It’s raining, and Ross Hukins isn’t happy.

“It’s not proper rain,” Ross, a hop farmer in the village of St Michaels in the Weald of Kent says, as he holds out his hands. A drop or two sneaks through the canopy of Challenger hop bines towering over him. “We had rain like this on Saturday but it just mizzled. I want an inch of rain in ten minutes.”

It’s the end of July, the start of a key period in the Kentish hop-growing calendar. August is when the volume of the harvest is decided: plenty of sun and rain, and all will be well. But rain, like sunshine, cannot be conjured or cajoled. In 2018, during the UK’s hottest summer on record, just 15 millimetres came in August, and the harvest suffered. The year before there was 95mm and it produced the best yield that Haffenden Farm, Hukins’ family plot, has seen in 100 years.

Not too long ago, Ross would have been one among many local hop farmers with hopeful eyes trained on each passing cloud. The Weald of Kent, which borders Sussex, had 4000 acres of hop gardens in 1979, 30% of England’s total. Even that represented a steep decline from the heyday of the late 19th century, but the last 40 years have been particularly cruel. Hop prices fell through the floor in the 1980s. The Wealden countryside is characterised by the distinctive white hood-like cowls of traditional Kentish oast houses—buildings in which hops were once dried—but virtually all of them have now been converted into homes.

At Hukins Hops, though, there’s a fresh sense of optimism, (even amid the uncertainty caused by the current pandemic.) New hop gardens are starting to pop up here and there across the county (Marston’s Brewery has recently invested in its own hop garden in Horsmonden, 12 miles north-west of St Michaels), but nowhere is the sense of revival stronger than here. The size of Hukins’ hop farm has doubled in the past five years, to 44 acres, and it will continue to grow over the next few years. Hop prices are up. Brewers in the UK and the USA are increasingly interested in quality English hops—and it’s quality that Hukins, the winner of numerous awards in recent years, is known for.

Greg Hobbs, head brewer at Five Points in London, first used Hukins for three green-hop beers in 2017. “What’s most impressive is their general ethos,” he says. “You can see how they’re committed to improving quality by the investments they’re making on the farm. They’re bringing back old varieties, they’re experimenting in a measured manner. We’ve been impressed from the outset: the quality of the hops is superb.”

In one sense, Ross is a natural hop grower. His family have owned this farm for more than 140 years, and before that they grew hops in Woodchurch, a village five miles away on the edge of the Ashford plain. Hukins, indeed, is thought to be a Flemish name, suggesting this family may have come to Kent at the same time as hops did, at the end of the 15th century.

But Ross was never keen to follow father Peter and grandfather Walter—pictured, smartly-dressed in jacket-and-tie whilst sampling a mid-century crop, on his office wall—into hop growing. He grew up when prices were rock-bottom, and his dad didn’t encourage him. Indeed, he almost put him off.

“He gave me the worst jobs,” Ross says. “I was making up boxes of hops for decoration, 50p an hour. I got nowhere near anything interesting like tractors—‘No, you can’t do that, here’s 1000 boxes to fill.’”

The craft-beer renaissance, and Ross’s increasing disillusionment with his management consultancy job in the City, changed his mind. He left London on his 30th birthday to help and then take over from his dad; since then, he has set about building a model of a modern English hop farm.

You wouldn’t guess, though, that he spent his twenties in the City. Ross is a classic Wealden farmer: direct, a touch cussed, avowedly unromantic. The quixotic nature of the climate means he craves control wherever it can be found. The water that spills off Bugglesden Road, which runs through the farm, fills two ponds with a combined volume of two million gallons. That helps when the weather lets him down, as in 2018. 50kW of solar panels means the farm generates more energy than it can use; cover-cropping—a technique uncommon in English hop-growing, but used in viticulture whereby seeds are sown between rows of vines/bines—makes for more fertile soil. And then there’s the new £1.4 million hop-processing plant, which opened in March 2020.

It means the 2019 harvest will be the last to pass through the farm’s charismatic 1940s American-style oasthouse, with its steep pitched roof and bulbous, cooked-in lumps of hop resin on the cooling floor. Built by Walter Hukins after the previous oasthouse burnt down, it has three hop-drying kilns, where the hops are reduced to 12 percent moisture—the perfect amount, according to Ross. It’s a taxing process, though, and the oasthouse’s limited capacity means it’s in virtually constant use during harvest, from late August to late September.

““You need to be gentle with English hops, particularly Fuggles, which is a light hop.””

— Ross Hukins

“We have to dry 24 hours a day to keep up with the volume,” Ross says. “In the new facility, we will be able to go home at 10 pm; the drying team have to sleep here. You’re working 20 hours a day. You fall asleep standing up.” Last year his team of three processed 500 60kg hop bales.

Some things won’t change. Hukins will still use old English hop-picking machinery like the Bruff Super-E, built in 1964 in Suckley, Worcestershire, that sits in a barn alongside the oasthouse. Bruff no longer exists, a victim of English hop growing’s decline, but two more machines of a similar vintage have been sourced for the new facility.

The only machines on the market now are German and they’re not suitable for more delicate English hops, Ross says. “This Super-E is the best machine ever made,” he tells me. “It’s gentle, and you need to be gentle with English hops, particularly Fuggles, which is a light hop. If you smash the hops up, it’s like smashing fruit up. They’re ruined.”

The new building is a short walk down the hill. It was designed by Ross after trips to Germany and conversations with other hop-growers, and measures 70 metres long and 35 metres across at its widest spot. It will be used to process an increasingly wide array of hops. There’s Fuggles, which is ready for harvest first of all, at the end of August, and other traditional varieties: Goldings, Bramling Cross and Challenger, which are harvested later.

And then there are the less typical varieties, like Cascade, Bullion, Ernest—new for this year, it has “intense apricot and apple flavours”—and six experimental hops. Diversity is crucial for Ross, who wants hops that will survive as the Kentish climate heats up.

They must also thrive in the clay soil that defines the Weald. There are, Ross says, seven different types of clay on his farm, sitting on top of Tunbridge Wells Sandstone. He points out a garden of Fuggles, through which a clay faultline runs. On one side, the leaves are noticeably greener and more vigorous than on the other, with yields typically 30 per cent bigger.

Fuggles is the Weald’s gift to world beer, but rising temperatures (“Fuggles hate heat—our Fuggle crop lost half its leaf in that 38-degree day we had last week”) mean the future looks more likely to lie with hops like Bullion, first released in 1938 and re-planted by Peter Hukins in 2014. It won overall champion at the British Hop Awards in 2017. “Yes, it was dad’s idea,” Ross says, grudgingly. “At the time I don’t think he understood why he had chosen it. I don’t think he understood why it was a great decision!”

It can be hard to imagine why anyone would want to be a hop-farmer, even with prices going up. There’s so much that can go wrong, from disease (powdery mildew, downy mildew) to insects (spiders and aphids) to the uncertainty of knowing when to pick. “You must pick at the right time,” says Ross. “If you pick Goldings when they are not ripe, they don’t have the right flavours, but if you get them when they’re ripe, the flavour complexity is amazing.”

Nonetheless, Ross plans to keep on growing his farm. It has another 12 to 15 acres of arable land that it can grow into without needing to buy more, and he plans to add two or three more acres of hops every year. There is a limit, though. “I think 60 to 70 acres is the sweet spot for a hop farm,” he says. “You want to be able to walk the site yourself—I don’t want to be managing others doing it. I don’t want to be back in a suit!”