Autumn is green hop season when brewers rush to use them fresh off the bine in special one-off seasonal beers. It’s long been a tradition in hop growing areas, like Kent, but Buckinghamshire's Chiltern brewery has recently released Green Hop Ale, which offers a unique take on the style, with the hops clocking up zero food miles.
Not only were the hops harvested in the brewery garden, yards from the copper where they were added to the beer, but they’re self-sown. George Jenkinson of Chiltern said: “They looked so good, it seemed a waste not to use them. We suspect they must have seeded from the whole cone hops we've used in the brewery over the years, so we don't know what the exact variety is.”
The 2025 small-batch brew follows the success of last year’s beer when George said the quality of the hops almost demanded a green hopped beer. “They just took over. They'd been growing fairly unnoticed along the wattle fence by the brewery driveway. Suddenly they just went mad. They were fantastic – almost the size of pine cones. We thought, ‘Great, let's do a green hop’. It went really well and sold extremely quickly.”
This year George did the harvesting himself, using a step ladder to gather all the cones within reach. The brewery tweaked its production schedule to brew Green Hop Ale when the crop was at its peak. The result is a 4 per cent ABV golden ale with the hops giving a soft hedgerow character, which evokes the Chilterns landscape.
The barley used in the beer is only slightly less local than the hops, grown around 10 miles away on the Waddesdon estate giving the beer a uniquely Buckinghamshire provenance. George says the brewery, founded by his parents 45 years ago, has always had an ethos of using local products. Now that pioneering approach is much more mainstream.
