1922.] 



Cultivation of the Hop Crop. 



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possible; light, so that the draught may be lice; uniformly, so 

 (hat the hops may dry evenly — or otherwise, as soon as the 

 thin places are dry the draught of hot air passes almost com- 

 pletely through these spots and the denser spots dry very slowly. 



Turning. — This operation is carried out after the hops have 

 " feathered " well on top. It is done for the purpose of mixing 

 the comparatively moist hops above with the dry hops next to 

 the floor and also to redistribute any thick or thin places on 

 the drying-floor. It should not be done k>o soon, and care must 

 be taken not to break the hops unnecessarily, since the lower 

 hops will have now become brittle. The operation tends to 

 expedite drying and to produce a sample, all the hops in which 

 are uniformly dry. 



Cooling. — It is not an easy matter to test exactly at what stage 

 drying should stop and cooling commence. On the one 

 hand it is most important to " home-dry " the hops, 

 since if unloaded from the kilns still moist they are 

 cither spoilt in the pockets or have to be again put on 

 the kilns and re-dried, resulting in loss of time and much 

 breaking of the cones. On the other hand, over-dried hops 

 become very brittle and are broken to pieces badly in unloading 

 and packing. The test most generally adopted is to take a hand- 

 ful (or several handfuls) representative of the bulk and rub them 

 to pieces between the hands; the majority of the cones should 

 rub down to powder, leaving only two or three cones in the 

 handful which are still sappy, though these should be " killed " 

 in the sense that they have already begun to shrivel. Drying 

 should then cease, and cooling commence by damping down 

 the fires with ashes and opening wide all blowers or shutters 

 below the drying floor. Cooling should occupy from one half to 

 one hour during which time the home-dried hops absorb moisture 

 from the air and from the few partly dry hops amongst them, 

 thus becoming less brittle so that they can be unloaded with 

 little damage. Per contra, the few 7 hops still undried at the 

 beginning of cooling complete the process. 



Two commonly occurring misconceptions in regard to cooling 

 may here be mentioned : just as in the drying process the bottom 

 hops feel the heat first and the top hops last, so in cooling the 

 bottom hops feel the effect of the cold air first and so does the 

 thermometer placed below the hops: for lliis reason the recorded 

 temperature rapidly falls and the hop drier i- inclined to think 

 that his heps are cool, when in fact only the Lowermoel hope 

 may be so: to test whether hops are sufficiently cool the drier 



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