Vignette 40: Miles Jenner of Harvey's (Part 1)
Harvey’s Brewery is one of those increasingly rare treasures in the beer world: a successful traditional brewery managing to stay relevant without abandoning the old ways. A big part of that is Miles Jenner, who grew up in the brewery (his father was the brewer before him) and returned decades ago after becoming a brewer himself. Today we’re going to hear about a once-ubiquitous vessel in an English brewhouse, the hopback. It is similar to a whirlpool and some people confuse the two because both can be used to steep hops. But the function in an old English brewhouse had a very specific purpose. Let’s listen to Miles describe it.
“The hopback process? Okay, it’s about a pound per barrel—about 120 pounds on a normal brew. We add hops at different stages throughout boiling, and we also have some in the hopback itself to pick up the aroma off the hop. Having boiled the worts—and they are fairly cloudy when they first come off—it takes about twenty minutes to get a bright filter bed through the copper. The whole lot is dropped, the hops and the worts—hops have been boiling in it—to the hopback below. And there it stands for ten minutes, and then we circulate for ten mintues round and round. You get a good, compact bed of hops. The structure is fairly similar to what you saw in the mash tun. And then after a further ten minute stand you pump the worts up. It takes about five minutes for them to come bright and they are as you saw them.”
“When you think that those worts that have been boiled have only been filtered through a bed of hops; it is remarkable. The other thing I would say, even in the UK if you go to a brewery you will not see a hop store like that, apart from ten or twelve breweries. Even the more recent breweries are largely using hop pellets. There is that traditional thing of using the whole leaf and utilizing it as a filter bed, but to do that, you’ve got to get a sufficient bed of hops. So you’re very much brewing with the traditional aroma varieties with lower bittering so that you can use lots of them. Quite apart from the fact that we want to use them anyway.”
“[Our hops come from] Sussex, Kent, and Surrey, so it’s our native and adjoining counties. I brew from 40% Sussex, 40% Kent, and 20% Surrey hops. And that roughly equates to the volume of beers we sell in our native and adjoining counties.” In Surrey “they can grow Fuggles with impunity. I also have Sussex Fuggles, which are grown near Udimore by the Weir family. Goldings obviously, largely—well, Kent, East Kent Goldings.”