Cultivation and Management of Hops. 
361 
decent provisions. In many places tents — cast soldiers' bell- 
tents — are used, whicli are very much liked if the weather is 
fairly warm. A large grower near Maidstone puts under canvas 
nearly the whole of his pickers, whose fires at night make it 
seem as if an army were encamped. Formerly cattle-sheds, 
straw huts, and temporary erections of any sort were thought 
good enough for hoppers, even by the largest growers. 
Drying. — To prevent the green hops from heating in the 
pokes or sacks in Avhich they are conveyed to the oast-houses, 
whereby their colour would be greatly injured, they are laid upon 
scaffolds that the air may pass through them, and the wet, in case 
of rain, drain from them. With regard to the drying process, the 
principle has not greatly altered though the practice has certainly 
improved. There is, however, a certain absence of scientific 
data with regard to the process, and experience or practice unas- 
sisted usually directs an operation which requires, one would 
imagine, a knowledge of chemical principles, as well as of the 
effect of heat at various temperatures upon volatile essences and 
vegetable tissues. 
A slight excess of heat, or an irregular application of it, spoils 
the look of the sample, makes the hops brittle and harsh and 
" smell of the fire." The lupulin escapes bodily from the petals 
in remarkable quantities, falls through the interstices of the hairs,* 
adheres to the sides of the kilns, to the floors of the cooling-rooms, 
and to the clothes of the dryers. Growers now check such a waste 
of this appreciable golden lupulin, and do not exult, as their 
ancestors did, at seeing their dryers in thick yellow crusts, com- 
posed of the best part of the hops ; but the greater number of 
growers do not think of, or perhaps are ignorant of, the far greater 
though imperceptible loss, by the action of excessive heat, of those 
aromatic essences from the hops which are all valuable to the 
brewer — of that essential oil f which gives aroma to beer — of that 
bitter principle, or lupuline, which preserves it and makes it so 
wholesome and grateful. The gradually-dried liops of Spalt — 
to take one Bavarian district — are highly esteemed for their 
superior flavour, due to the retention of all their valuable pro- 
perties ; and the English growers who have plenty of kiln-room, 
and are thereby enabled to dry their hops more gradually, without 
subjecting them to very high temperatures, invariably get better 
prices than their neighbours who crowd their hops on their kilns 
and subject them to great heat. But far more attention is paid 
* Hops are dried upon horsehair stretched over stout laths above the fireplaces 
of the kilns. 
t Professor Brazier -writes : — " In an experiment -with beer I extracted all 
bitter flavour ; at the same time I obtained a fragrant aromatic oily body, 
reminding me more than anything I have ever smelt before, of the beautiful 
odour in an oast-house where hops are being dried." 
