I went to a Hythe Hops meeting last night1. The idea is we grow the hops in our garden, hand them over to local brewers, last year they made two different beers and gave all the profit to a local charity. There's no money in it, nor free beer, but it's a bit of a community exercise. Get hops back in Kent, get people in their gardens, meet other local people etc. It was definitely like the beginning of an episode of Midsomer Murders though, I full expected someone to be strangled with some hop string (it's a thing) or impaled on a hop spike (it's a thing). Neither of these things happened, but we did watch a video and ask some questions about it, and then had a couple of pints after. I'm going to do it, it's £5 a year for membership, and £10 to buy a plant and then we all have to harvest on a certain day in September and they make the beer the same day. Some of the beer is given back to the society I think, they had a little beer festival, and the rest is sold. Last time they gave all the money to the Bumblebee conservation trust2.
We started in December 2018 signed up 70 members who planted 132 hops which were harvested on 21st October and we delivered 31.5kg of hops to our two wonderful brewers. The hops went into two brews: “HopBuzz” A light ale from the Hopfuzz micro-brewery and “Hythe Green”, a malty darker ale from Range Ales. 30 casks of Community Green hop Beer were produced and consumed with relish!! particularly in the Hythe Hops pubs that grew their own (The Fountain, Prince of wales, Three Mariners, White Hart and also at Custom Folkestone). Collected funds of £1300 went to the Bumblebee Conservation Projects to improve local Bumblebee friendly habitats – a big thanks to the 2 breweries and pubs!! To round the hop year off, we had a great party, lubricated with a barrel of each of the brews, for all of the growers.
5k: Five km, just over three miles to you.
Paul Clarke's weblog - I live in Hythe near Folkestone. Wed to Clare and dad to 2, I am a full stack web developr, and I do javascript / nodejs, some ruby, python, php ect ect. I like pubs, parkrun, eating, home automation + other diy jiggery-pokery, history, genealogy, Television, squirrels, pirates, lego, and time travel.