Spreading Hoppiness Podcast Ep27 OUT NOW – On the Farm: The Hidden Heroes of the Hop Yards

Patrick Whittle 0:04
Welcome back to Spreading Hoppiness, the Charles Faram podcast. This week, we’re diving into the fascinating world of Hop agronomy, the science behind crop production and how dedicated farmers at Tom Probert cultivate the high quality hops essential for brewing. You join us on Tom’s farm as he and our own Will Rogers put hop agronomist Jonathan Blackman to the test about all things hops, diseases and pests.

Will Rogers 0:27
Hi, I’m Will Rogers group Technical Director at Charles Faram, and we’re here to talk talk to you about hop agronomy today. So we’ve got Tom Probert, who’s farm this is. And Jonathan, would you like to introduce yourself, Jonathan? Yeah. So I’m Jonathan Blackman. I’m Horticultural Technical Manager at Hutchinson’s hop agronomist , being a hop agronomist for 25 years this year, and prior to that, I was a hop researcher, and I’ve got a family history in hop growing, so I’ve been around hops all my life.

Excellent. So

Tom Probert 1:00
Do you not want an introduction from me?

Will Rogers 1:03
We know you, Tom, come on. Okay, introduce yourself.

Tom Probert 1:06
Hi, yeah, well, I’m Tom probe 4th generation, hop farmer. Here, I’m reluctantly growing hops out of habit because they wouldn’t let me fly fast planes in the RAF.

Will Rogers 1:18
Don’t blame them, I’ve seen your driving. Okay, so what are we looking at here? Variety wise, what are we looking at?

Tom Probert 1:26
So we’ve got one very small block of progress, and then we’ve got gold ins further up, and they’re only meant to be just touching the top wire, a bit too forward for me. So we’re trying to manipulate that as best we can. And it’s a bit of a juggling act of when and how much fertiliser is off to put on.

Will Rogers 1:46
So when you say, manipulate that, how can we how would you explain that to brewers? What are the levers you can pull that sort of either speed, speed up the growth of the Hot Ball, drag it back if it’s too far ahead.

Tom Probert 2:01
So the only thing we’ve really got control over is nutrients. We don’t irrigate. It’s not a necessity. Yet, drier climates, Germany, America, they’ll be introducing water into the plant, and they can manipulate nutrient upgrowth uptake. So we’re not in control of that. And the British summer is so unpredictable and fickle that we’re not in control of any sunlight intensity as well. So the only thing we can really do is manipulate the nutrient we put onto the plant, whether that’s folia or onto the ground.

Will Rogers 2:31
Okay, and so you mentioned folia or onto the ground. What are our options there when we’re growing hops then?

Tom Probert 2:38
So we’ll have a baseline of potassium and phosphate in the ground. They’re fairly stable. You can top those up kind of once a year. I know phosphate is a dirty word, but we won’t go into that. It’s absolutely critical to grow hops. Nitrogen is the one that is more for making the new plant matter. Dive in at any time you want to to back me up on this or correct me. So nitrogen is the one we’ll be applying, and that’s what the plant really responds to. Growth flies, yeah. So that’s the one. If hops are a bit too far forward, we’ll either put less or less frequently. If hops are quite a long way back, and we’re trying to really give them a push.

Will Rogers 3:21
Push them on Yeah,

Tom Probert 3:22
we’ll get more on the ground, and we’ll even introduce sort of foliar feeds, or foliar stimulants to just give that plant every chance. It’s got to give it a push. It’s a high value crop, so it’s worth everything to just try and encourage it.

Speaker 2 3:38
Notre

Jonathan Blackman 3:39
Hops have a high nitrogen requirement, typically 180 to over 200 kilos of nitrogen per hectare per season. And whilst it’s nice to use organic manures, and we do use them sometimes in hops, the issue with organic manures is the nitrogen is not released in a regular way, whereas with the bag fertiliser, you can have a bit more control over the plant, a bit like a switch.

Will Rogers 4:08
Yeah, with the organic stuff, it can be the release rate isn’t steady or linear, and you can apply it and still wait for it to have its effect.

Jonathan Blackman 4:18
It depends on soil moisture, temperature, so you have a cold, dry spring, you don’t get the bugs releasing the nitrogen out of out of the organic manure you put on. So it’s good. It’s more for getting organic matter into the soil, rather than the absolute nutrient content, because we don’t want uncontrolled release of nitrogen, which you’ll get with organic manure, so the majority of the nitrogen will be applied through a fertiliser spreader, because that’s that’s the only thing we’ve got to manipulate and control, and because of the high requirement, it means we can apply it in stages. It doesn’t all go as one lump of 200 kilos of nitrogen in one go. In the spring. If they need pushing on, you can put it on a bit earlier. If they’re growing really well, you can hold it back. Some girls get to the point of with some of the really vigorous varieties, they say, Well, I have to keep my nerve until they go really yellow, and then I’ve got to put some nitrogen on, because if I put it on early. They’ll be over the top wire before the end of May. You know, it’s

Tom Probert 5:24
This is a problem we had on the Goldings up here that they just took off, and it was like, wow, we’ve got to slow these down. So we were, in fact, discussing it yesterday, weren’t we, that rather than holding right back on all of their fertiliser, they were just getting a tiny fraction at the same time everything else was so they weren’t being completely starved, because you run the risk of starving them back so much, and they’ll just go, well, bugger you, I’m not gonna grow your hops. And they’ll just pack in and they’ll go into some sort of survival mode where they kind of go, well, I’m not actually gonna fruit night then, because I’m stressed. So you’ve got this balance between having it too vigorous or too stressed,and it is a tricky balance.

Will Rogers 6:07
Yeah

Jonathan Blackman 6:08
The unique thing about hot plant is you’re starting with nothing each year if you’re growing apples. You’ve got an apple tree there, you’ve got a framework, and you’ve already got your flowers determined for that year. We’re building a plant every year, and what we’re trying to do is optimise to get a plant that’s going to carry the most amount of hops, but that’s gettable at harvest time.

Will Rogers 6:28
Which actually is a very fine line. It’s a real sort of sword that you’ve got to balance on to get the right, get exactly the right thing when we don’t have control over a lot of variables that influence that. I just wanted to touch back on the 200 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare. If you compared that with like a barley crop, what would you expect something like barley or wheat to require?

Jonathan Blackman 6:54
Well, if you’re going malting barley, you’ve got to be quite careful with not in terms of winter wheat or something like that. It’s in the same ballpark, getting up to that, maybe a little bit higher, depending on yield potential. But course, that’s an annual plant that you’re growing from seed each year, and you’re pushing it as hard as you can for maximum yield. Now, whilst yields really important for Tom and for you, the cost of harvesting is really important as well. And you could grow a massive crop out there, which just takes you so long to harvest. It’s actually more economic to have a slightly less yield, to have something you can harvest at a reasonable pace.

Will Rogers 7:37
Yeah, we’ve got to have one eye on the on the habit, so that we can get it through the picking machine efficiently, is what you’re saying,

Jonathan Blackman 7:43
Yeah. And also, as Tom’s mentioned about, you want to be able to get to spray into the top of the plant as well later in the season that they’re not too thick in the tops. We call it housey, one bit of hop jargon, so they get housing in the top. They can be difficult to harvest. This can harbour disease, and particularly spider mite pest up there late in the season. And you could have a perfect crop at beginning of August and be struggling come harvest time in September.

Will Rogers 8:13
Yeah, when it becomes housey, it effectively becomes like a micro climate within the hop yard as well, doesn’t it? Which is really it’s negative on all fronts.

Jonathan Blackman 8:25
Well, you’re not, you’re not getting light in as well, so you’re blocking the light into the lower part of the plant. So you may want or not get hops developed lower down. And the the Early Choice Goldings, which here are classic for that if they get too far forward and they house in at the top, they’ll only get hops halfway down because there’s not enough light lower down, let the pins, as they call them, develop into the flowers, and then, and then develop into the hops.

Will Rogers 8:52
Yeah, Fascinating, isn’t it? Should we have a bit of a closer look. I can see that we took you mentioned organic matter in the soil earlier, Jonathan, I can see Tom’s been spreading some some muck much earlier on in the season. Was this over winter.

Tom Probert 9:09
Yeah, we use farm yard manure. So Jonathan was saying that it’s difficult to kind of quantify what you’re gaining from farm yard. So farm yard manure, we’ve got cattle on the farm as well. So the straw that goes under the cattle, the cattle do their cattle, things on it, and then that comes out here. There’s an immeasurable amount of magic in muck. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something in muck, whether it’s the type of bacteria that likes it. But if you mapped one half of a hop yard and not the other, you would see the difference, even if you replicated the nutrients on the other part,

Will Rogers 9:48
Yeah, I think anyone would be able to see the difference. You know, you don’t even have to be a technical hop grower,

Tom Probert 9:56
And I think with muck as well, you’ll get a lot more worm activity. And if you’ve got worm activity, you’re moving material up and down the soil profile, and you’re introducing natural drainage channels, so the soil’s just healthier.

Will Rogers 10:09
Yeah, yeah, we want that organic matter in the soil, and actually that causes less root stress to the hop plant. So it’s a very sort of virtuous circle, there, isn’t it.

Jonathan Blackman 10:20
You’re You’re lucky to have the cattle on your farm, because there’s a lot of hop farms now, find it really difficult to get hold of farm yard manure. It’s not the cattle around that they used to be, and it’s a valuable resource. So people have got it. They tend to use it on their own farms. What there is plenty of is, is poultry manure. But the issue with poultry manure is it’s quite high in nitrogen, so you’re limited as to how much you can put on. There are statutory controls. Most of Herefordshire is a nitrate vulnerable zone, so there’s a maximum amount of nitrogen put on as muck, and it’s actually quite a small amount of poultry manure. So you’re not getting the benefit of a lot of organic matter going in, so it can be used, but it’s not as good as farmyard.

Speaker 2 11:07
Probably

Tom Probert 11:07
Probably gonna make Lord know the phosphate issue as well import poultry manure. Yeah. Well, the sheds.

Jonathan Blackman 11:13
The biggest poultry producer in in the county, are now exporting all their muck out of Herefordshire because of perceived issues with with that and the rivers.

Speaker 2 11:26
we

Jonathan Blackman 11:26
don’t,

Will Rogers 11:27
Well, we don’t, we don’t want to pollute the rivers, do we? We’re trying to be responsible about it, and definitely the farmyard manure the cow muck is, would be your preference, wouldn’t it?

Tom Probert 11:39
It’s traditional. It’s been happening for years, and it’s not been a problem so, and it’s, it’s, it’s not a concentrated manure. It’s got a lot of organic matter in it, which maybe that’s where the benefits coming from. But of all the cattle manure we have on this farm, it all goes on hops, yeah, we don’t waste it on any of the other ground. Subsequently, some of our arable crops are a bit poor looking, but I’d rather those look poor than hops are poor.

Will Rogers 12:10
I can also see that you’ve got quite a lot of clover growing

Tom Probert 12:14
So I think we touched on this before somewhere. So cover crops have all become quite in vogue and quite exciting for everybody to grow. I will put my hands up and say I’m probably one of the scruffiest Hop farmers. We’re not meticulous about how it looks, but we’re in control of how it looks. So we’ve got weeds, if you want to call them weeds, because there’s all sorts down there, but I like to look at them as beneficial ones, meta grass and clover, I’ve got no issue with at all, because they swamp everything else out we are. That’s one other element we’re sort of in control of. So if the hops are looking too strong, I can leave the weeds or cover crop, however you want to call it, to compete with the hops for water and for nutrients. If the hops are looking weak, I can either top which isn’t ideal, or destroy with Roundup very carefully, down the middle of the rows and take away all that competition. And that will also the material will die down and make like a natural mulch of the dead material, and just keep moisture in the ground.

Will Rogers 13:19
Also later on in the in the year, though, it’ll be competed for light by the hops, because the hops will be at the top.

Tom Probert 13:27
It will and if the hops at the top and causing a shading issue, it doesn’t matter what happens on the floor, but it’s now it’s June. Is the manipulating month, and May, you’re trying to preempt what might happen in June. So if we get a moist June with some nice warmth that we’re going to get the day length, we know we’re going to get the sunlight. Well, not sunlight fixed day length, we know we’re going to get that. But the just try to control moisture and preempting what might happen. So you don’t want to go right. We’re going to push these hops really hard in sort of April and May, and then have a really fantastic June. And you’re like, Oh, we’ve got a problem. They’ve grown too much. So you’re just trying to predict and juggle and hope, yeah,

Jonathan Blackman 14:15
Yeah, once, once the hops have got to the top wire, when the sort of head of the flops over. See here already that where that’s happened. The laterals are starting to grow out. But what then also happens is the fine white roots come from the main stock of the plant right out into the alleyway. So the hop plant uses all of the soil volume in July and August to build the crop. So that’s where the competition from the cover crops,

Will Rogers 14:44
It’s quite near the surface, those fine white roots, aren’t they?

Jonathan Blackman 14:47
Yes, yeah. So that’s where the weather can have a big impact. So Hops can really struggle if we have hot, dry weather in July and August, because they trying to get moisture and nutrients out that. The top six inches or so the soil. And if it’s very dry in there, then they’ll they’ll struggle.

Will Rogers 15:05
So it’s water. These nutrients are water soluble, aren’t they?

Jonathan Blackman 15:08
Yeah, yeah. So we always need rain in July and August, which, if you also got arable crops to harvest, that’s what you don’t want. You want it nice and hot and dry and go and harvest your crops. But hop grows always once in rain in July and August.

Will Rogers 15:24
So these plants here, Jonathan and Tom, look to be a little bit stunted, a little bit dwarfed. What do we think’s gone on here then?

Tom Probert 15:34
Well, in themselves, they’re healthy enough, so we’re not worried. They’re just not as vigorous as the rest. And the reason for just this small area here is there’s a problem with the drain. So in the winter, there was water on the surface and bubbling down the hill. So that’s just affected their start to the year. They’ve tried to start with everything else, but the everything has just been waterlogged around them. They haven’t had any air or anything around them, nutrient uptake will have been slower, and they’ve just been slow to get going. But the plants themselves, they’re fine. They’re just a bit behind.

Will Rogers 16:09
I think those fine white roots we’re talking about, Jonathan, can they can sort of get a try to see kind of they can rot off, is my understanding. And so the water logging, sort of the plant has to regrow those, or a lot of them, yeah.

Speaker 3 16:25
So Well, the main stock of the plant, so the whole plant, being a perennial, it stores energy as starch in a big, thick, fleshy root. But there will be, there are structural roots around that which provide the Anchorage, but also for that early uptake in the season, there are roots that are there all the time. The fine white roots we’re talking about earlier are what grow in the season. But if that plant sat in water or winter, then there’s a risk of damage. They can’t breathe underwater. They need oxygen, even in the winter where they’re not growing. So you’ll get some damage that can get disease in, so various rots that might get in, I think also we quite often can see fusarium canker can kill plants in the winter because of wet

Will Rogers 17:18
Yes,

Jonathan Blackman 17:19
It’s a, it’s a in season disease that we do get. So you quite often you’ll see a bind, wilting and dying, and it’s not very cilium wilt, it’s fusarium canker. But that comes in in the spring, and typically that’s that’s from slug damage. And another consequence of the wet weather we’ve had since the autumn last year has been slugs. And the slug population has been huge. Every time Tom’s put slug pellets out, you come back a few days later, they’ve all gone. They’ve all been even varnish. Just never since gobbled up. I put some out in my garden the other day, and they were gone in two days, just loads of slugs about.

Will Rogers 17:58
Huge challenges with slugs. And I believe the slug pellets have had to be reformulated over the last couple of years, haven’t they? They seem less effective?

No, they’re not less effective. So don’t see the result. Yeah. So the previous chemistry we used to use the slugs when they’d eaten it, they would produce a lot of slime, and they die on the surface, of the soil, and you see, see they worked. That particular chemistry is now been withdrawn. And the ferric phosphate that we use, which is what people get in the garden center as well these days, it’s very effective, but it’s stomach poison, and they disappear underground and die underground. So you don’t see dead slugs on the surface. But all the trials work that’s been done with these pellets has shown they’re just as effective as the old metalde pellets that we used to have.

So going back to these plants that have suffered with being sitting in water, I can see that you’ve chosen not to burn them off at the bottom. Tom, yeah. Give them a bit of a chance.

Tom Probert 19:03
So well, yeah. And they’re just too small. The last time we passed through, they’ve been too small to burn off. And if you burnt off 50% of the plant, it’s going to check it even more. So we’re just trying to help it as much as we can.

Will Rogers 19:18
This is another reason why you like to do a lot of the work yourself, isn’t it because, but it’s attention to detail.

Tom Probert 19:27
Yeah, I know where this area is, so I’m already sort of programmed that I know I’m going to slow down, or I know I’m going to turn off. I kind of, you’ve got a more sort of intimate knowledge of where stuff is on the farm, and it’s something, yes, you probably could map it, but it’ll be very difficult. Perhaps it’s something we should look into, but it’s some of these things will be sporadic. They won’t be in the same place every year. It could be. It could have been a problem from something else, somewhere else entirely. So. Is another of the variables.

Jonathan Blackman 20:02
One thing I was going to just say, for those that don’t understand what we mean by burning off that’s defoliating the base of the plant. So even though the plant has got the shoots up the strings, it will still produce shoots at the bottom, and we have to remove those because it’s a it’s a nice place with disease and pests to develop. But it’s also taking energy, energy away from the plant which we want, going up the string and producing the crop. So we have to defoliate them at the bottom, which colloquially is called burning off.

Will Rogers 20:33
Yes, some people are using sheep now for that.

Jonathan Blackman 20:37
Yeah, some people, Tom’s done

Tom Probert 20:39
Very close to you.

Jonathan Blackman 20:40
Tom’s done a bit of that, and, yeah, the sheep can be used relatively low stocking density, and it does help if they’re not too easily spooked, which can be difficult with some sheep. Some people are using Shropshire sheep, which are being used in orchards, because they tend to be a little less destructive. But I know one farm I go to the sheep, they’ve used get moved around a lot to a lot of keep so they’re used to having people around them and different surroundings, so they don’t get spooked quite so much.

Will Rogers 21:13
Yeah,

Jonathan Blackman 21:14
If you, if you’ve got a flock of sheep that don’t see anybody, don’t have Ramblers through the field, or only see one person they might get a bit spooked by

Tom Probert 21:25
The problem with spooking is if you look up a row, you could probably gallop about 10 sheep up that row, and they’ll pack together, and they’ll be fine. But if you try and gallop 20 sheep, they will start barging the binds, and if a sheep gets his neck around a bind, it’s not going to go into reverse and stop. It’s programmed to run, yeah, and it’ll keep going. You’ll end up with quite a lot of binds on the floor, and they really enjoy the flavour of hops the leaves. If a binds on the floor, they will be back to it and they’ll strip it bare.

Jonathan Blackman 21:55
The issue for lock grows is that their hop yards are not flock proof

Tom Probert 21:59
That’s why we haven’t got them in this yard, but we will be putting them in the yard up the road.

Will Rogers 22:03
okay

Tom Probert 22:03
And to me, the great advantage with sheep. So Jonathan touched on the burning off that we do with the chemical, or you can do it mechanically, is to sort of stop some pests and diseases. And one of the biggest pests for us is red spiders. So we’re trying to get rid of the habitat down there a if we need to apply a pesticide, we can target from there up easier, and we can also stop that little motorway for the spiders coming from the ground up. So if I’ve got sheep, they’ll take those leaves off far more efficiently than I can do it, and whilst doing so, they’ll eat any spiders that are there.

Will Rogers 22:41
Yeah, reducing the population,

Tom Probert 22:43
yeah, yeah. Whereas if I slowly desiccate a leaf, the spider’s gonna go, this is a bit rubbish, and going to move off to another

Will Rogers 22:50
Yeah.

Tom Probert 22:50
But if a sheep comes in and nibbles it, that spider has gone, completely gone. So again, it’s another sort of incidental, accidental solution, which, if we could make all the hop yard stock proof easily 100% I would let sheep in 100% and yeah, you get a bit of collateral damage with the odd buying coming down, and they will strip it bare. But you can tolerate that for the goodness they do, and you can control the height that they graze at randomly. We put them in. I thought they’d just go to one by nibble it out, then go to the next. But they’re pastoral grazers. They’re used to walking around, so they’ll walk the entire area. They’re allowed in nibbling at a comfortable height, which is down on the floor. Next day, they’ll nibble a bit higher, but they’ll still go over that whole area. It’s quite something to see a hop yard being stripped

Will Rogers 22:50
Day by day. They get a little bit higher, and then you take them away.

Tom Probert 23:50
You take them away. Yeah, it’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant. You couldn’t invent it better.

Jonathan Blackman 23:58
I know in New Zealand, they Sheep pretty much what they use only for defoliation, and there’s plenty of sheep in New Zealand.

Will Rogers 24:07
They don’t have many problems with hops, though they don’t ideal.

Jonathan Blackman 24:11
Being in the middle of the Pacific means you don’t have various pests and diseases. But they do have the two spotted spider mite, which is what we have here, and they principally rely on using predators for control, although they did have some problems last year because it was very hot and dry, and the pest likes that. And Tom was involved as one of the sites in a project that we in Hutchinson were involved with, funded initially through innovative farmers looking at trying to use predators to control juice spotted spider mite might and hops.

Will Rogers 24:46
So that’s introducing other insects that predate those pests.

Jonathan Blackman 24:51
Well, these are actually another mite species. They run a bit faster and they eat the mites, not the plant. And. And it’s been looked at for a long time, over the years, but it’s quite difficult in the season to do it, because we’ve already talked about the fact that the hot plants are moving target. It’s starting from nothing and growing to, you know, where we are now, at 15/16, feet, three, four meters height, or whatever. And it’s so what we were trying to do is target application in the autumn. So we’re using a native predatory mite which is better suited to our weather conditions. Still likes the warmth of the summer, but by using it in the in the autumn, we’re hoping to try and clean upin the autumn.

Will Rogers 25:41
So reduce the burden for the following year,

Speaker 3 25:43
Because the pest will hide in the cracks in the poles on the proud of the plants as well. And then in the spring, following that up with a with another application early in the spring to try and deal with what’s coming out in the spring. The results were interesting. We didn’t get satisfactory control, but what we did find we were able to clearly establish a population overwintering. And what we’d like to be looking at is, what could we do to enhance that overwintering population? So we’ve talked about cover crops and things like that. Generally we’re trying to avoid anything that might harbor verticillium wilt. So there are some growers who are planting winter rye to protect soils over the winter, which is great for soil protection. You’re putting bit of organic matter back in when you destroy that cover crop, but it’s not a great environment for these predatory mites, which will survive on things like pollen and a little bit of detritus they don’t just eat the pest. So we’d like to try and find something that we could plant at post harvest. Be there over the winter, provide a good habitat. Be there in the spring as well, to make sure we’ve got plenty of predators there for when the spider mites appear in the spring and try and control them that way.

Will Rogers 27:04
That would be amazing wouldn’t it

Jonathan Blackman 27:05
With with the the kerosene, the chemical spray as the Get Out of Jail, free card if we get really hot and dry weather,

Will Rogers 27:13
does the kerosene affect the predator? The

Speaker 3 27:17
ones we use are very selective, so though they either don’t affect the predators at all, or the relative effect is much higher. So the important thing with predators and prey is the ratio. So actually, by if you if you’re having to spray because your spider mite populations get out of control, you will improve the ratio of pest to predator. And yes, we’re talking about introducing predators. But one of the things I have seen in the last five, six years or so is we seem to be getting many more natural predators in hops now. So there are natural predatory mites, there are predatory midges. There’s also a lady bird species which is specialised in eating spider bites, seeing more of those in hops. Now, because the things we’re using for other pest controls and damson and the hop aphid, which is a pest we have every year, maybe, maybe not this year, we’ll come on to that. Maybe it’s the things we’re using for that are actually very predator friendly

Will Rogers 28:28
because they’re so selective.

Jonathan Blackman 28:30
Yes, yeah, they’re very selective for for the for the aphids that we’re spraying for, but not for other things. So seeing just so many more predators in hops now

Will Rogers 28:40
that’s really interesting to see those populations build up and and hopefully we’ll get to a stage where we can control these things much more easily, because the natural predators are there helping us.

Jonathan Blackman 28:52
Yeah, and there’s, there’s, there’s two drivers, I think, for the growers, one sort of economic driver is that there are not the chemical products coming through for hops. Because globally, hops are a minor crop. You know, even if you take the US and Germany, who are the big players in the hop world, terms of the crops that are grown in those countries, they’re still tiny. Yeah, so from a manufacturer’s point of view. What return are they going to get for investing millions of pounds in developing a chemical just for the hop industry? Yeah, so we’re not seeing those chemicals coming through. The cost of gone up. The regulatory burden is a lot higher. So there’s a driver that the solutions that not going to come in a in a bottle, but also, you know, we want to do things in a more integrated way, in terms of pest and disease management that we’re we’re not relying on the chemicals that we’re we’re looking at working with nature, using nature and using the chemistry. And introduced biologicals, whether that’s biofangicides or predatory mites or whatever, to try and get a robust system of control.

Will Rogers 30:11
It’s the robustness we the worst thing that could happen would be for us to be relying on it and it fall over mid season, when we’re when there may be a problem.

Jonathan Blackman 30:21
Yeah, and you want robustness because of the value of the crop. If this wasn’t a high value crop, you might be prepared to take more risks with your pest and disease control, but the stakes are so high in hot growing that you’ve got to be belt and braces, because you can carry a lot of cost to grow the crop, to walk away from it at harvest. Very expensive.

Will Rogers 30:46
Yeah, well, it would be the majority of your income for the year, wouldn’t it? Tom if the hops went,

Tom Probert 30:53
Yeah, it’s a big proportion of the farm and area wise, time and investment and time spent on them, yeah, huge. It is the main focus of what we do. Yeah,

Will Rogers 31:06
I know we have some deer that wander around the valley, don’t we? Do? You see any issues with the deer or they?

Tom Probert 31:13
No, we don’t get a lot this side the other side our little hill here, we get them running the river, and they’re not a big problem there. It’s a couple of muntjac running around. I believe they’re nibbling the nursery plants, although I’m concerned about his muntjac trap because look more like a squirrel one.

Will Rogers 31:33
Is a squirrel, one squirrel instead.

Tom Probert 31:35
Yeah, but yeah, no, we don’t have a problem at all. One of our biggest problems is animal problems that is rabbits, and they will just bite strings. They will graze the hops a little bit. But once we’ve got the string on in sort of February, March, you’ve got a bare string, and they will just come along and sharpen their teeth on those. And that can cause a bit of a headache,

Will Rogers 31:57
Quite destructive, because the whole string is, you know, it’s, it’s all connected. So if you lose a bit of string here, and the hops haven’t reached the top to support their own weight, yeah, everything collapses,

Tom Probert 32:09
not everything, but yeah, it just becomes a tangled, flying web of the strings, and you’ve just got to go back and tie them up and put them back on. Okay. Interestingly, once you’ve got hops going up the strings. The rabbits leave them alone. Now I don’t know whether they don’t like the hop plant in the way, or whether it’s the fact we’ve been all around and hand tied stuff and it’s the scent of us touching the plants. Don’t know, but they do seem to leave them alone once they’re tied, yeah, and then they’re no longer a problem. Yeah.

Jonathan Blackman 32:38
So the tying is what’s called training. So that’s twiddling them onto the strings, so making sure there’s the right number of binds go up each string. You don’t want too many, and you wouldn’t need to make sure that at least two or three going up each string.

Will Rogers 32:54
Some of these pests are attracted to like wireworm is attracted to the they get a hormonal response to the growing of the plant, and they can actually pick it up, and then they are attracted to it. I mean, that could be something, could it? John, yeah,

Jonathan Blackman 33:09
well, there’s a little bit of wire worm in here, but there’s much, I think

Tom Probert 33:12
it’s not seen a lot.

Jonathan Blackman 33:12
It’s possibly more leather jackets. There’s no chemical control. I’ve been talking to a few growers this spring who’ve been planting some of your new varieties, where they’ve been concerned about wireworm that you can use, nematodes enterpathogenic nematodes, which will attack the wireworms, and that can be very effective. Companies who sell them have been doing work on some of the bigger crops, like potatoes, where it’s a big issue. And again, they have no controls, so it will work, and they will work on leather jackets. But ideally with leather jackets, you want to treat in the autumn, when they’re small, because when you get to the spring, they they’re they’re sort of final stage of development. They’re not called leather jackets for no reason. Yeah, they’re quite tough, and you need quite a big dose of nematodes to control them, so

Will Rogers 34:06
you have to apply them well in advance of actually planting the potatoes or the hops

Jonathan Blackman 34:13
Well, usually you would do it when the crop is in there, because, as you say, they’re attracted to the plants. The great thing with hops is we can treat the individual plant. If you’re doing a broad acre crop, you’ve got to spray them everywhere, and obviously some of them will be close to where the plant is, which is where the wire worms would be attracted to. With hops, we could go in through an individual individually drench each plant, and which actually makes it quite cost effective. I think for you guys being surprised when I talked about the cost and go, Oh, we thought it’d be more than that. So I think it’s there are some good biological solutions out there, particularly for some of these pests, which are not they’re not major pests, wire worm and leather jackets, not a problem in established, hops. They can have a nibble at those.

Tom Probert 35:01
It’s gonna say, for the benefit of anyone that doesn’t know what they are, they’re underground, and they’ll nibble away at the root system. Well, the root system on these new ones is tiny. You could sit it in the palm of your hand. The root system on the established ones is huge, so they’re probably in there nibbling away. Yeah, some of the worst gonna do a lot of damage.

Jonathan Blackman 35:20
Some of the worst wire worm attacks I’ve seen have actually been hops planted straight after hops. It’s been a wild worm population. The Wire worms interesting because it’s a lava of a click beetle, but it has a very long life cycle, so they it’s a three, four year life cycle as a larval stage. So they can be there for a long time before the next generation comes through. But they can do a lot of damage year on year. It’s not as if you get it’s an annual cycle, and whether goes against them or whatever. So you get a bad year or a good year, if you’ve got the population there, they’re going to be there for for a few years. Yeah,

Tom Probert 35:53
And leather jackets are Daddy Long Legs.

Will Rogers 35:55
Yes, yeah.

Jonathan Blackman 35:56
Which is on an annual cycle, and we do. I think it’s quite likely we’re going to get warmer autumns. Probably we’re going to have bigger issues with leather jackets, but it’s only an issue for young plants, so not big one for hop growers.

Patrick Whittle 36:09
From farm to brewery, this week’s Five Minutes with Faram Maddie chats to head brewer Andy Lemann from Timothy Taylor’s as they talk his favorite beers and the best advice for new and advancing brewers.

Maddie 36:25
I’m joined here today at Timothy Taylor’s with Andy Le Mans, and this will be our five minutes for film segment. Okay, so can we just start with what is your favuorite hop? Andy,

Andy Leman 36:36
oh, my favorite hop, I would say, is Fuggles. We also use Whitbread Goldings varieties and Goldingd. But for me, Fuggles is such a unique hop. You know, it’s a heritage variety which has been growing since the late 1800s and for us, it does blend perfectly with the Goldings varieties, and it gives a nice fruity, spicy character to the beer and minty edge to the beer as well, just complements the citrusy side from the Goldings.

Maddie 37:14
So have you been using it as long as you can remember? Then,

Andy Leman 37:17
oh yes, here forever.

Maddie 37:20
Yeah,

Andy Leman 37:21
I don’t think they’ve ever not used Fuggles Here. It’s

Maddie 37:23
Classic, isn’t it?

Andy Leman 37:24
Yeah

Maddie 37:25
So you can be biased, but what is your favourite beer?

Andy Leman 37:30
Well, of our stable, I would say Landlord, because Landlord is our classic pale ale.

Maddie 37:36
And how did Landlord come about?

Andy Leman 37:39
Well, that’s right. So first brewed in 1953 and the guys who brewed it had Philip Taylor and probably a brewer called Grinrod was around then, and Alan Hay, they actually had a lot of foresight, because they brewed what was quite a pale beer for the time, and a very hoppy beer for the time. In fact, when Michael Jackson came around the brewery, the beer writer, not the song singer, he he was asked in his article afterwards, he said, people often ask me to describe Landlord, and I’ll describe it as liquid hops, you wouldn’t say these days, because there’s so many more hoppy beers on the market, but back then, Landlord was really the hoppiest widely available beer,

Maddie 38:30
Very cool. So if you weren’t going for one of your core ranges, what would you pick for a favourite beer?

Andy Leman 38:37
I think favorite beer to drink a cask ale would definitely be Harvey’s Sussex, Bitter, beautiful blend of traditional English hops again and malts, real subtleties and complexities of flavours, similar in a way, like Landlord does, but tasting very different,

Maddie 39:02
Brilliant, cool. So do you have a favourite food and beer pairing?

Andy Leman 39:09
Mostly, I tried to drink beer without having food, but I think Landlord goes particularly well with like a steak pie or something like that. Traditionally, traditionally fair for me. But we also have a beer called Hopicalstorm, which is our keg keg ale. And that goes because of the hops. We use. The aromatic hops goes particularly well with Asian food. So Thai food, or even Chinese.

Maddie 39:40
I do love Thai food yeah, because then I just want to talk to you about hopacal Storm. So that’s your first ever keg, isn’t it that you that you’ve done and you saying earlier, 2019 and it came around 2020, didn’t it? So, like, what’s the story behind that?

Andy Leman 39:56
Well, the story behind it is, we, I. A long think about doing keg beer for many years, but the fact the cask ale market has been in decline for a long, long time, probably more than 50 years. And although we’ve grown our business in that time, and our volume of cask ale gone up a lot, you do worry for the future, you know, sometimes. And so it was a point that the modern style of keg beers are much more, very different from the old keg beers that came out in the 70s, which were very bland versions of traditional beers. And they’re now exciting, vibrant flavours. So we just want thought there’s a new generation of people growing up drinking these styles of beer. You know, we should be able to offer something like that as well.

Maddie 40:49
Yeah, that next generation, isn’t it? Yeah. So do you have a favourite beer destination? Do you get to have a get a chance?

Andy Leman 40:58
Well, as far as places, locations, I suppose, Bruges, where I went for my 50th birthday, fantastic place. And obviously the wide range of beers you can get there, I wasn’t a fan of sour beers at all, but having been there and tasted the different types, yeah, I like, I do like them now. But particularly I like the Dubbels and the strong Belgian ales. I think they’re fantastic. So for me, that was as far as a destination. I think the best, best place, oh,

Maddie 41:37
wow, yeah, definitely like to visit there. I think Do you have a favourite pub in the world is, do you have a local or,

Andy Leman 41:44
yeah? I mean, we’ve got so many of our own pubs that are great. And to pick one out, I think I would say the Boltmakers Arms in Keighley, which is a very traditional pub, and it has no food on, but our full range of beers, and it’s a tiny little pub,

Maddie 42:06
see, that’s quite rare these days, isn’t it? To not Yeah, because that was a thing like 10 years ago, there’d be most pubs, you know?

Andy Leman 42:15
Yeah, yeah, very true. It’s a lovely little pub. We also have, perhaps flagship in Skipton Woolley Sheep, which is always a busy pub, fantastic old building, again, with a full range of beers, and there’s several I could go on and outside of our own estates, my favorite pub is pub called The Bell at Aldworth, which is in Oxfordshire.

Maddie 42:46
Oh, nice, I think I might have been there. You know,

it’s won it’s one pub of the year for about three occasions. I think, beautiful been in the same family for 170 years. I think,

wow, wow. That’s impressive. Yeah, so obviously, we are in a lab right now, in your lab. So do you have an item in the brewery you couldn’t live without? Or is there an essential item in the lab that you find really valuable

Andy Leman 43:15
well, you know, sad, isn’t it today? Because probably the most essential piece of equipment is my computer, my laptop, I know. But beyond that, which is just an essential tool, isn’t it? These days, I was thinking about it, and I think perhaps a dipstick. So the wooden dipsticks were used to dip our vessels to gage how much beer is in the vessel. Yeah, without them, we’ve lost.

Maddie 43:39
Is that an old, traditional tool that

Andy Leman 43:41
has been used, yeah, yes, yeah. It’s the way vessels will basically, you gage your fermenting vessels, yeah, partly for your own use benefit, but partly because the customers and excise wanted to know how much beer you got in your vessels. And the easy way to do that was, as long as your vessels are regular shape is to use a wooden dipstick and measure the inches or centimeters, as we do now, to the level of the beer. And then you have a table which tells you what volume that is, much as you do for an oil tank or something, but without that being lost. So the only way you can do that is to automate it with radar and things like that, or load cells, but sometimes they’re inaccurate. You know, the wooden gage in rod cannot be wrong.

Maddie 44:31
Yeah. Do you have a favourite song or album or music that you like to play in a brew day or

Andy Leman 44:40
Well, we don’t, because we don’t have music. We’re not allowed to bring any radios or anything in equipment in and we don’t have a piped music system. If I was choosing music to brew with, it would probably be dependent on the beer. Otherwise brewing, I suppose so. I was brewing Hopicalstorm. Uh, maybe I’d use some punk rock, because when I grew up, Punk was a big thing. So

Maddie 45:05
Do you have a specific artists,

Andy Leman 45:08
well, the Clash all the Sex Pistols, probably one of their tracks, because, you know when that’s going you can’t fail to get up and, yeah, enjoy yourself and crack on with brewing

Maddie 45:18
The day.

Andy Leman 45:19
Yeah, I suppose if we were doing a more old fashioned beer, perhaps like Poulters Porter, our award winning dark beer. I think perhaps then I might listen to small Tyrannosaurus Rex, who were like a folky hippie predecessor to T Rex, who were the glam rock band in the 70s.

Maddie 45:38
I have to give them a listen on my way home. So if you weren’t in brewing, what do you think you’d be doing?

Andy Leman 45:45
Not entirely sure. If I had enough money, I would have probably set up my own vineyard in England, because I’ve always been interested in wine as well as beer or my own brewery. But I think vineyard growing vines. I have a vine in my garden, a Chardonnay vine, which grows every year, even in Yorkshire, yeah, ripens about once every four years. But

Maddie 46:10
do you do anything with it? Yes, I’ve

Andy Leman 46:13
made some along with some grapes that we stole from a champagne vineyard. I’ve made some champagne and incorporated by Chardonnay in there. So

Maddie 46:22
you actually went to champagne. Then we were on holiday in Champagne. It

Andy Leman 46:25
was post harvest, actually, so the grapes weren’t of a use to anybody, but we picked a load off.

Maddie 46:32
Oh, gorgeous. That’s bucket list that is

Andy Leman 46:34
Brought them back and made it. Yeah, fantastic. Wow,

Maddie 46:37
Amazing, do you have a big inspiration in brewing, like someone you look up to or look to for advice,

Andy Leman 46:44
or I think through my career, when I came to Timothy Taylor’s, I was fresh out of university. I’d done at Heriot Watts University. I’d done some work at Brakesspurs brewery in Henley, at the original brewery before that was closed down to get some kind of practical experience, but it wasn’t really so I came to Timothy Taylor’s in 1987 that I started learning about making beer properly. Yeah, the guy who was my influence was Peter Eells, so he was the previous head brewer to me. So I worked with them for nearly 30 years, and he really showed me everything about practical brewing that I needed for the rest of my career.

Maddie 47:28
Amazing. And I assume, did you do you study brewing at Heriot Watts?

Andy Leman 47:31
Yes, I did brewing at Heriot Watt. Yes. So we’ve got four brewers here. They’ve all been to Heriot Watt Universities

Maddie 47:32
as a theme. How did you know that that’s what you wanted to do?

Andy Leman 47:43
Well, it was more a question of, I ended up doing brewing. I started off doing home brewing, as I suppose most people who get in brewing do, and it went down quite well. The story behind that was that my dad, we lived in the village and back then? No, no. This is down south. I grew up near Newbury in Berkshire. Oh, nice, but in a village called Cheveley, but back then, so this was like the late 70s, early 80s. It was fairly acceptable for people who are underage to go into a pub and be allowed to drink alcohol as wasn’t causing a nuisance. So that’s what being mates all did. But my dad didn’t really like that too much, because he liked to go in there for a drink himself, and got bit fed up of seeing us all in there, so he tried to get the licensee to ban us who he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t be fair to him. He said, No, no, they behave themselves. They sit around the corner. They don’t upset. They’re polite when they come up to the bar. So he’s tried a different tack. And he said to me, right, instead of you and your mates going down the pub to drink beer there, I’ll show you how to brew beer, because he made wines country vines, and then they can you, your friends can come here and drink your beer here safely and legally. Wow. But it backfired, you see, because what happened was we still went down the pub, and then when the pub shut, everybody came back to my place. So then we kept them away, kept my dad awake. Then, yes, that’s

Maddie 49:18
That’s a nice story. So have you ever been to any beer festivals? Oh,

Andy Leman 49:23
yeah, yeah. Hundreds, probably, yeah.

Maddie 49:26
You like, you like going, Yeah,

Andy Leman 49:29
I do. It’s funny, because it used to be the only way you could taste new beers. But now, of course, you don’t have to go far to be able to try probably, a beer you’ve never had before in just in normal pubs, you know? But,

Maddie 49:44
yeah

Andy Leman 49:44
I do. I like the atmosphere. And we have a local beer festival here, but we have two, actually, very fortunate these days. We have one in Bradford at Saltair, they run their Beer Fest, which is cracking cracking one, and our local one is the Keighley and Craven branch have a beer festival in Skipton, and that’s brilliant fun. And that’s that’s really nice because a lot of locals go on the Thursday, especially Thursday evening, so you see people publicans from pubs. It’s just great place, and they always do a good choice of beer as well. Great.

Maddie 50:22
So do you have a hobby outside of brewing that you get a chance to do now? Or do you say that is sort of your wine and champagne?

Andy Leman 50:30
It’s not completely alcohol. No, we myself, my wife, we do a lot of walking,

Maddie 50:39
Nice walks around here?

Andy Leman 50:40
Yeah, some lovely, some great walks around here. Got the Pennines, and most especially, got the Dales, the Yorkshire Dales. So do walking there quite a lot. We’ve just been up to the northeast to Northumbria. We’ve walked on the beach this weekend, believe it or not, in the sunshine. So yeah, we like, that’s what we like doing.

Maddie 50:59
Yeah, I do like a nice walk, and then you end up at a nice pub.

Andy Leman 51:03
Yeah,

Maddie 51:03
At the end of it,

Andy Leman 51:04
Gosh, yesterday we ended up a lovely pub. It was only yesterday, in a place called The Ship, and it was right on the edge of the water the sea looking at over there, lovely old fashioned Pub has its own brewery.

Maddie 51:24
How far are you from the sea here?

Andy Leman 51:26
We’re quite a long way. Closest is to head west here. So you’d be, you’d be hitting sort of Blackpool as an hour and a bit a quarter.

Maddie 51:36
Yeah, nice. So what’s the last beer that you brewed?

Andy Leman 51:41
Last bit I brewed, well, Landlord. Unsurprisingly, we brew Landlord. Most days, we brew Monday to Thursday, and we do two mashes a day. So out of the in a typical week, out of those eight mashes, six or seven will be Landlords, 80% of our production.

Maddie 52:04
Yeah, wow, great. How much of production is your Hopicalstorm,

Andy Leman 52:09
Hopicalstorm is only very small at the moment, being a new brand and launching a keg beer. Is, we found it more challenging than our cask, which we’re known for, we have a reputation for, and it’s a slightly different products on the bar, and it’s much more competitive, perhaps, than we’ve been used to on the cask side,

Maddie 52:37
Takes time doesn’t it?

Andy Leman 52:39
It’s growing. Every month it grows.

Maddie 52:41
That’s amazing

Andy Leman 52:41
So we can’t really complain.

Maddie 52:43
Yeah. And then my next question was going to be Fuggles or Golding, but you’ve pretty much done that right yourself. So Fuggles, obviously. So then final question, what is next for you in the industry?

Andy Leman 52:56
Next for me or for the brewery?

Maddie 52:58
Both

Andy Leman 52:58
Oh right? Okay, well, I mean, next for the company is really just to consolidate our consolidate in, not in cutting brands, but consolidate the brands we have keep them going, possibly supplement with another brand. But it’s not really our thing to do many new brands, you know, I hear with horror. You know, these people who do a different brew every week they’ve never done before, because we just can’t do that because of our our facilities and structure of our production plant. But it’s, it’s nice to brew new beers, but really it’s consolidating our existing brands. And, you know, finding new markets for some of those beers.

For me, not particularly. No. We’ve got massive, massive five year plan of projects coming on, which my second Brewer, Nick and senior Brewer Tom are very involved in and that’s to really modernise some of the brewing brewing plants without changing the way we brew, and to give us some extra capacity for storing, conditioning beer. And that’s happened the work starting on that we’ve had all the permissions from the board, and we just need to, there’s a lot of prep work to do to get there, but that’s our big thing for the future now.

Tom Probert 54:33
That’s exciting.

Andy Leman 54:35
Yeah, we’re very fortunate, because the family’s always invested money in the business. And, you know, this is 9 million pounds, and it’s a lot of money for us, but, you know, over the years, there’s been more than that spent over the last 20 years you know.

Maddie 54:52
Is that what they’re going to be investing into this five year plan? Yeah,

Andy Leman 54:55
wow, that’s amazing. Yeah. So it’s a relatively small brewery.

Maddie 55:01
I mean, facilities are very impressive, yeah.

Andy Leman 55:05
Well, it’s done a lot, but, you know, you must never stop. And that’s the mistake other family brewers have made in the past, but they haven’t invested in in the place. And then they get to the point where they say, well, we must do, we need to do. We must do this, to upgrade it. And they find out it’s so much money that they can’t afford to do it, and they end up selling up the brewery, you know. But you know, for us, yeah, we’ve we’ve developed the plant, we’ve made the place, you know. We’ve refurbished places that were needed upgrading. And so it’s, yeah, we’ve been lucky.

Maddie 55:44
Yeah, it obviously you’re a very experienced Brewer. If you could give some words of wisdom or advice to a small starter, or, you know, small brewery, what would it be?

Andy Leman 55:56
There’s probably two things. The big mantra here is quality. And I mean that both in the modern day meaning of the word, which is making sure things are consistent and stay the same and people don’t deviate from recipes and mistakes aren’t made, but also in the traditional meaning of the word, which is really using the best quality materials you can get to brew beer that really excites the customer and maintains that love. You know, people have a deep love of Timothy Taylor’s beers, and that’s, that’s what we’re here for, really to do that, and whether it’s our Golden Promise malt or whether it’s the fantastic hops that you supply us, then you know that’s what it’s all about. So I would say so quality. Once you’ve got your beer to the flavour you want, then it consistency and maintaining that and keeping the quality standards high and cleanliness is, of course, involved in that,

Maddie 57:06
yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, I think that brings me to the end of my questions. But thank you very much. Really appreciate it.

Andy Leman 57:13
Not at all

Maddie 57:14
Yeah, a really interesting chat.

Andy Leman 57:15
So good. That’s been very pleasant. Thank you very much. Nice to Nice to see you. Nice to be able to show you around the brewery

Maddie 57:20
Yeah, amazing. I find it really interesting. Great.