Today is the feast day of St Arnulf of Soissons, patron saint of hop pickers. Have 10 facts about the hop plant.
The Latin name for the common hop is Humulus lupulus and it’s part of the Cannabinaceae family – so Beer and weed are distant cousins. The hop plant diverged from Cannabis sativa over 20 million years ago.
Strictly speaking, hops are the flowers of this plant (also called seed cones or strobiles). These contain oils, such as lupulin, which is the substance which gives flavour and aroma to beer.
The plant itself is a perennial, herbaceous climbing plant which is cultivated in a hopfield, hop garden or hop yard, depending on where in the world you happen to be. In the south of England it’s a field or garden; in the west of England and the USA it’s a yard.
The plant is dioecious, with male and female Flowers on separate plants. The fragrant flowers are wind-pollinated. Hops are harvested from mid-August to mid-September.
The first written reference to hops dates to 768 CE when King Pepin donated some hops to a monastery in Paris. It wasn’t recorded whether the monks made beer with it, as the first reference to beer making using hops wasn’t until 859 CE, in documents from a monastery in Freising, Germany.
Hops weren’t always the go to plant for brewing beer. Medieval brewers also used "gruit", which was made from a variety of different plants including Dandelion, burdock root, Marigold and Heather. Then people began to notice that beer made from hops was less likely to spoil due to the antibacterial properties of the hop plant. Even so, there was a lot of switching between the two methods for tax reasons. The nobility taxed hops, the Catholic church taxed gruit, so brewers would use whichever they had to pay less tax on. For this reason, Protestants preferred hopped beer. Hops were described as a "wicked and pernicious weed" up until the early 16th century.
H. lupulus has been the county flower of Kent since 2002.
Pliny the Elder referred to hops as food: both the young shoots and young flowers are edible and can be cooked, rather like Asparagus.
It can also be used to make soft drinks and herbal teas. Julmust is a carbonated soft drink made from hops which is popular in Sweden.
It has also been used for medicinal purposes. It was used as an antiseptic in the middle ages and it’s a folk remedy for insomnia. Just fill your pillow with it. In more modern times, amarasate, a supplement extracted from the hop plant, has been used to suppress appetite. Hops can also be used in the manufacture of natural deodorant.
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