XT Brewing, in Buckinghamshire, is bringing a new pale ale to market this summer made with experimental British hops.
XT is one of a select few breweries given the chance to create a beer with prototype hops known only as CF160 and CF182 — the work of the Charles Faram Hop Development programme.
Each year Charles Faram plants as many as 5,000 new varieties of hop, of which as few as 100 may survive. Hop breeders kill off some of them, but only in the name of finding out which plants can withstand disease and pests.
Varieties that survive and make the grade are set to transform the British brewing industry with big new flavours designed to take on competition from imported hops.
XT’s head brewer, Russell Taylor, said: “It’s a major thrill to have the chance to brew with these new varieties of British hops.
Game-changer
“We’ve known since we started brewing that hops from the USA, Australia and New Zealand, with those punchy, tropical fruit flavours, are hugely popular with beer drinkers. If this breeding programme can bring forth a British answer to hops like that, I think it’ll be a game-changer for everyone who drinks, makes or sells beer.”
Named Brit Hop, the beer is a strong pale ale. The new hop varieties it features are said to have flavours of passion fruit and green peppercorns and floral sweet peaches.
Much of the hop breeding work that created the new flavours is done at secret locations to avoid surveillance and espionage. This means pub-goers will be in a privileged position of being among the first to taste the new flavours the hops offer, along with visitors to the Great British Beer Festival, where the beer will be officially launched.
A spokesman for Charles Faram & Co said: “I see our breeding programme as being in the true spirit of British innovation, like an inventor in a garden shed — mildly eccentric, but still managing to achieve results which perhaps punch above our weight as a nation, and also as a small company doing some crazy things with hops.”
