Waboomskraal

Hops ... .

"It’s what makes beer bitter and, some varieties more than others, ads flavour and aroma.

In botanical circles, and perhaps at Hogwarts, hops is known as Humulus lupulus.A lesser-known fact about hops is that it belongs to the Cannabaceae Family of which the infamous Cannabis is also a member.
Hops, is one of the 4 main ingredients of beer.

It’s said to have originated in China, but the first recorded cultivation of hops is around the year 736 in present-day Germany.

Oddly enough, it isn’t until 1079 that hops is mentioned as used in brewing. At the time a herb mixture called gruitwas favoured for flavouring and bitering beer, and hops doesn’t truly steal the show until the 13th century.

Aside from it’s obvious capabilities, hops soon also gains prominence as a natural preservative, helping beer stay drinkable for longer.

In the 1400′s the Dutch first introduces the English to hopped beer. The word beer, incidentally, used to specifically refer to fermented malt liquors bittered with hops.

The Brits only start to cultivate their own hops in 1524 and a century after that, Dutch and English farmers start hops farms in what today is the United States.

Meanwhile, at the southern tip of Africa, hops makes a cameo appearance in South African history in 1652. Jan van Riebeeck has the first hops garden planted in that year, with which the beer mentioned in 1658 is presumably brewed.

Hops then leaves the SA history limelight and doesn’t reappear again for centuries, until 1924 when the Cape Town Brewery organises a hops growing competition to discover which part of the region is most suited to hops cultivation.

No prizes for guessing that the winning region ends up being what, until today, is South Africa’s only hop growing region. Situated around George, it includes Herold, Waboomskraal and Blanco.

This particular area is South Africa’s most suited region for the picky crop that is hops by virtue of its Mediterranean climate.
It satisfies the requirements for healthy hop horticulture with enough daylight, mild temperatures, low incidence of frost and a reasonable amount of rain.A prominent hops variety, Southern Brewer, specifically bred for the region’s conditions, emerges in 1972 from a cultivation program started in 1956.

It dominates South Africa’s hops landscape for the next 20 years, but requires artificial lighting after dark, via lights attached to the hops plant trellises, to achieve the desired growth.

This very region yields a bumper crop of hops, supplying countless ways to mainly bitter, but also flavour and aromatise our local craft and mainstream beer.