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8. Palace Pint, Crystal Palace, London
There are already a few shopping bags full of hops on the pub sofa, the first of this year’s yield. Since it only takes 6kg of hops to brew 1,000 pints, there should be enough beer to go round – and the growers get a free barrel to share.
Helen Steer is waiting as the rest comes in. In a creased, billowing silk skirt and pointy green ballet shoes, she looks exactly the sort of person to whom you’d bring freshly-picked hops. Steer is a social enterpriser, a food activist, and the driving force behind Palace Pint. One of the food and growing initiatives set up by Crystal Palace Transition Town, south London, in January last year, Palace Pint is a community project to encourage local people to grow their own hops to be harvested into a seasonal, unique and local beer. They plant on St Patrick’s Day, exchange tips and advice on the group’s Facebook page throughout the year, and tonight they collect the yield at Beer Rebellion. Later on, the crop will be cycled over to Penge-based micro brewery Late Knights, who will perform whatever sorcery turns a heap of flowers into beer.
“Hops are the herbs of beer,” explains Steer to my utterly clueless face, as we wait. She plucks one out for a quick lesson. It’s an egg-shaped ball of green petals, about the size of a large Malteser. She breaks it open to reveal an oily, yellow powder. Like a small child learning shapes, I say the first word that pops into my head, “Pollen!” It’s actually lupulin, the active ingredient in hops. Since Palace Pint beer will be brewed with “green hops” rather than the dried variety, the oiliness will give it a fresher and lighter flavour than dried hops does, “much like the difference in taste between fresh and dried herbs.”
Sadly, explains Steer, most British beer is brewed with imported hops. “Usually they’re from America and Europe because the flavours are quite strong and citrusy, and that’s what consumers are used to.” Also, since hops take three years to come to fruition, switching to British hops would be quite an expensive and time consuming change to make.
There’s barely enough time for me to learn to spell “lupulin” before people start showing up with the fruits of their labour. Belinda and Keith Matherson-McLaughlin come in with a sackful of their first ever try. “Picking them was so much fun! I felt like a kid again!” Steer presents a small handful of the green, slightly resinous flowers. “This is a normal amount for the first year,” she comments, to which they reply: “Well, we had some help. Shelter, south-facing, and all that chicken poo.” Sorry? “Oh yes,” says Steer, “chicken poop is incredibly nutritious for hops. It’s like any manure.” Then the group is chatting about a couple in Walthamstow who were sent the wrong hops – instead of dwarf hops which grow to to around two metres, they were sent standard hops and were bewildered to find them growing to six or seven metres, like an urban Jack and the Beanstalk.
It’s heart-warming to see the community this simple project has generated. Everyone seems to know each other, and they chatter about yield and trellises and putting the shoots in an omelette – “a poor man’s asparagus”, apparently. Steer talks about moving to London from Wales and missing a community feeling, “until I scratched the surface and realised how many people are doing incredible things here.”
As the bags of hops start piling up the smell becomes stronger. It’s fresh and citrusy, and I want to compare it to grass but that’s not right. I ask Steer how she would describe it. “Skunk and condoms,” she says, without missing a beat. This seems like a pretty popular analysis. One grower said, “Rubber – and it smells a lot like marijuana. Um – I’m told.” I push my hand deep into one of the bags when no one was looking. The flowers are cold and slightly sticky, like the floor of a poorly-maintained bar.
All this project took was a tweet. There was no promotion of the project other than an invite to “grow hops with us”. Now Crystal Palace has 150 growers, some beer enthusiasts, some grow enthusiasts, some both – and a surprising number are neither, but enjoy the community connection. There are also groups in Hackney, Walthamstow, Kentish Town, Farnham, Cardiff and Germany, but it all started three years ago in Brixton.
“I actually got a lot of shit for it in Brixton,” says Steer. “A lot of people aren’t happy with the gentrification of the area and saw our project as part of it, but that’s ridiculous. We have all sorts of people growing with us – yes, there are ‘yummy mummies’ growing in their gardens, but some of our growers are single mums on benefits. People grow in allotments, on council estates, even on balconies. And we’ve had videos on the site from day one for people whose first language isn’t English, or people without good literacy.”
The pub is getting louder. We’re having to shout over the flowers, which are now piling up onto the back and arms of the sofa. Tables are filled with people chatting over glass tankards of beer and shiny burgers. Not everyone’s there for the hops – one person said “Why do you have a huge pile of brussel sprouts?!” – and Steer guesses many of them are there for Green Drinks, another Transition Town initiative. People meet and chat, and get an idea of some of the activities they run – such as the Palace Pint, installing community solar panels, growing your own veg, Fairtrade events and local food markets.
A gaggle of excited young women appear with bags, one with a hops vine wrapped around her neck like a (very) Bohemian scarf. “Is this ALL from Crystal Palace?!” one lady exclaims, surveying the swelling harvest.
The party moves outside as people gather, beer in hand, to load the sofa-full of hops on to a cargo bike. Angus, who runs the CPTT Transport Group, will pedal it up the hill to the brewery. It’s thirsty work, but he’ll have to wait 10-15 days for his Palace Pint reward. As the crowd draws together for a “photo hopportunity”, I hide in a doorway (no one wants to see a journalist in a photo), and listen to the click of the camera, the jokes and the giggles of the growers.
So far in the series ...
1. The community supported farm
2. The bike repair co-operative
3. The community garden centre
5. The meat-rearing collective
This article is part of the Live Better Community Project month. In September, we are showcasing 17 community projects from around the UK. On Wednesday 24 September, we will ask you to vote for your favourite project. The project with the most votes will be awarded £1,000 of funding, and two runners-up will each receive funding of £500. One voter chosen at random will receive £150 worth of gift vouchers for Nigel’s Eco Store. Terms and conditions here.
With thanks to: 10:10; FOE; Project Dirt; Neighbourly; UK Community Foundations; Groundwork; Business in the Community; Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens; the Prince’s Trust; Garden Organic; the Royal Horticultural Society; the RSPB; Keep Wales Tidy; The Wildlife Trusts; and Mind.
Interested in finding out more about how you can live better? Take a look at this month’s Live Better challenge here.
The Live Better Challenge is funded by Unilever; its focus is sustainable living. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled advertisement feature. Find out more here.
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