Australia: Western Australia farmers try growing hops

While vineyards can be spotted far and wide around southern Western Australia, towering hops bines are quite rare, abc.net.au reported on September 22.

Despite the growing number of boutique breweries across the state, fresh, or even locally grown hops are hard to source.

But with paddock-to-plate, or farm-to-glass, very much in-vogue, there are some producers looking to fill that supply gap.

With five generations of dairy and cattle farming behind him, and a job at a Margaret River craft beer brewery, Hamish Coates saw an opportunity to grow hops for local beer.

Mr Coates has already trialled hops in pots on the family farm at Jindong, in Western Australia's south-west.

He is now growing a 120 plant crop that will produce approximately 300 grams per plant initially and will increase to about one kilogram per plant over the next two to three years.

The hops will be grown on 12, five-metre high posts that will form a trellis for the long stem, or bine, of the hops to climb over.

Hops are predominantly grown in the eastern states, with Australia's largest producers located in Victoria and Tasmania.

With only very small quantities of hops grown in WA, Mr Coates said many local breweries sourced dried product from interstate and overseas.

He said unlike other beer ingredients, like malted wheat, or barely, hops could not be sourced locally.

"I think [breweries] are trying to source local ingredients where they can," he said.

"You can source [hops] from over east, but the main regions are in Europe and through the US."

Mr Coates said he expected to see an increase in the number of people growing hops in the state.

"I think that there's a lot of potential down here, given the number of local breweries that are popping up around the place," he said.

"And given the global demand for hops there is a looming shortage."

He said fears of a hops shortage had driven many larger brewers to invest in growing hops.

Mr Coates hopes to use the hops as a platform to starting his own wholesale brewery on the farm.

The hops and the brewery are a part of diversifying the farm, as well as planting barley and wheat crops to include in the brewing in the next few years.

"My grandad and dad are both still on the farm and they are very open to the idea of diversifying," he said.

"They recognise that they don't want to be tied to one industry together."

Mr Coates' hops trials have grown reasonably well, but he said there were challenges to growing the crop in WA.

With the absence of sufficient frosts or chill in the region, he will use an irrigation experiment to create a frost for the hops, which require a period of dormancy to grow.

"We're actually going to run our irrigation through a heat exchanger to cool the temperature in the ground," he said.

"Hopefully that will force a frost."

Mr Coates said the plants will not cope very well with temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, so he will install a mist machine to cool the bines.

Hops also require extended daylight hours during the growing season, which Mr Coates said may be solved by using LED growing lights and he will also add lime to the soil to balance pH levels.

Just outside of Albany, on the Kalgan River, Colin and Britt Butler are into their second season of hops growing.

Britt Butler said the couple began growing the plants, but she said they soon moved into breeding and creating new varieties.

The Butlers have supplied Hamish Coates with some of his hops varieties.

Mrs Butler said she and her husband were creating their own home brew to test their varieties.

"We're putting two types of a variety, or five types of a variety and making some nice mixes with it."

Mrs Butler said hops were still an emerging crop in WA, but she believed there was demand for the product.

She said using "wet," or fresh hops, as opposed to the dried plant was growing in popularity in US breweries.

"Australia's a little bit far behind so we are not used to using the fresh hops," she said.

"We are hoping to get people involved in it and to have a bit of a play with it."

Chris McNamara, the executive officer of the Craft Beer Industry Association, said the commercial hop market was dominated by two main companies, with some of the smaller growers selling to the large producers.

He said this model gave brewers a wider choice of hops.

"Hops are a bit like spices if you're making a curry," Mr McNamara said.

"Quite often you'd have a mix of spices in your curry to build that flavour, same in beer, people might use four, five, six different sorts of hops in varying amounts to build the flavour profile in their beer."

Mr McNamara said experimentation by brewers made the craft beer industry a success.

"That's what craft beer is all about, it's about people trying things differently," he said.

"We've all grown up drinking the beers from the big brewers that provide the same beer, year in, year out, and that's great, but the idea with craft is that as an industry we try things."

He has heard of Tasmanian brewers who were trialling the farm-to-glass style that Mr Coates is aiming for by using hops and barley grown on site.

"In the US, two of the bigger companies have been doing an estate ale for a while, they grow their own hops, they grow their own barley and I'm sure it's done in other parts of the world as well," Mr McNamara said.

"In Australia, it's just in the last month or two, two Tasmanian brewers have announced they are attempting to do it.

"You've got to have access to a farm and I think it's the people who come from those sorts of farming backgrounds they enjoy having that aspect to their brewing lives by running the farm as well.

"I think it's down to bringing everything back in house."

23 September, 2015