Teach me about Worcester hops, please.

[seymour]

I keep discovering very old English ale recipes which specify "Worcester" hops, such as historical versions of Bass and Barclay Perkins. I would think that's more of a reference to growing region than a specific cultivar, such as Mid Kent vs. East Kent Goldings, but I really don't know. It's weird because sometimes brewery records list Worcester hops among very specific types, such as "East Kent Goldings, American Cluster, Bavarian Spalt, Worcester hops." Sometimes, I even see the term in modern-day descriptions, such as "Bank Top Flat Cap Bitter contains two Worcester hops."

So, what does that mean to you as Englishmen? How would you describe Worcester hops? How do they differ from say, Goldings or Fuggles? What type(s) of modern hops would you use in an old-timey recipe calling for Worcester hops?

Thank you in advance for your thoughts.

[Uncle Joshua]

No idea if they will help but..



http://barclayperkins.blogspot.co.uk/20 ... -hops.html

http://www.worcestershirelife.co.uk/peo ... _1_1639914

[mysterio]

You can buy worcester goldings online. Not to be confused with WGV.

I've never used them; there must be some big breweries that do use them. I'll bet there are some homebrewer fans of them.

[PhilB]

Hi Seymour

I know I don't contribute over here on JBK as much as I should ... but I still get a lot out of it from "lurking" (Thank You All!! ) ... but I'm interested in this "searching for precision in an imprecise world" notion, so I hope you don't mind if I pitch my two-penn'orth in

There were lots of question in your post, but if you start with the references in historical recipes, I think I'd agree with you when you said ...
seymour wrote:
> I would think that's more of a reference to growing region than a specific cultivar,
> such as Mid Kent vs. East Kent Goldings, but I really don't know
... except, you had to add the word "Goldings" there, didnt you?

If you look at the "Shut Up About Barclay Perkins" page that Uncle Joshua linked to you'll see that ALL references to hops in that discussion, held in the 1850's (I believe) are defining them in terms of "terroir"/region ... there are no mention of what we would today recognise as varieties

Further if you think about how the Fuggle wasn't found (growing in someone's garden) until 1861 and marketed until 1875 ... and then only called "Fuggles" because they were grown and sold by a Mr. Fuggle ... not, necessarily, because anyone had worked out they were a different variety ...
(info from here ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ho ... es#Fuggles )
... and if you consider that Wye College didn't specialise as an agricultural research and training establishment until the 1890's and didn't breed their first new varieties of hops until 1919 ...
"The first breeding of different hop varieties took place at Wye College in Kent, England by Prof. E.F. Salmon in 1919 when he bred the varieties "Brewers Gold" and "Bullion""
... that's quoted from the Wiki page linked above ... then isn't it quite likely that the "discovery"/differentiation of different hop varieties (rather than distinguishing them to their "terroirs") probably happened quite late in the 19th century ... but the natural "lag" of change in language/culture probably continued to cause confusion in specifications for quite some time afterward (and on to the modern day even )

I'm sorry if that's not a straightforward answer to your "What are Worcester Hops?" question, but I think thinking through historically how the lack of precision in language/specification arose, might help us at least understand why the answer is likely to be "Probably no-one knows!"

As a corollary question ... and by way of depicting how nothing much has changed all this time further on ... can you tell me "What are Styrian Goldings?" .. these hops are referred to in quite a few popular recipes, including Wheeler's recipe for Timothy Taylor's Landlord, which happens to be a beer so many of us homebrewers try to recreate ... but you can't buy Styrian Goldings anymore, depending on where I shop i can get Styrian Goldings (Bobek), Styrian Goldings (Savijnska) or Styrian Goldings (Celeia) ... or more and more commonly, Bobek (Styrian Goldings), Savijnska (Styrian Goldings) or Celeia (Styrian Goldings) ... or maybe just Bobek, Savijnska or Celeia ... there are people who will tell me that Styrian Goldings used to be a blend of hops from the Styrian region of Yugoslavia (and then Slovenia) ... and others who say that all hops from the Styrian region of Yugoslavia (and then Slovenia) were sold as "Styrian Goldings" and what you actually got was "pot luck" ... still others suggest that the Savijnska (or Bobek or Celeia, depending on who you ask) hops are the real Styrian Goldings, and the other varieties have been bred/developed (through a swiftly developed hop-breeding progam) since Slovenia gained independance

Maybe you would be just as well using some of those when the recipe calls for Worcester hops
Cheers, PhilB

[jmc]

Very interesting post PhilB.

When I was buying hops earlier in the year from Willingham Nursery I found their site really interesting with historical notes about many of the hops, eg they say that Mathon was available in Worcestershire in the late 18th and 19th Century

Both “the Golding vine” and “Mathon-White” are named in A General View of the Agriculture of the County of Worcester, published in 1810, as growing locally. In 1826 the “Mathon white” was described as “superior to any other. It not only affords a more pleasant and mild bitter, but a much more pleasant aroma than the Kent or any other Worcestershire hop.” My personal suspicion is that the Mathon white was, like the Golding, descended from the Canterbury White-bine, and that accounts for the Mathon being put later in the Goldings family."

They also have PDF book on Hop Cultivation from 1893 (52pp)
http://www.willingham-nurseries.co.uk/b ... 973687.pdf

And a book on English Hops from 1919 - 138pp
http://www.willingham-nurseries.co.uk/b ... 20hops.pdf
NB 1st page is black cover!
I find these PDF books are best downloaded with Save As option as they take ages to load in Firefox


** edited added pic

[PhilB]

Hi jmc

That information about "the Golding vine" and "Mathon White" is a good find ... but I think my point was that just because some people (e.g. farmers) were aware of there being different types of hop plants (that we would now know as varieties) with different characteristics (e.g. how fast they grew, how tolerant to disease they were, how good a crop they gave and how the customer percieved their quality when they were sold) ... doesn't mean that everyone actually talked in the same terms once the hop flowers had been harvested, dried and marketed for sale.

As a parallel observation ... farmers had been selecting their "best" animals/plants for cultivation for centuries (probably forever actually ) ... but none of the scientists/naturalists who were trying to work out how things were related would lower themselves to study what farmers did ... until Charles Darwin decided to study what was going on down on the farm and had a "eureka" moment when he realised what was going on there, he recognised it as "selective breeding" ... and made the mental leap about the selection process to identify "natural selection" also ... it's well documented that this was an important step in him developing his theories towards him publishing "On the Origin of Species" ... in 1859

That's two years after Michael Bass sat in front of the parliamentary select committe and reported how the main determinant of the quality of hops he used was where they had been grown and who he bought them from (He did seem to quite like those from Mr.Smith in Worcester, mind ) with no mention of what type of hops they were

Cheers, PhilB

[Dr. Dextrin]

As a corollary question ... and by way of depicting how nothing much has changed all this time further on ... can you tell me "What are Styrian Goldings?" .. these hops are referred to in quite a few popular recipes, including Wheeler's recipe for Timothy Taylor's Landlord, which happens to be a beer so many of us homebrewers try to recreate ... but you can't buy Styrian Goldings anymore, ...

This site has some information about the parentage of the Styrian hops you can buy these days.

http://www.slohops.com/

It means less to me than it might to a botanist, I suspect, but I note that Celeia has "Styrian Golding" as a parent. So presumably what's sold these days isn't the same as the original Styrian Goldings and has been "improved" a bit. Savinjski looks like it might be traditional, though.

[PhilB]

Hi Dr.D
Dr. Dextrin wrote:
> Celeia has "Styrian Golding" as a parent. So presumably what's sold these days isn't
> the same as the original Styrian Goldings and has been "improved" a bit. Savinjski
> looks like it might be traditional, though.
Thanks for that, I really appreciate it, although, my question was rhetorical really ... I suppose the point here is how information like this, that appears to be helpful, isn't always ... it's clear that Slovenia is developing it's hop export industry (along with others) to support the economic needs of being a new country, and one step it has decided to take to increase those exports is through "differentiation" of its products and "diversification" of its product lines ... I must admit that that makes me nervous about whether to trust these descriptions of these hops (that may well be just my innate distrust of marketeers though ), but let's just run with those distinctions/definitions as fact ... but, you see, that may give me more information about what Styrian Goldings ARE now ... but in order to accurately recreate Graham Wheeler's recipe for Timothy Taylor's Landlord, what I really need to find is what Styrian Goldings WERE when he was adding them to his boiler to develop his recipe ... and, although there are suggestions that Savinjski are the ones most like traditional Styrian Goldings, clearly they're not the traditional Styrian Goldings because otherwise they would be selling them as that (that was the Slovenian hop industry's biggest "brand" surely, if they could have "diversified" by keeping that "brand" available they would have ) wouldn't they?

But the point I'm really tring to make through all of that is, for Seymour to get a decent answer to his "What are Worcester hops?" question, he's probably going to need to be more specific about what particular references to "Worcester hops" he wants more information on, and when that reference was made

Cheers, PhilB

[beer gut]

Hi all you can find the profile for Worcestershire goldings on the simply hops web page, you can also go on the British hop society web page and on there is a link to contact them. They should be able to give you some more info. Hope this helps.