Let's stick together

Hop Trading and Exchange in the Age of the Pandemic

Coronavirus, Covid-19, pandemic – all words we don’t really want to hear right now, since the months of lockdown have started to blur into a haze of lost memories and, for many businesses, lost income.

Here at Brook House Hops, we’ve been affected by the boatload as you can imagine, due to our place as a supplier to those who subsequently supply our wonderful pubs. With pubs, restaurants, cafés and other hospitality venues all closed since March 23rd, less beer is being brewed and therefore fewer hops are purchased.

Since March, we have been working hard on “keeping calm and carrying on” and have been bowled over by the efforts of everybody in this industry to come together and support each other, change their offerings and generally adapt to these strange times. We have split our pack sizes down and really dropped our prices and are continually thinking of what more we can do to support this incredible industry.

As pubs and breweries struggle, the industry is starting to see a lot of brewers with excess hops they simply can’t use. And as time has gone on, we have been in contact with some of these brewers and we’ve been trying to come up with ideas to support them.

Occasionally we get asked for hops we don’t grow ourselves, so we thought about it and realised that now may well be the time to buy them from these brewers in order to make them available to other brewers who have continued to brew in these difficult times. We help out the struggling brewery, they help us out by selling us the hops, it’s a circular story of goodwill.

We just had the opportunity to buy some Northdown, which is a cracking UK hop variety with bold berry, pine and spicy flavours, so we decided to take it. We took both the T90 pellets and whole cone hops which were on offer, to help a brewer out, now we intend to sell them on for those who are still brewing and gearing up for the potential reopening of pubs in less than 3 weeks’ time.

Northdown is great for brewing traditional ales, typically combined with Goldings and Challenger which we grow ourselves here on our farms in Herefordshire and Worcestershire. We are really hoping that brewers will get involved in this trade circle so that these hops go to a home where they can live up to their dream of becoming great beer. You can find them now in our shop: https://brookhousehops.com/uk-northdown-735-p.asp.

The berry notes of Northdown specifically make it a great hop for use when brewing milds, old ales and barley wines, due to their requirement for fruity depths of flavour. Fuller’s ESB and London Pride are hefty, well-known classics that use Northdown with great results.

Northdown is a dual-purpose hop that is particularly good in the early to mid-stages of the boil and has good alpha and aroma properties. Its high oil levels give it a distinctive aroma and it is considered slightly higher impact in flavour than its parent strain, Challenger.

As an independent, we are constantly talking to brewers and working out how to best serve their needs. Buying and selling excess hops is increasingly important in this industry, so we are looking at ways to make this process easier and more transparent. Get in touch with us if you want to share ideas!

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