Maddie Lewis 0:00
Welcome back to Spreading Hoppiness the Charles Faram podcast. I’m Maddie, and this week I’m joined by beer expert Jane Payton!  

Jane Peyton 0:22
So hi there, Maddie. I’m Jane Peyton. I’m an accredited beer sommelier. I’m the founder of the School of Booze. I also write books, non fiction about alcoholic drinks, mainly, although I have written about architecture and design and what else, and British traditions. I also educate people about alcoholic drinks through my business, the School of Booze, which I founded in 2008

Maddie Lewis 0:47
Amazing, amazing. So you’re known for blending history and storytelling, can you share some fascinating cultural tidbits about the beers role in history?

Jane Peyton 0:57
Yes, beer is probably about the third purposely made alcoholic drink after mead, which is fermented honey and water and wine, or grape wine, fruit wine. Now those two drinks would make themselves because the mead, the honey would get diluted by rain water, for instance, and then natural yeasts and air would ferment the sugars and turn it into mead. So you didn’t need a human for that. Fruit would rot away, and as it rotted away, the wild yeast in the air would ferment the sugars, so you’d get some alcoholic mush, basically, which could be described as wine. You know, early wine, nobody needs to make that. It happens by nature. Beer needed to be made by humans. So you needed to find a source of sugar from cereal or maybe legumes or fruit, even with, you know, fruit beers, as long as you can ferment those sugars and combine the liquid in a container, then you’ve got a beer like substance. So what beer ended up doing was turning humans from being nomadic people into sedentary people, because cereals had been domesticated around, I think it was around 12,000 years ago. Cereals were domesticated, and that meant they were purposely grown by humans. Now if you’ve purposely grown something and domesticated it, you want to stay around to make use of it, either as food or as drink, and what was the drink? It was beer. So there’s an argument that beer civilized people, or created civilization

Maddie Lewis 1:26
A social setting?

Jane Peyton 1:55
Yes, exactly because people were now living together in communities that weren’t just scattered about the steps or about the country,wondering. They were they were in one place, so when you’re in one place, you have to live together. And so you make rules, you make laws, you make traditions, and that’s all part of civilization. Now that came about because of the agricultural revolution, which was known as the Neolithic Food Revolution started happening about 12,000 years ago, and beer was very much part of it.

Maddie Lewis 3:07
That’s amazing. What inspired you to create Beer Day Britain then, and how has it evolved since its beginning?

Jane Peyton 3:14
Beer Day Britain is Britain’s National beer day. The first time we did it was 2015 I chose June the 15th to be the annual beer day. And June the 15th is a very significant date because it’s the dates that Magna Carta was sealed. And Magna Carta was a bill of rights basically, and it laid out certain rules and laws. And in clause 35 ale was mentioned. It was a really boring law and I thought, well, we need something significant to hang Beer Day Britain, and we need a significant date. So I looked around. I thought, maybe April the 23rd which is Shakespeare’s birthday, maybe this, maybe that. And then I came across Magna Carta, June the 15th, clause 35 and I thought, perfect. How

Maddie Lewis 4:04
would you go about getting something that like that to become a day that’s celebrated nationally?

Jane Peyton 4:10
It’s been really hard, actually, and I’ve never been paid for it. I’ve self funded everything, the website, the logo, the monthly hosting, everything I’ve funded myself. I’ve been very fortunate in that I know people in the brewing industry, and also the pub industry and the trade bodies as well. So they didn’t give me any money, but they gave me help, and they helped me elevate it and amplify they spread the word. They let me use their PR agency one year, actually the first year they donated their PR agency to get the word out. So that year, and it was the first year we ended up with a front page on the Daily Star. Actually, it was the splash on the Daily Star and since then, it’s sort of grown. I mean slowly and slowly each year it’s grown. And I I only know that because I can see what’s happening on social media now. Social media, right from the beginning, we trended, each year, several times, the hashtag #cheerstobeer or #beerdayBritain, or national beer day, various hashtags and we, we trended. My favourite one was in 2018 I think it was, there was a World Cup for football, the Men’s World Cup footy in Russia, I think it was and the kickoff had been the or the inaugural game was the day before, or June the 14th. And on June the 15th, we were trending ahead of the World Cup

Maddie Lewis 5:33
Sort of followed a nice time then as well.

Jane Peyton 5:35
It was perfect. Since then, it was mentioned on Countdown. There were two minutes on Countdown devoted to it by the host talking about why Beer Day Britain was on June the 15th.

Maddie Lewis 5:46
Did you know that was going to happen?

Jane Peyton 5:48
Somebody recorded it as it happened, or they got a recording to me. It was just random. People have heard it on Radio two they’ve heard it on various radio stations, in various newspapers. So it has got a life of its own, I wish it had more of a life and I wish more of the breweries would get involved. So breweries, any brewers listening to this, or any brewery people, if you would brew a special beer or just get involved, have a party in the tap room.

Maddie Lewis 6:15
Get the word out there. It’s only going to be a benefit for the community

Jane Peyton 6:20
What I wanted for beer day Britain is for people to realise. A, it’s Britain’s national drink. B, we’re really good at brewing in this country. We have amazing hops also, I wanted to draw people’s attention to the fact that Britain is one of the leading brewing nations of the world. But more importantly, Britain was really important in spreading the love of beer around the world, and that’s because we had an empire, we had a navy, and we were a trading nation. So everywhere that British ships went, I’m talking about the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. Now, everywhere that the ships went, they carried beer with them, and they were spreading the word glass by glass, although it would have been a tank, wouldn’t it? Another thing as well, I wanted to point out with Beer Day Britain and celebrate is the fact that more styles of beer currently brewed around the world were first brewed in Britain than any other brewing nation. In terms of the reach that the British styles have had, you know, it’s all around the world. All craft breweries around the world brew an iteration of India Pale Ale. You know, that was a British beer originally a porters, stout, miles, brown ales. These are all British beers or styles. So we’ve got a lot to be thankful for, and a lot to celebrate.

Maddie Lewis 7:37
Beer is at the core of Britain. So do you have any goals going forward for Beer Day Britain?

Jane Peyton 7:43
Just for more people to know about it, and for more people and more members of the general public to know about it. Now, this year, for the first time ever, 2025 for the first time ever, Father’s Day coincides with beer day. Britain, and I know a lot of pubs and a lot of people celebrate Father’s Day and make a big thing of it and beer brands really go to town, especially if they have pubs as well. So I’m hoping that they might think, oh my goodness, we’ve got Beer Day Britain, it’s our core business. You know, as a brewer, pubs, seven out of 10 drinks sold in a pub is beer, so the pubs and the Brewers, please get involved. Let’s really push it, and then it gets more into the public knowledge, because people are there at the pub or wherever to drink beer with dad or granddad or the brother or whoever.

Maddie Lewis 8:31
Snap a photo tag, hashtag, going more into the hop and storytelling side of it. Could you share your favourite hop related story, if you have one?

Jane Peyton 8:43
it’s a personal story that I’m going to tell you. And I can’t remember the exact date. I think it might have been around 2010 but the London Brewers Alliance, for a few years, would go out picking hop shoots. Hop shoots are edible. They’re a little bit like asparagus or samphire, but if you’re going to grow the hop plant, then you can’t eat the shoot, because then your hop won’t grow. So what the farmers do? Any fields that they are having fallow for that year, the hops aren’t going to grow into into hop flowers, but the shoots might grow. And so we would go out in a minibus down to Kent. I lived in London at the time, and it was the London Brewers Alliance, so we’d go down to Kent, hopping down to Kent, and in a minibus, and we’d pick the hop shoots, and then we’d rush them back to London to restaurants and pubs that had signed up to cook with hop shoots for that night or that weekend. Absolutely brilliant, but it was so wonderful to be out in the countryside, but also Derek Prentice, legend, the legendary Brewer, Derek Prentice, who many of you listeners will know and love. He’s amazing, and he at the time, he was the brewing director at Fuller’s. And so what he’d do, we. Get a minibus from Fullers, and he’d bring his camping cooking camping gear, and he’d cook for us in the field and cook an omelet. And I remember going to Waitrose, we’d get lots of eggs, we’d get the butter, we’d get this, we’d get that, and he was making omelets with hop shoots.

Maddie Lewis 10:15
Well, I was gonna say, what kind of foods would these chefs be using the hop shoots to make?

Jane Peyton 10:20
Yeah, good. Good question. Some of them might use it if they were going to use Samphire. For instance, they might just use it instead of Samphire. Or they might use it as a garnish, or they might use in an omelet. For instance, you wouldn’t want to cook it and boil it, because then you’d lose the texture, but you’d also lose the flavours. So you’d want it as a vegetable, maybe just to eat, And most people, I would say that 99% probably more than 99% of people, have never tasted a hop shoot before. I mean, they used to be eaten. It was a vegetable hundreds of years ago, but not anymore, because hops are too valuable now as a crop to turn into brewing. Yeah, so the people who were eating and drinking at those restaurants and pubs must have been so excited. It’s like, hop shoots, wow. Just a quick another thing that Derek Prentice would cook one year he had scallops from Dorset, freshly picked or harvested, you know, the day before, and maybe even that morning, driven up to, up to the fields, and we have omelets with fresh scallops.

Maddie Lewis 11:28
Oh, wow.

Jane Peyton 11:29
And even better, I mean, if that wasn’t good enough, they always brought a cask of bright beer, it was combining everything that’s best about beer. I’d recommend it any hop farmers or because you work for Farams

Maddie Lewis 11:55
You could go on to walking down to Jimmy Barrett’s farm.

Jane Peyton 11:59
Exactly, go and see Ali capper and yeah. Oh, another little fun story. I really enjoyed it, talking of Ali capper and Stocks Farm. One year, I picked hot to help the harvest, and I was with Charlotte Gorham, aka Charlie Gorham, of Charles Faram. We went down to stocks farm, helped them, I think we were doing Goldings that day, actually, and helped them harvest, and then watched as they went into that incredible Bruff hop picking machine.

Maddie Lewis 12:36
Do you find them mesmerising? Because you could just lose time watching them, and that sounds so bisarre. I think anyone who’s come to the HopWalk will understand that you could just watch it for hours.

Jane Peyton 12:49
It is mesmerising, and you’re absolutely right. But also the technology, and it’s an old machine, but even so, that technology and the noise and the way it’s built, and everything it does is extraordinary. But what’s really extraordinary is this beast of a machine, this behemoth, so gently takes those very delicate flowers and doesn’t damage them, and without losing all that powder in the resin. Just extraordinary. Ali once said to me that she’d been to New Zealand on a hop trip at the British hop Association, and there was a Bruff hop machine there from Suckely. Maybe it’s a bit like IKEA. or Lego, they just stick it together

Maddie Lewis 13:32
Flat packed! Can you imagine how long that would take? Brilliant, I’d like to talk about the Disney witch beer making myth. Can you tell everyone a story about that?

Jane Peyton 13:43
Yes, so this is rather fascinating, but it’s not true. Unfortunately, it’s a miss. And what people might be familiar with in terms of the Disney witch, that cartoon witch, is this crone with a black pointy hat, with a black cat with a cauldron of something bubbling away and a broomstick. Now, all those accessories I’ve just mentioned, are related to brewing as well, or related to a medieval brew ale wife, you know, a female Brewer from the medieval period. And at that time, the majority of people who brewed beer were women, and it was made in the home. Beer was made at home by ale wives. Women didn’t work outside the house.

Maddie Lewis 14:25
Is that part of myth as well? Or is that all true?

Jane Peyton 14:28
That is all true. That is but a lot of women were accused of witchcraft to punish them. You know, your neighbour might not like you, and so all they have to do is say, Oh, she’s a witch and they might say, Oh, I don’t like her beer it made me ill. Well, it wasn’t the beer that made them ill, it was something else. Oh, she’s a witch. You know, she’s brewing this beer and it made me ill. So to be accused of witchcraft was quite common for women, but also it was common for women who brewed beer to be accused of witchcraft. Now getting to the accessories that I mentioned earlier, the hat, you know, the cauldron, the broom stick, the cat, all of those are used in brewing. So the cauldron, you boil your ingredient, or heat your ingredients. It didn’t actually boil in those days, but you heated the ingredients and you had the cat because you had cereal, so it was to get rid of the vermin. The broom, you’d sweep your brewery floor or the kitchen floor, where were you making the beer? But also, at that time, if you were selling beer Ale, as it was at the time, if you were selling Ale, to show that you were selling it outside your house, you hung a stick with twigs on the end of it, or leaves, it was called an ale steak. Now they look like broomsticks as well. If you’re selling your beer in the market, for instance, you want people to know where you are, so you wear a hat. Also, hats did tend to have high crowns in those days, so you’d wear a hat that people could see you and they go, Oh, look, there’s the alewife. Let’s go and buy some ale. So all these accessories were what brewers used, female brewers, but they also became this image of what a cartoon witch was. Now there isn’t any truth to it, unfortunately, and I wish there was, because it’s such a good story.

Maddie Lewis 14:37
and it makes sense.

Jane Peyton 16:12
It totally makes sense. It’s just a coincidence, but I need to thank Dr Christina Wade, who’s an Irish beer historian, and amazing that her speciality is beer and history as well, and she’s written extensively about this disabusing people of this myth about the witches and the cartoon images, but it still keeps going around.

Maddie Lewis 16:35
It is a great story, though. I like it. Could you tell us about your Guinness World Record beer tasting. How did you come about that? Firstly, what was the experience like? All the details please

Jane Peyton 16:48
In 2016 the Publician and Trade magazine was having a 25th anniversary, and they each year they have an award ceremony, and they have a big dinner. And everybody in the industry, particularly the pub industry, they go and have a nice jolly. So for the 25th anniversary, they wanted to do something special, and somebody had the idea that they would apply to the Guinness organisation to have a world record attempt on the largest beer tasting. Tutorial, Guinness said, yes, you pay, by the way. You know, it’s quite a big business, so you pay to be part of, you know, the attempt, and Guinness said that they needed somebody who was quite well known, who was an accredited beer sommelier, it couldn’t just be anybody standing up there, had to be accredited. And I knew somebody who worked at the magazine, so they recommended me. So what we did, we went to the venue where the dinner was happening, I think there were about 1300 guests and to get into the room where the dinner was going to be hosted and where the beer tasting would happen, we had to go through a metal detector and be counted in so they knew how many people were there, right on each table and there were dozens of tables. Think there were about 12 people on each table, so dozens of tables, and there were monitors on each table, and they were watching, as I was going through the three beers, just small samples, they were watching and counting how many people were actually participating. Now, if you needed the loo or had to go out for any reason, you couldn’t come back in. So you were counted out and that’s how it happened. And we did get the world record, and I think it still stands actually, it was 1256 people, 2016 I’m not mentioned, unfortunately, as being the host. It just says that the Publican had done it, but yeah, I had to use a an altar queue as well, which I’ve never used before, because I’ve just talk off the top of my head normally, oh, I had to write a script, and they had to approve it the Guinness organisation, and then had to read it off the auto queue. And it can be quite stilted.

Maddie Lewis 18:54
A little bit unnatural?

Jane Peyton 18:55
Yeah, because you’ve sort of rehearsed the joke in a way. You’ve written the joke or the silly comment, and then you say it, it doesn’t seem very authentic somehow. Yeah, so that was a good experience, and I was nervous and I never nervous normally. But I was nervous because I wasn’t just doing my own event. I was doing them for somebody else, and this huge organization.

Maddie Lewis 19:16
Well there was over 1000 people there that somewhat relied on you as well.

Jane Peyton 19:21
I mean, I’ve talked before to big groups like that, but it was the fact that I had to use an autocue, but also that somebody was there watching, you know, the Guinness organization, basically. So

Maddie Lewis 19:31
What’s your all time favourite beer style and why?

Jane Peyton 19:35
Right I’m going to cheat now. It depends who I’m with, where I am, the weather, my mood, and all sorts of factors like that. So if I’m with people, if I’m going out to the pub, for instance, and it’s a warm day, or if it’s spring or summer and I’m feeling really upbeat, and it would be a very bitter, hopped beer, like a West Coast IPA and, but I also love porters. Love porters in all their iterations and stouts as well. I’m gonna have, oh, I’ve been grading it, aren’t I? So stouts, having dark, dark stouts, because you can get white stouts as well. So dark stouts, porters, any iteration of those, lovely. And then a beer that stunned me, the first time I ever had it, and which I dream about, and I keep coming back to, and I tell people about and rhapsodise about, is a Belgian style of beer called Red Flanders Ale, or Flanders red ale. It’s a sour beer, and the one, the brand in particular, is the Duchesse De Bourgogne, which I would highly recommend anybody to try if you haven’t ever had a Belgian sour beer before, and it tastes like balsamic vinegar or sherbet, which sounds really horrible, doesn’t it?

Maddie Lewis 20:46
I actually I love balsamic vinegar. So maybe that’ll be right on my street.

Jane Peyton 20:51
Also, I describe it as a beer bridge, a beer bridge for cider and wine drinkers to cross, to beer landyer. So people who’d say, oh, don’t like beer. What don’t you like about this? There’s over 150 different styles. So I say, what do you drink normally? Oh, I like cider, I like red wine? I’ve got the beer for you. And then you give them Duchesse De Bourgogne, or you blind taste them with it. They have no clue that it beer, and then the really, really surprised or shocked even, and disbelieving.

Maddie Lewis 21:22
What’s one beer fact that never fails to surprise people.

Jane Peyton 21:26
I mentioned it earlier. Actually, it’s the fact that women were the original brewers. And people are going, why? How they think of beer? Possibly they think of beer being brewed in a brewery. But when beer was first brewed, nobody knows when, by the way, was at least 13,000 years ago, but when it was first brewed, it was women who were doing it because it was part of your daily diet, it was part of your food. You know, it’s liquid bread, it’s soluble nutrition, and they were brewing it at home as part of your daily task of making food and drink from my family, but for 1000s of years, they were the primary brewers. And people find that quite, quite stunning, particularly in this country where it’s more male dominated.

Maddie Lewis 22:14
Where do you think that bridge happened? Where did you think the table started to turn?

Jane Peyton 22:18
I think it started in about the 1960s when pale lagers started coming into the market, and women were sort of pushed out of that, and younger people started coming and drinking the pale lagers, and then they started to be marketed as brands. And so the brand owners realised that, oh, a lot of young men are drinking our beers, and then pale, pale lagers, or iteration, I won’t say Pilsner, but Pilsner style, that type of pale lager, they became a dominant style of beer. Now, my grandma and my great aunts all drank beer.

Maddie Lewis 22:53
My grandma loves a beer.

Jane Peyton 22:54
yeah, you know. And you’re younger than me, but mine were, you know, they were, when I knew them, there were 80 or 90. Said some of them were born in the 19th century, you know, into the 60s, 70s. They were still at the pub and have a brown ale or a milk stout. You know, no, there was no question that they wouldn’t do and nobody would say, oh, a woman drinking beer. No, there was none of that. So I think it started in the 60s, and I wish it wouldn’t, because a it’s really bad business sense. For brand owner to target 50% and to alienate them. Another one as well is that only a handful of beers are actually bitter. You know, most of them are driven by malt. No, not very bitter, that style of beer doesn’t call for lots of bitter hops. We’ve got the sour beers we’ve already talked about, got all those roasted beers. We’ve got fruit beers, for instance, that don’t have any bitterness. So you know that’s a myth, that all beers are bitter.

Maddie Lewis 23:58
Have you got a hop fact that surprises people. Something, you might not of covered yet?

Jane Peyton 24:03
Yes, it was about the health benefits of hops. Also, one fact that I really enjoy is that, of all plants, hops are the second highest source of estrogen, a plant based estrogen. So Soya is number one, and so menopausal women who want to take hormone replacement therapy but don’t want to take a synthetic medication, often take hop based HRT. There’s loads of health benefits so as well as the incredible benefits that they give to beer, flavour, aroma, bitterness. Love it, and a preservative. They’re also good for other things, so they help you sleep, they help with anxiety and tension. They can help with migraines, with seasickness, travel sickness, they’re antibacterial. So in terms of food poisoning, you know, anything that you might have a bad tummy, it’s like, we’ll take some hops. So there’s all sorts of other uses for hops in medicine that aren’t just been beer and I love that fact, and we know that because of science, but before science, people were still using hops for certain things. Oh, another fact is, well, it’s do with hops it’s do with beer. Love this one, so talking of our grandmas and all that drinking beer and there was this old wives tale, you know, our grannies would say, oh, if you’re a nursing mother and you feed in your baby, drink some beer before you breastfeed because it helps the milk to run. And so you’d get the milk stout, you know, Guinness, would be marketing to nursing mothers and oh, yeah, it’s good for you now. It helps you in order. But the science, and this is where the science comes in, there is a compound in barley, in the malt, that stimulates the enzyme that produces the milk. It’s called a galacto Gog. The enzyme is and it makes the milk run. So our, you know, 1000s of years ago, it was, oh, yes, we’re going to drink beer to make our breasts fill with milk and all this blood.

Speaker 1 26:17
I know, I mean, it kind of makes sense. So I assume now there’s, like, streamlined processes.

Jane Peyton 26:28
I mean, non alcohol, beer would do it.

Maddie Lewis 26:30
Obviously you’ve achieved so much already, writing your books, breaking records. What’s next for you in the world of beer, in this industry?

Jane Peyton 26:37
I’ve got a very happy occasion coming up, which is training the staff of the brewing company. And by that, I don’t mean training them in brewing, because they already know that. It’s all the things that they might not know, which is about beer styles. How to identify them, how to taste beer like a professional, matching beer and food, and all the facts, the fun facts that we’ve been talking about today as well, and the history, hopefully sell them some books, and we’ll be drinking beer, different beer styles, in a pub and it’d be a joy.

Maddie Lewis 27:10
the dream,

Jane Peyton 27:11
the dream going to drink some beer after I’ve finished here.

Maddie Lewis 27:13
Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. I think me go and get a beer now they’re well deserved. Well. Thank you very much. I really, really appreciate your time coming here, today, and I hope everyone learnt something that’s listening

Jane Peyton 27:25
cheers

Maddie Lewis 27:25
From a beer expert to a hop one, on this week’s 5 minutes with Faram you join Paddie and award winning hop grower Jimmy Barrett. Over to you guys.

Patrick Whittle 27:42
Hello everyone. I’m joined here with Jim Barrett, who’s a member of our Charles Faram Farms recently winning an award for your Harlequin® 2024 harvest.

Jim Barrett 27:52
Yeah, that’s correct.

Patrick Whittle 27:53
And we’re going to do a little Five Minutes of Faram. Normally, we do this with the brewer, but we thought we’d do a different aspect and do it with a grower this time as well. So to start us off, Jimmy, what would you say your favourite hop is?

For this year it’s got to be Harlequin®

Is that from a purely from a growing point of view, or is it from more of a you just love the smell.

Jim Barrett 28:13
It’s got everything at the moment, but I’m hoping that we, within the development programme we’ve got, there are going to be other varieties we’re going to latch on to and be able to grow. At the moment, I’ve got a small acreage of CF 321, which hasn’t even got a name yet, that looks like it could be a nice big one as well. But we’re yet to grow that one in a quantity, in a bigger acreage, so that might be better than Harlequin®, we don’t know. Or it might be the variety that will go side by side with it, we’ll see.

Patrick Whittle 28:48
Would you say that has similar characteristics to Harlequin® when you’re growing it? Or is it very different?

Jim Barrett 28:54
It is a little bit different. It’s more hardy, it’s it looks like it could be a hop growers variety, which would be a little slightly easier to grow than than Harlequin®. Harlequins® a little bit difficult to establish.

Patrick Whittle 29:40
Oh, I see. But I guess that’s part of our the Charles Faram Hop Development Programme. We’re constantly developing sort of creating and growing new varieties. So what would you say your favourite beer is?

Jim Barrett 29:53
My go to beer is always Speckled Hen, Vintage, which is Green King and also Adam reserve. They’re both quite powerful, but they’re lovely beers. Bathem’s and anything that Ledbury Brewery brews.

Patrick Whittle 30:12
Yeah, yeah Ant

Jim Barrett 30:14
You can’t sort of say anything negative about his beers. They’re very good beers.

Patrick Whittle 30:18
Well he does a lot of stuff with us and you guys, I know he’s quite sort of involved with the growers, isn’t he, and he does some of our hop development beers as well.

Jim Barrett 30:34
I think you’re find with Ledbury Brewery and Ants beers, you can’t have enough of them. You can have one, then you have another. You can carry on. They’re really are session beers.

Patrick Whittle 30:52
yeah 100% that nice. I guess you get to grow the product and then you actually get to drink the final product as well, that’s really nice indeed. So what would you say if say you’re having one of like a Ledbury Real Ale what would you pair that with food wise?

Jim Barrett 31:05
I do like meat. So I love Ledbury Gold. It doesn’t for me. It doesn’t really matter what the beer is, nice bit of beef or a nice lamb, yeah? Ledbury Gold is a very good pint when, when Ant does put a bit of Olicana in it, that, again, is a very nice pint.

Patrick Whittle 31:27
Have you got a favourite pub in the world, or that should be the local or?

Jim Barrett 31:36
I quite like going to the Olga Stay pub because they got Bathem’s on the Wheat Sheaf, because they’ve got Butty Back. That’s another good brewery. And yeah, pretty much wherever Ledbury brewery have got their beer in it.

Patrick Whittle 31:50
So your not too fussed on the pub of choice there. So obviously, on the farm, I guess hop picking, it’s a lot of different machinery, isn’t it? Yes, you’ve got the kiln, you’ve got the picking machine. You’ve got all the tractors. Yeah, what would you say? Could you put one item or one piece of machinery that you couldn’t live without? Or is that a very difficult question?

Jim Barrett 32:11
I probably couldn’t do without my little 135, tractors. Okay, they’ve all got an implement attached to them, so I don’t have to change implement by changing tractors. I just jump one from one to the other. Yeah, I’d struggle to do without them. If I had to just use one tractor, then you wast a lot of time, unhooking, hooking up. Lucky enough to have quite a few of these smaller Massey Fergie tractors. They’re 60 year old, but yeah, they do their purpose on the farm. So we

Patrick Whittle 32:44
find that in hot picking, even like you’re the picking machines, they’re all sort of 50/60, years off. I guess if it’s built, well, it’s sort of, there’s no reason to replace it.

Jim Barrett 32:53
Bruff machines, they still do their job, exactly.

Patrick Whittle 32:55
Yeah. So how many of those tractors have you got?

Jim Barrett 32:59
20?

Patrick Whittle 33:00
Wow.

Jim Barrett 33:05
There’s 20 of them. They’re all vineyards as well.

Patrick Whittle 33:09
So you can get in between hop vines isn’t it. So when you are, I don’t know, in the picking season or drying in the kilns, do you have, do you put any music on? Do you have, like, a go to playlist, podcast, anything like that.

Jim Barrett 33:21
When I’m spraying, I tend to, I’ll put on an audio book of something rather than music. So, yeah, I’ll listen to audio books

Patrick Whittle 33:31
Anyone in particular, or?

Jim Barrett 33:34
Yeah, whatever you know I’m attached to it at a time, little bit of espionage, thrillers, something like that. I don’t read too many books, so somebody has to tell me the story.

Patrick Whittle 33:46
Neither do I, I’d rather, I’d rather have an audio book. I think I can’t focus enough to listen to her to read a book. Rather. So if you weren’t a hop farmer, do you know what else you’d be doing if you do anything before, have you always been a hop grower?

Jim Barrett 34:01
I’ve been a hop grower, right from the word go, we were mixed farm. I do like the animals. I did like a bit of corn growing, but really and truly, it was just hops. That’s what really buzzed me up a little bit through trial and error. I just carried on through that for the last, should I say, 40 odd plus years. So, yeah, it’s always been hop growing. If I could, if I was given the choice now, and I had the choice back when I was in my early 20s, I may have pursued the scuba side of it, a bit more bit of diving. I might have just sort of joined the Navy or something. At the time, I couldn’t really do that because father died when I was in my early 20s, so I had to grow up a bit quick. Yeah, some people probably say I still haven’t grown up yet. I might have missed that, but from all my diving experience. Now it could have been another string to me bo Yeah, back then,

Patrick Whittle 35:04
What would you say excites you? Over growing hops, over, say, just growing other arable crops.

Jim Barrett 35:10
It’s different. Every year is a challenge.

Patrick Whittle 35:12
Is that? What it is, it’s the challenge.

Jim Barrett 35:13
It’s the challenge. Every year is different. We’ve all got our basic way of growing hops, and we all know roughly what we’re going to do, but you have to sort of slide to the one side, this month and next month might be a totally little bit different the other way, it’s a challenge, because every year is different

Patrick Whittle 35:30
How many types of hop varieties do you grow?

Jim Barrett 35:34
At the moment, we’ve got two main varieties that are for the commercial side of it. But then I think we’ve got about , 6000 individual ones within that the development programme, because everyone’s different.

Patrick Whittle 35:50
How do you keep track of all them? Because surely they all look similar?

Jim Barrett 35:53
I give Peter Glendening a ring, yeah, yeah, they’re all numbered up. And in the early stages, there anything from A to Z with a one to, I think in the Pridewood patch, one to 100

Patrick Whittle 36:13
Yeah, hopefully Peter’s got a big old map with all them written.

Jim Barrett 36:15
Yeah he maps them all out. Gives me a map, so during the season, if I see something that is either good or bad, I’ll notify Peter G about it and you know exactly which number to go to when.

Patrick Whittle 36:31
So you’re obviously tending to sort of hundreds of different varieties, because they’re all obviously individual plants would you just treat them all the same?

Jim Barrett 36:38
Exactly the same.

Patrick Whittle 36:39
And then you can see which ones have weaknesses and which don’t and which have differences and that sort of stuff.

Jim Barrett 36:45
If you just give them the normal whatever you’re doing that year for the commercial variety, do exactly the same for them, then you allow some sort of idea that, okay, that one’s got pretty much Downy problems so that one’s scrubbed, that one’s not doing very good on the Powdery Mildew side of it, so that one’s scrubbed. You just take them out, because they’re not got any future. So they need to be able to put up with the commercial side of it, as well as being looked after to enhance them.

Patrick Whittle 37:17
Well I guess the idea at the end, eventually you’d have X amount of acres, and you would have to treat them like a commercial hop but, yeah, commercial hop, because they are a commercial hop. So if you almost want to do it from the start, exactly sure they can survive that commercial processes and stuff, isn’t it,

Jim Barrett 37:30
You need to be able to do that almost from the start, because we don’t really want varieties 20 years down the road, you know, we want to try and establish one in 3/4/5, years, five years at the maximum. And if they can’t put up with the vigors of being grown, then they’re not going to be wanted. And hopefully, at the end of the process it might, it might be only one out of 567, 8000, the that you’ve got in the ground that makes the mark

Patrick Whittle 38:05
It is survival of the fittest, isn’t it? Because you mentioned earlier that the CF three was it 321, yeah. Is a growers hop?

Its looking like a growers up at the moment

So that is from the sense of it, it’s an easier crop to grow, whereas some hops are more tedious, aren’t they, and you do have to do extra things, you have to be careful, and that sort of stuff.

Jim Barrett 38:30
I think, within a comparison with Harlequin®, Harlequin® is difficult to establish and get going. Even later on, I think, like because, because, I think with Mark Andrews, he’s got the more established Harlequin®, and he’s still struggling with mature Harlequin®, so I think it could well be an ongoing job with Harlequin® being difficult, but the end product is good.

Patrick Whittle 38:59
It’s worth putting in the extra steps, isn’t it, and the extra and the extra bits. Have you got any hobbies or interests outside of farming, or is it an all consuming thing?

Jim Barrett 39:10
No no, no, it, because I’m mostly on the hops, and that is my game. Therefore, November through to February is just an odd few days. So I’m usually on a plane going diving

Patrick Whittle 39:26
There we go. Where’s your favourite diving destination?

Jim Barrett 39:28
A place called the Hab in Egypt. Oh, lovely. I got the same place on mates with the dive center. Soon as I arrived, they pretty much put me to work. I do the dive guiding.

Patrick Whittle 39:42
Ah that’s interesting then, yeah, how deep would you go?

Jim Barrett 39:45
Well, this last November, I was out there, the deepest dive was 52 meters. Mostly, they’re sort of between sort of 25 and 30 meters. Of course the deeper you go, the shorter your dive is going to be anyway, because you you tend to use a little bit more oxygen.

Patrick Whittle 40:06
And you spend that extra floating up . Have to be gradual

Jim Barrett 40:11
And there’s less to see down at 50 meters?

Patrick Whittle 40:13
Is it too dark?

Jim Barrett 40:14
It’s starting to go a little bit dark. And most of the coral and the reef and the light you need, the light. At 25 meters, that’s the best. That’s the sweet spot.

Patrick Whittle 40:26
Okay, so what’s next for you in the hop industry? Then, is there anything new and exciting coming? Or

Jim Barrett 40:33
Well hopefully the 321, takes off? There’s a couple of other unnamed varieties that just could spark to life again. We’ll know, ask me that question in 12 months time on variety wise. But yeah, I think that’s about it. I think from a growing aspect, I think most of us up growers have cut all corners sharp enough now, and we can’t cut them any more, so we just got to move a little bit somewhere else. With me, it’s moving into bio stimulants a little bit and seeing if that do it a little bit better job.

Patrick Whittle 41:13
And that’s to help promote the plant growth. Is bio stimulus? Yeah. And how would they do that?

Jim Barrett 41:18
It’s protecting the plant, enhancing their defensive mechanism. Yeah, and the healthier plant you’ve got, the more it’ll look after itself. So if that’s the way to go, then maybe less pesticides are going to be needed to apply to the to kill any fungus, or chess, or anything like that, which,

Patrick Whittle 41:42
in the long term, is obviously good for the environment, yes, side. And if the plant can stand on its own two feet a bit, you don’t have to. Well, it’s still the job for you. Yeah,

Jim Barrett 41:50
exactly, exactly. Well, I think that’s

Patrick Whittle 41:52
a nice place to end our five minutes with fare. And so, thank you very much.

Jim Barrett 41:56
Thank you very much.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai