Patrick Whittle 0:00
Music. Welcome back to Spreading Hoppiness, the Charles Faram podcast this week, we’re bringing the farm to you as we catch up with three of Britain’s best hop farmers as we hear about their farm’s history, their best stories and what’s next for their farms. So let’s catch up with farmer Tom Probert, Richard Capper, Molly and Bob Bidell on this week’s episode. Hello, everyone. If we could all start by introducing ourselves a little bit about you and your farm, where we are, etc, that’d be great.

Speaker 1 0:31
Okay, yeah, so I’m Tom Probert. We’re in Churchfarm, Weston Beggard Herefordshire, and I am a fourth generation hop farmer. So followed my father and my granddad, who was very miserable man. I’m sure it’s the hops that made it miserable, and then wouldn’t have known my great grandfather, but hops have been here. I dragged a bit of paperwork out the other day, and 1928 is when they first started farming here. So nearly 100 years of hops, and as far as I know, they’ve been cropped every year since then. Yeah, that’s about it, and we’re still growing for our sins. Well,

Richard Capper 1:09
Hi my name is Richard capper, and we are here at Stocks farm, which is suckley, which is on the Worcestershire Herefordshire border. And the farm is consists of 200 acres of apples and hops, and we it’s been in our family, my family, since 1962 which is when my father bought it. It’s always been a hot and fruit farm, so it hasn’t changed dramatically in the 50/60, years that we’ve owned it.

Bob Biddell 1:37
I am Bill Biddell, Chief Executive of the Hampton estate farms in the Hampton estate, and it’s a family owned and run traditional, forward thinking estate based in South West Surrey.

Molly Biddell 1:51
And I’m Molly Biddell. I work at Hampton as head of nature based solutions, but I’m also responsible for our marketing and our community engagement, because we’ve got a range of different things that we’re doing at Hampton, and a lot of them involve kind of reaching out to people talking about what we’re doing.

Bob Biddell 2:09
Yeah, the hops are really interesting. It’s a there was always hop growing in Surrey and in Hampshire, and it was just a little enclave, and now we are the last people growing hops commercially in Surrey or in Hampshire. It’s all completely gone apart from ourselves. And over the years, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of years, there were loads and loads of hop growers. And it was always said that the Surrey Hampshire hops grown around the town of Alton, which is about 10 miles away were the best hops in the country. And the Farnham Whitebind was a really old traditional hop, which everybody wanted to go and buy. And it was said that you used to be able to walk from Farnham to Guildford along the Hog’s Back, which is the A31 and never be outside a hot car. So it’s, it’s an old, old crop. It’s been around for, you know, for a long time. And so when it started in our Hampton, I really don’t think anybody knows that it’s been there for ages.

Patrick Whittle 3:18
Obviously, fourth generation hop farmer hop’s been here since 1920s has that? Have you seen lots of change within, like hop farming practices, at all?

Tom Probert 3:27
So I think was, everybody would agree the biggest, huge change would have been machine picking. So that was, oh, 50s. And I think the machine we had here was one of the first, or probably was the first to go in the Froome Valley, and I think a lot of people came to look at it. I think farmers, yeah, I think there was a reciprocal agreement that went on with whoever Western Power were at the time that they would put the high capacity line in as long as enough people wanted it. So it all sort of came nicely together that the grid got expanded, and then electrical machines could go in. We’ve still got, and it is still commercially viable. Part of that machine from the 50s is still being used now. And if you ask any other farmer, they wouldn’t own a hammer or a spanner from that era,

Charlie Gorham 4:18
yeah

Tom Probert 4:21
And that was a Bruff that made them it was their own demise. It was so well built they never became obsolete. And the concept hasn’t changed. Brand new machines using the same concepts. Just polished up a bit. But I can remember dad saying, when the engineer came out from Bruff, they used it for the first day. And dad was, I don’t know, he’s probably a teenager at the time. I can’t quite remember, but he was going, Oh, this is wrong, and that’s wrong. And there’s hops go in here, and there’s leaves going there, and this isn’t right and that’s wrong. And he ranted away at this poor engineer, and the engineer just let him carry on until he ran out of stuff to say, and then just went, I. So Young man, was there anything right with it? Dad could always remember that. So I think that was the biggest change that we’ll ever see,

Richard Capper 5:09
Innovative. I think my Bruff Hop picking machines, there’s more than we get 1950s technology, but

Patrick Whittle 5:17
it’s still going.

Richard Capper 5:18
It’s still going. It’s like a classic, classic car, really, you sort of nurture it and tender it and sort of,

Charlie Gorham 5:26
yeah. So I think, I suppose it’s these small things. So, like, they wouldn’t so much about, like, the sustainability issues back in like, the 50s, or, like, you know, pesticides and all that kind of thing. So you’re probably doing things that you don’t even realize that are quite, you know, big moves, but

Speaker 1 5:46
Yeah, they’re not. We’re just chipping away at stuff. So they’re all small steps to sort of evolving, whereas I think that machine step was huge, yeah, that was massive. That suddenly took hundreds of people that were hop picking down to 10s. So the big pilgrimage from sort of South Wales or up in the West Country, Black Country even ended then.

Charlie Gorham 6:11
Yeah, and it seems to shame, because you should look back at the pictures, and there’s like films in there, Darling Buds of May, and it’s just like you’ve got a whole romantic vision of how it was.

Speaker 1 6:23
They turn up to the stations with their like, possessions all sorts. They were moving in for months. Yeah, we still got one of the old sheds that used to live in. It’s now stable, but it’s still there, and it’s, yeah, it’s even a little piece of history that it was all partitioned off. And we did flatten the communal toilet,

Patrick Whittle 6:44
Nice,

Speaker 2 6:46
But yeah, it’s to been able to step into a time machine and go back to see that would just be astonishing, the hustle and bustle that must have been. And you always hear about the fights that were broken out and stuff, and the local police would be called and, yeah, and

Patrick Whittle 7:05
And the machine doesn’t do any of that. No agro when it comes to a machine.

Tom Probert 7:10
Oh there’s still agro.

Richard Capper 7:13
And that machine took over from hand picking, because before the profits invented, as you probably know, it was teams of people coming out for holidays, staying locally or on farm, picking hops, actually out in the field. Yeah, all the women were all the men were sort of probably in the pub drinking

Patrick Whittle 7:32
The amount of labour and manpower that was required for that absolutely immense,

Richard Capper 7:37
Scary when you think these days, because it’s quite challenging just getting, you know, a handful of pickers to help you with your harvest. I mean, these days, but whenever it was before the Bruff was invented, 1000s of people come out into the countryside, be put up on farms, and quite basic a accomadation. But then you could, you could drive from Hereford to Worcester, and for either side of the road, we just hops, yeah, the whole way along. But now that look at the hectares of hops in this country, that’s very small. It’s been challenging, isn’t it? What, with covid, yeah, I think that has really knocked not the industry sideways. And hopefully, I might sort of say to people here, we’re still in survival mode at the moment. We’re hoping we can sort of call and I’m sure other grows and Faram’s are feeling the same. It’s been a very challenging, you know, running a business.

Molly Biddell 8:28
It was a big move when we moved to our new pop setup, basically, we moved the hopping machine and the kiln all the way up over, sort of, like two mile a mile away, in order to extend the hop gardens. And that’s when we then became much more mechanised, and we had a mechanised Oast, and we had a slightly more mechanised machine. And, yeah, I remember that being a we can, you know, changes a quite a bit, but actually, it’s been fantastic. And we, we’ve done all the size of the hop garden, and we still do the harvest in like half the amount of time. So was a good change.

Bob Biddell 8:59
It was, yeah,

Charlie Gorham 9:00
So if you’ve got the Bruff and another picking machine, just the Bruff

Bob Biddell 9:06
The reason, actually, the reason for changing was because our existing one, which was a Rotorbank, was just at the end of its useful days. Well, it was actually the Bruff is older. So we, we knew we had to do something about this. And, I mean, you know, we either got out of hops completely, or we, we had to expand.

Molly Biddell 9:30
And this was in 2017/2016/2018

Bob Biddell 9:33
Probably started in 2014

Molly Biddell 9:35
Yeah, thinking about it.

Bob Biddell 9:36
And luckily, the the area that where the farm buildings were for the hops were just within the village envelope, so we could get planning consent on it for houses, which is what we did. And then that worked really well, because the parish council said, fantastic. We want hops to stay in partner and in the village. And we, you know, if you go to expand, that’s fantastic. The District Council said, brilliant. We need new houses. So we’ve got to have quoter houses at that moment, and we need some more. And we said, great, because that will enable us to, you know, expand and move and make it much more efficient. But the other funny thing was that Bridge and I and our other daughter Chole went down to Munich to go and look at the German picking machine. Yeah. So we went down there because we thought this would be the place to go. So we had a day down there. Chloe says it’s the most dull day she’s ever had. But we went into the factory, and then we showed around, and we were taken to two or three farms, and they had the most supersonic pickers. Absolutely fantastic. So they said, absolutely perfect. We can do this, and it costs you 2.5 million euros, right? And so we had no interesting with Fuggles. They’re very delicate pedal, so we had no guarantee that if we bought a German and hop picking machine, that actually they’d pluck them and they would, they might easily come in and smash them to bits so, and then put a call out to everybody when we pick one up 10,000 quid in Worcestershire, which we then brought down on five low loaders down here. And

Charlie Gorham 11:24
My next question was going to be, where on earth did you get a Bruff from

Bob Biddell 11:30
Amazing I’m trying to think who was selling them. He wasn’t using them. There were two Bruffs side by side. Simon for Parker bought one. Yeah, we bought the other. And then we met this amazing bloke called Albert. Albert Philpin, astonishing bloke, so he was about, he must have been late 60s. Met Albert because he had put those machines into that barn in Worcestershire. We said, Albert, can you move them? Says, Yeah, I can move them and I can build you a Oast. And he did just that. So he took me around to Kent and to Herefordshire, and we looked at about the Powertucks, yes, yeah, they’ve got an Albert designed Oast. And then we went down to Kent to look at an Albert designed Oast. And he is the most amazing individual, he really was. And so we had to persuade our trustees that what we needed to do was to invest in in this in Albert, Philpin who was going to build us a Oast and put this hop picking machine in. Albert, Have you got you know I needed a budget from you, and I need plans to know, I never do a budget or plans. Well, how am I going to persuade my trustees The only time I ever put a plan together, I gave it to a bloke to tell him, this is what he needs. I never heard from him again, and he built it himself. So I’m never going to do that again. So our work came and was with us for a year and a half, year and a half, and did the whole thing, and the whole

Molly Biddell 12:58
The whole Oast was built by him.

Bob Biddell 13:01
when he said, he said, don’t worry. Dog said, I may be looking a bit old, but when I really need the heavy stuff done, I’ll bring my wife in

Charlie Gorham 13:10
So what’s more difficult to farm? To think?

Speaker 1 13:12
Difficult to farm. Every aspects difficult the hops are just on a scale of one to 10. You’ll get people going. Oh, yeah. So I think Arable Farming is about a four or five, and fruit growing is a six or seven, and every hop farm you speak to will go your scale is not big enough, because it’s just, there’s just something different all the time, right? I don’t know what it is. It’s it’s a fast moving plant. It’s changing on a daily basis, and there’s always something. It won’t be a new disease or anything that’s going to come. It’ll just come at different times, in different proportions, and it will catch us by surprise every year. You’d think we’d learn, but we don’t,

Richard Capper 13:12
I would say growing dessert fruits for the supermarket is very challenging because they want absolutely perfectly sized apples, no blemishes, and the colour has got to be absolutely right. There’s a lot of labour involved in growing apples for supermarkets. It’s a very expensive crop to grow, and there’s a lot of risk. There’s frost risk in the spring, which can burn the flowers so you have no crop, and then you can get hail storms, which they hailstorms can affect hops, as we all know, but also decimated, crop right? I

Charlie Gorham 14:25
I think when I first started, 2015 around then, there was a massive hailstorm, just where you are, like nowhere else, just where you are. And we went to look at the hops, and there was a big pile of apples that were just written.

Richard Capper 14:37
I know was so depressing, all the effort that goes into growing those apples, yeah, you just think of the amount of hours that goes in and just, I’m also the cost. It’s just, it’s money down the drain. But we do insure for hail events, it’s expensive, yeah, for horse, we had hail in our hop crop last year. I don’t know if you remember

Charlie Gorham 14:58
I do remember I did. Come around that, yeah, but I do remember we had hail. It made me think of that pile that I saw before

Richard Capper 15:06
We had we had five minutes of hailstones in June, and I never known it decimate hops, because hops usually grow through but it just knocked the heads off the hops, so the hops didn’t, some didn’t get to the top of the strings, which obviously has huge impact on yield, so I was amazed how they sort of pulled through. But it wasn’t a proper crop, wasn’t a full crop,

Charlie Gorham 15:28
right? That’s interesting. Then that’s kind of, yeah, you want to expect that

Patrick Whittle 15:34
Especially in June, they’re at the top of the wires, aren’t they? By Yeah, by the late end of June

Richard Capper 15:38
Should by the end of June, early July. I think we have to expect sort of more sort of challenging weather conditions with global warming, climate change. Call it what you want.

Charlie Gorham 15:51
What are the other challenges you’ve experienced with hop growing,

Tom Probert 15:57
All of it. The most nail biting is the final sort of two or three weeks, which a lot of that is actually being put into place in sort of May, June. If you get a big growing season now, you’ll yeah, might get a bigger, heavier crop, but a bigger, heavier crop can then host a lot more diseases, a lot more weight on the wire work, and cause you a lot of headaches in another couple of months. So the biggest nail biter, particularly for us, is about the 19th of August. Historically, we’ve had a couple of hop yards go down, and they both went down on the 19th in separate years. So yeah,

Bob Biddell 16:37
over the last 30 years. Yeah, but I think what’s really interesting is how we’ve mechanised hugely, how we how we have less people working physically in the hops and especially at harvest. That’s been a big change, and how we’re now looking at new methods of growing hops and the whole ethos of regenerative hop growing so and plus, in the middle of that, we knocked down our old hop buildings, and we put up a brand new processing plant, and we’ve expanded our hop area. So it’s a big, big change.

Molly Biddell 17:13
A lot of it is that the challenges create opportunities for us. So the challenges in terms of reaching the scale needed from your equipment, was an opportunity to expand the challenges in labour then become opportunities in the way that you can recognise the challenges in climate become opportunities for us in terms of regen, growing things like that.

Charlie Gorham 17:36
So what else do you farm?

Tom Probert 17:39
As little as possible. So what do we farm? We Hops is predominantly our focus. It’s not the biggest part of the farm, but it’s biggest sort of focus only. It takes up the most time. We’ve got some arable we’ve got some Suckler cows, and we did have cider orchards, but they’ve gone, so really, we’re sort of specialising back into hops, and my interest in arable has become a bit dulled off recently. So dad would laugh. Dad’s no longer with us, but he would be chuckling, thinking I knew you’d get bitten by them. So yeah, hops is just even in the slightly subdued market we’re in just seeing the way forward.

Richard Capper 18:19
We grow apples for the supermarkets. So dessert apples, which sort of commercial commodity apples? Suppose Gala, Winsor an early British variety, and we’ve got some unusual ones, once called Junami, as an British apple. And we have grown Braeburn in the past. But Gala the main variety of growth for the supermarkets. And we also grow cider apples.

Molly Biddell 18:19
The ethos is Hampton, of Hampton in general, we are a very environmentally focused business, and have got a lot of exciting nature restoration projects, because we’re actually located in some really interesting areas of landscape for habitat. So we’ve got a restoration project. We’ve got chalk downland, and we’ve already got a regenerative herd of pasture for life and accredited cows.

Charlie Gorham 19:09
Do you always want to be a hop farmer?

Tom Probert 19:11
No Will ask you this yesterday, so they’re gonna ask you things like, why you hop farmer? I wasn’t good enough to fly fast jets, so I originally applied to the RAF right to fly fast jets, every boy’s dream, but I just failed on one of the parts of the interview, so that it was like a bit of a rethink, but I still dug my heels in and went down the engineering route instead. I think I don’t know, did I ever want to be a farmer? I think my earliest memory of when you ask kids, oh, what do you want to do? I probably didn’t even know what inventor was, but I just thought I want to be an inventor. So maybe the engineering came from that. I don’t know. I like nuts and bolts, so it works a hop machine. But no, I definitely didn’t want to be hop farmer

Charlie Gorham 20:00
Funnily enough a lot of engineers go into brewing, right? So there’s a lot of engineers. And I think it is because that, like science and the, you know the kit, and all of that kind of thing

Tom Probert 20:11
Probably done home brewing, yeah, or something, yeah. There’s so many little micro breweries have started because they used to brew a bit of beer at uni with their mates,

Charlie Gorham 20:19
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We get a lot of phone calls out for advice and things from people doing exactly that.

Richard Capper 20:25
I’m often asked, actually, that, have you done anything else? Actually, when I was at school, my holidays were spent here because I just loved being outside, and I wasn’t particularly good at so I didn’t, I didn’t excel academically at school. So I remember coming home and just being out in the fields, and just loved being out growing things. And I think, well, that was one of the few prizes I ever won at school. Was actually growing stuff. We used to have a little small gardens at school. I think that’s a few prizes. So I did. I spent all my holidays working on the farm. Obviously, children, when you’re young, you just want to drive a tractor as fast as you can. But no, it’s just something I’ve always wanted to do. That’s but I have no pressure from my family, from my father, to come into it. I’ve just sort of it just happened naturally.

Molly Biddell 21:14
I’ve been doing hop harvest since I was like 17, and done it every year. And I just love hops. I just think they’re one of the best crops ever there so that I’ve never met anyone that doesn’t find hops interesting, or do they want to, you know, they always say, can we see? How do you pick them? How does this work? And I love beer, so that helps. And a lot of my mates love beer. So you know, it’s a great exactly, and you’re quite proud of it, and it’s hop. Harvest has always been, like, always a big event. I used to get lots of mates over from school, and we do the hop harvest and stuff. So, yeah, it’s a great crop, and I love it. And I do feel, I think, because I feel passionately about beer, I feel passionate about hops,

Charlie Gorham 21:54
yeah, this kind of community from start to finish, the community with, like you said, they pick it, the growing, the picking, and then the actual drinking, yeah, everything is all about community. Is there anything farming wise that’s coming that you’re excited about? Whether it is innovation or

Patrick Whittle 22:15
Doesn’t have to be industry wide, it could be

Tom Probert 22:17
The one thing excites me. It must be my Welsh roots is we’ve used sheep in the hops for defoliating, right? And they actually do a fantastic job. They tick the this is green and renewable and regenerative box. So we send them in. We don’t have many in there. They take off the bottom leaves of the hops. My obsession with it is, if they take away the bottom leaves, we’re taking those way to stop pests and disease. Yeah, in particular, red spider. Well, if I defoliate the leaves of the chemical and just let it like a salt solution or whatever we use to shrivel the leaf up, well, a spider sat on there. He’s gonna go, Well, my home’s drying up. I’m off, and he’ll go up and find a nice leaf, yeah, but if a sheep comes in and eats it that’s gone, and they strip the bine bare so they don’t touch the bine, they nibble like great big wooly caterpillars. Take it off perfectly. Nail a load of weeds and grass as well. Put a load of muck on for me. And and it’s, it’s almost like this nice, big, holistic kind of, it’s like a magic wand of, like, wow, that’s worked really well. Yeah. So I would love to integrate sheep into it more, but I hate sheep, right?

Charlie Gorham 23:32
It bringg another element. I was sitting there thinking, why isn’t everyone doing that? But then, yeah, then you’ve got to take care of the sheep

Patrick Whittle 23:40
They don’t look after they only got to keep them all year round. So I

Richard Capper 23:45
I think we just do the varities first. I mean, we do get involved the firm’s development program. We’ve got quite a lot of trial plots. I find that very interesting, having different panels of different varieties going through a selection process. But so yes, I think variety is new. Variety is coming on, very important. But you’re going back to your question about technology, without changing any technology. I don’t think I do, and I love my Bruff picking machine. If I won the lottery, I might go go to Germany and buy something a bit the machine was a bit more modern.

Charlie Gorham 24:20
But keep both

Patrick Whittle 24:22
you want to look at from

Molly Biddell 24:23
From a hop perspective. I’m really interested, and this is what I’m going to be looking out for in the next five years. So the point at which we start to see brewers interested in the environmental integrity of their hops. So I’ve had a first, my first conversation with a brewer a few weeks ago where they said, Do you know how many car like, how much carbon and dioxide equivalent per kilogram of hops you are emitting? So I said, Okay, we’re going to go and work that out. So we’re trying to be as forward looking with what a good, environmentally grown, sustainably, regeneratively grown hop looks like. I’m really interested for when a brewer. Wants to know more about that. And when they say we’ve committed to making sure that our supply chain is 100% regenerative by 2040 which, you know, we’re seeing a lot of supermarkets say that so Morrisons have said that, you know, Sainbury’s are talking about it. And it’s when brewers engage with that. And then we can say to them, here you go. This is what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to do what we want from us. And this is the data. And let’s, let’s let’s share that story to the consumer, but also let’s share it with data. So the next thing for us is, as we said, we’ve made some of these interesting changes, and we’ve made some of the bigger changes over the past two years. It’s now collecting the data system to understand like, have those changes on the ground actually impacted our soils? Have they reduced our need for this so that, you know, we can see, we think from eyesight and for what our yield looks like, is doing good stuff, but until you have the soil based data and metrics around water retention, things like that, and we won’t know if it’s really what we should be doing, so we’ve got to get the data, and then hopefully that will fit in with the story. And then hopefully we’ll find consumers and brewers that want to share that story and want to know that they’re putting something in their supply chain that is a good hop, basically, for the future.

Charlie Gorham 26:10
Yeah and I think it’s important that everybody knows they’ve got a choice from brewery to the drinker as well. And then that’s not always clear that you can have, you know, look into it. And there are people telling this story, so you cannot say I love that beer because it’s got British hops in it, or it’s from this farm that I know is concerned about the environment or where it’s going and its quality, yeah.

Molly Biddell 26:35
And I just love that. Like, as, as an avid beer drinker, you’re always, you know, you always look at a kind of beer, and you’re like, oh, wow, there’s a nice picture of a hop on the side here. And I think we can do so much more as an industry to connect those drinkers up with the actual stories I think we’ve had. We have one local brewery, make some hops, make some make some beer that was brewed with your name in it, didn’t we? And that clearly it was like, Bills brew or something that was clearly connected to us. And, yeah, so it’s Yeah, yeah.

Charlie Gorham 27:04
And then mine’s gone blank.

Bob Biddell 27:07
I think, I think the other thing is, it actually is the commercialisation in that somewhere along the line we still need to be paid for creating a, you know, creating hops and the usual, it’s always the usual thing. We couldn’t have invested in our hop enterprise if we hadn’t got planning consent to put up some houses where our hop buildings were, and that gave us, that gave us enabling development, which enabled us to put money into a new hop picking machine. There’s absolutely no way we could have done that from our from our annual hop growing income or deficit. So I think that somewhere along the line, there’s got to be a realisation that there’s, there is a standard, there’s a there’s a base level for selling hops, until the whole country and all 48 of us, or whatever we are, all realise that, you know, it’s going to be a problem.

Molly Biddell 28:03
Because it is the classic thing of despite the craft beer boom, despite the fact that people are interested in bearing the stories behind it, you haven’t seen the reciprocal increase in hop prices. And actually, I think it is about saying, Hold on. If we want a fantastic British hop industry, we need to be paying enough to keep it going. And that is really important, and that’s where I think the regen story fits really nicely, because it’s like, hold on, we can create amazing, high integrity hops. They can be a brilliant part of the beers that we’re creating, but that’s that is really valuable. We need to value it properly, and does that for enable us to create slightly more economically resilient businesses.

Charlie Gorham 28:37
Yeah, that might be a good place. Yeah, I can

Maddie 28:45
say you’ve basically asked all our questions.

Charlie Gorham 28:48
Was there anything else that you wanted to say to get in?

Molly Biddell 28:51
You haven’t said anything. Oh,

Bob Biddell 28:58
You came in with the 40 to 50 degrees, 40 to 50 degree temperatures, yeah, I think I’ll tell you what, actually, I was just thinking when we used to have lots of people, and we it was great. We had a lot of people from the traveling community. Used to traditionally come and help us with our hops, and we’ve had and so they were, they were real characters, and they were always during, well, there were two times during the hop harvesting, so we’d have a group of students who came and helped us, and a group of travelers. And the travelers were all all ladies, and they were all brilliant. But after about the first week, we then have to say, right, we’re gonna have a French day tomorrow. So with no one’s able, is allowed to set to speak anything other than French.

Charlie Gorham 29:49
what other days did you

Bob Biddell 29:50
have? Well, then, then we used to have a big sack race at the end. So we had all these green sacks that we split hops and took them across to the dryer, and we had this lovely otter. Swiss/ Austrian guy who came. He was a loving he came and helped us for a couple of years. And he instigated the great the Hampton sack race. And we used to have everyone so all the all the ladies would be in these big sack race down the hop garden. The end of the end of picking.

Molly Biddell 30:18
It is so like I, most of my mates have, I think, her 21st birthday, and you said, hands up if you’ve been hop picking for three weeks in September, you know, like, yeah, everyone’s done casually, but hot picking before we recognize, and actually, we used to, like, when, in my kind of, you know, when I was 18/19, we had, we always had needed about 15 people. So now we’re down to five or six, so different. But we had some really fun days. Countryfile came, they filmed us. They suddenly did the tractor from Greg James on radio one, tractor of the day. It was a good flex. And we also had, we used to try towards the end of the season we’d see if, because obviously our CEO is bit stingy with the breaks that we were allowed. But we used to see if on a lunch break, we could we had a morning tea break, and could we go and make an order from the local Chinese and then someone who, like the person first off the trailer, could go grab it in time for lunch. And then on a Friday afternoon, we could all up for Chinese takeaway for lunch, rather than, like, bring our sandwiches. Yeah. I mean, there’s so much, and also even all of like mum, when she was younger, and they were hop picked, they have much more, much more relaxed about 19, because they used to sort of like have beers at lunch, we definitely we would not be allowed. But everyone’s, I think every pretty much, everyone’s got hop growing slowly.

Bob Biddell 31:45
But I think also, we have been very lucky that in that as well, said, we’ve got one guy on the staff who’s been with us. He started work when he was 14 on the farm. His grandfather, his father, worked on the farm and dried hops. And his uncle worked on the farm and did hops. His grandfather worked on the farm. And he’s now 72 and he still works in on the farm. So he’s got 60 years of, you know, of hop harvest. He’s our chief dryer, yeah, and he does a lot. He does all the spraying. So we’ve got really skillful guys.

Molly Biddell 32:18
It’s about also making sure that that knowledge and skill transfers to people and are you can’t just keep it with one person. It has to be shared

Patrick Whittle 33:09
From farmer to brewer. It’s time for this week’s Five Minutes with Faram. This time we’re down in Gloucestershire interviewing Brewer Ben from Stroud brewery on his favourite hops beer and what’s next for him in the industry.

Ben Jennison-Phillips 33:21
So I’m Ben Jennison Phillips. I’ve been here at Stroud for nearly five years now, and this year is my 20th year as a brewer.

Patrick Whittle 33:30
Oh, very nice. Where’d you start?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 33:32
So I started a little brewery called Whittington’s, which was part of Three Choirs Vineyard that was on the second of January, 2004 and then since then, I’ve worked fairly locally in Cheltenham, Pershore in Worcestershire, and up in Bourton-on-the-Water in Gloucestershire as well. So this is my fifth brewery.

Patrick Whittle 33:52
Is his favourite brewery?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 33:56
One of the things I like about here is definitely the variety of things we do. Some of the others were just cask or just lager, whereas here we do a bit of everything, so you can get your teeth into all sorts of different things.

Patrick Whittle 34:09
Yeah, it sounds really good. So the first question our Five Minutes with Faram segment is, what’s your favourite hop?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 34:14
My favorite hop, I think at the moment, one that I’m quite liking is our organic Harlequin®. Being organic brewers, we have had in the past a little bit of a restriction on how many hops we can use, and obviously that affected what sorts of beers we could produce with everybody liking American flavours and big fruity hops. Having a UK Harlequin® now available to us just means that you know, a couple of our beers have really lifted, and I think that’ll go quite well for us. So

Patrick Whittle 34:44
Very nice, what would be, what gives some names of some beers where you’ve used that Harlequin®?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 34:49
Well, so far, we’ve just used it in one beer, our Oaty pale, which we’ve just brewed last week, brewed it once last year, because there was only 12 kilos available organically.

Patrick Whittle 34:57
Right

Ben Jennison-Phillips 34:58
So hopefully, as production increases production of the hop increases we’ll get more available to us, so we’ll be able to use it in more things.

Patrick Whittle 35:06
Yeah, definitely, from like Farams point of view, is obviously, when we’re getting all this positive feedback about these different experimental varieties, we’re only going to keep pushing them through

Ben Jennison-Phillips 35:14
Yeah hopefully, and hopefully, you know, with us being just organic as well, you know, yeah, hopefully that will grow and then we’ll be able to to use more of it. Yeah, no, definitely.

Patrick Whittle 35:24
So what would you say your favourite beer is, or beer style is, or

Ben Jennison-Phillips 35:28
That we make, or in general?

Patrick Whittle 35:30
Well, you can, you can give one from Stroud. You can give one from anywhere else. For example,

Speaker 5 35:34
I think for a few years now, I grew up in Sheffield and had real ale force down my throat all the time. So those sorts of beers, you know, just traditional bitter is what we had as when I was younger. But now I think I really appreciate sort of a decent Heller’s lager, things like that, just now that I know how difficult they are to make, but how varied they can be as well. So our LOL is that sort of style recently won the SIBA award, and that’s that’s going great guns. So that’s probably my favourite at the moment.

Patrick Whittle 36:12
Very nice. What about a beer from a different brewery?

Speaker 5 36:16
In our local, local area, I always look out for Wye Valley or Salopian But recently, I’ve had a couple of great Bristol Beer Factory beers as well. I really enjoy They’re Notorious when I see it in town. So yeah, those sorts of cask ales and those guys do go down really well.

Patrick Whittle 36:33
Very nice. So when you’re drinking, for example, the LOL beer you just mentioned, what would you pair that with? Food wise?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 36:40
Well, if I have it here, I’d have it here, I’ll have it with just our standard Margarita Pizza in our tap room. So, yeah, beer and pizza the classic?

Patrick Whittle 36:47
Yeah? Definitely, to be fair, most of our answers that question is that is proper, hearty foods, like pizzas, burgers. Yeah, I’ve had cheese as well. Okay, cheese pairs well trends to be darker beers. Yeah, what we’ve found out. But yeah, no. Good choice. Enjoy that. So have you got a favourite pub in the world, one that you’ve been to, or

Speaker 5 37:05
Favourite pub? I’ve been to, quite a few, comes with the job. Really, it does. It does. I mean, I quite enjoyed some of the pubs in the Forest of Dean down on the River Wye. Yeah. There’s a few down, down in Simmons Yat that are just really nice for looking over the water. Holiday vibe. But whenever I go back home to visit the folks, there’s a couple of great pubs near us in a place called Chapeltown.

Patrick Whittle 37:33
Okay

Ben Jennison-Phillips 37:34
So, yeah, I always like to go out down there. The Commercial is a good place

Patrick Whittle 37:41
I ever find myself in Sheffield, I have to make sure to visit some of these. So sort of moving on from pubs. Have you been to many, like beer festivals, or?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 37:51
There’s a few locally. CAMRA, do the Cotswold beer festival? Yeah, we’re always at that. Tewkesbury just had the winter ales festival as well. That’s quite a good one. #

Patrick Whittle 38:00
Where’s that in Tewkesbury?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 38:02
It’s at the Watson Hall on the high street.

Patrick Whittle 38:03
Oh, I know, yeah,

Ben Jennison-Phillips 38:05
So, so, yeah, I tend to go to just local ones a couple of times through work. I’ve been to the GBBF in London, but I find those a little bit much. They’re just a bit too busy. I prefer something a bit smaller,

Patrick Whittle 38:17
yeah, a bit more sort of intimate local,

Ben Jennison-Phillips 38:19
yeah, I guess. And also, prefer stuff that’s got our beers on there, or stuff that I know, rather than stuff from absolutely everywhere. So

Patrick Whittle 38:27
Yeah, and you get a better connection with the beer then if you know where it’s come from, yeah, or you know, sort of the brewer that’s brewed it, or whatever, I think there’s almost bit more meaning behind it.

Ben Jennison-Phillips 38:35
I think also, as well, with the local breweries, is that the people who are there engage with you more as a local brewer. So if we were at the GBBF, 99% of people probably never heard of Stroud brewery or anything like that. Whereas, if we’re at a Gloucestershire festival, people are interested in what you’re doing. And so yeah, you get a bit more engagement that way.

Patrick Whittle 38:55
Yeah, no, definitely. So obviously, we’re sat in your brewery today. What would you say? One item you can’t live without in the brewery.

Ben Jennison-Phillips 39:05
Squeegee done,

Patrick Whittle 39:07
just for cleaning. Yeah, yeah.

Ben Jennison-Phillips 39:10
Just get the floors done. Get everything sorted. Yeah. 90% of our job is cleaning but, but yeah. It’s really satisfying at the end of the day, squeegee the floor down, feel like you’ve cleaned up, done. You can leave then,

Patrick Whittle 39:24
yeah, that’s yeah, like you said, satisfying job, isn’t it? Yeah. I guess if you then come in the next morning, it’s all nice pristine ready to start brewing again that’s what we want isn’t it. And so when you are brewing and not cleaning, yeah, do you have you got any, like, playlists you put on, any podcasts, any radio stations, or

Ben Jennison-Phillips 39:41
We always have, if just a general day brewing, pottering about, we’ve always just got Six Music on, yeah, just because it’s got a variety of tunes for everybody to listen to. If we’re canning, then I’ve always got proper hardcore trance and rave on, just to get us through canning. So boring. So having the tunes on just. Gets you through

Patrick Whittle 40:00
A bit high pace, is it your playlist?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 40:03
I tend to pick up all the CDs from the charity shops. So if I see sort of, you know, old compilation ones or anything, then yeah, I’ll just pick those up.

Patrick Whittle 40:14
You sort of protect them. So yeah, your type of music?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 40:16
Yeah, Ministry of House, 1998 a Mystery of Sound. Sorry, I should say 1998

Patrick Whittle 40:22
High intense stuff. Yeah. So if you weren’t in brewing, obviously, as you mentioned, you’ve been in brewing for 20 years. Did you do anything different before or ?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 40:31
Or so, the first brewery I was at was based at Three Choirs vineyards. So before that, I did wine making and worked at a wine trade. So I done wine for about eight or nine years before I’d started on working in their brewery,

Patrick Whittle 40:44
Yep

Ben Jennison-Phillips 40:45
So I possibly would have stuck with that my whole working life’s just been in booze basically.

Patrick Whittle 40:54
No, I love that. That’s brilliant. So, yeah, so very much sort of around the alcohol side of things didn’t have any sort of, have you got any other hobbies or interests outside of brewing?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 41:00
I sort of quite, I quite like outdoorsy stuff. I think doing something like, say, a Cotswold Ranger, or working at a national trust property, fixing old things, repairing fences, a bit of gardening, just something outdoors. I’ve never worked in an office, and I’d like to do something just varied and hands on really well. I

Patrick Whittle 41:20
Guess being a brewer is a big physical job, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s a lot of sort of manual labour, lugging stuff about.

Ben Jennison Phillips 41:25
So yeah, but it has the variety of doing the sort of sciency stuff and or the social side, tasting, pubs, etc. So yeah, it has a good variety.

Patrick Whittle 41:34
Do you find you do a lot of, like, recipe development here?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 41:37
Um, not so much recently, because we’ve got a fairly set series of beers. But in the last year or so, we have started to do what we call ‘In the Brewers’ series. So there’s four of us brewers here between us, we sort of play with some of those recipes. So for example, in the summer, we’re planning on doing a Kolsch beer for the first time. Last year, we did a sour beer for the first time. So we do do a little bit. I haven’t done it personally for a little while, because some of the guys are sort of more interested in other styles, so they’ve, they’ve taken on the recipes. But

Patrick Whittle 42:15
Do you do that on your pilot kit?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 42:17
We’ve done both really, the pilot kit we’ve done a few sort of test brews and sort of trial hop brews for you guys as well. A couple of the brews we just went straight in full 20 barrels. But yeah, that’s that’s what pilot kits for, test them out and try and scale it up.

Patrick Whittle 42:35
Happy days. So do you have any sort of big inspirations in brewing that could be like a previous boss, or someone you big brewery, or?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 42:45
Most of the stuff that I’ve done, I sort of learnt on the job from people that I’ve worked with. I did enjoy my time working at Cotswold Brewery now Hawkstone. Yeah, I learned a lot about lager there. I was lucky enough to travel to Germany for the big trade fairs over there. So, you know, in Munich and Nuremberg, seeing all the proper breweries and the way proper lagers made and things like that was that was pretty good. And we’ve brought that to here to make our lagers now. So I think that’s definitely stuck with me the guys from Cotswold.

Patrick Whittle 43:20
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Really nice. So what got you into brewing?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 43:25
I said, I was at Three Choirs Vineyard, and they didn’t need quite so many of us in the winery. The harvest was over. Obviously, grapes just picked one time of the year, and that’s that. And so they wanted somebody sort of relatively sensible to look after the brewery for a little while. So I just, literally, I was looking at the same place, but just moved across into look, you know, starting their brewery properly, it was more of a hobby or a side, a side hustle for them at the time. And so I took it on, doing sales and brewing and delivering and so it was to begin with, yeah, we started it off like that, and then that just carried on really

Patrick Whittle 44:09
Happy days. So just a few sort of quick fire questions just to sort of wrap up the conversation. So what was the last beer you brewed?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 44:16
I brewed our Hopdrop yesterday.

Patrick Whittle 44:18
Very nice. What hops are in that?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 44:21
That’s got Motueka from New Zealand, El Dorado, and then a bit of Citra and Equinox in the dry hop.

Patrick Whittle 44:29
Very nice. And Fuggles, or Goldings?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 44:34
I’ve not used either of them for about 15 years. Oh, so Golding would be my initial reaction.

Patrick Whittle 44:42
Okay, let’s reword the question then, what would be one hop that would be your go to?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 44:48
At the moment, we’re using Brewers Gold as our bittering base, so that’s giving us a good, solid starting point. Most of our our sort of regular cask beers. Yeah, it’s got good Alpha it’s got a lovely aroma, and that’s working really well for us at the moment.

Patrick Whittle 45:08
Happy days, it’s not broke don’t fix it, I guess. And what’s next for you in the industry?

Ben Jennison-Phillips 45:15
For me personally, we’re just keeping on, keeping on. We’re just, you know, we’re getting busier coming into spring and summer. Yeah, we’re doing a few new beers. We’re trying to develop some more of our seasonals. So, yeah, that’s us really

Patrick Whittle 45:33
Happy days, So that concludes our Five Minutes with Faram. So thank you to Ben from Stroud Brewery for taking part.

Ben Jennison-Phillips 45:39
Cheers Paddie