Page 17 - All About History - Issue 186-19
P. 17
Inside History
Letting the air out
At the pinnacle of the kiln’s
roof was a wooden cowl
that was connected to the
building via a sprattle beam.
The cowl would pivot to
ensure it always had its back
to the wind, creating a small Pulley system
and controllable vacuum that
helped to draw the air up and When hops from the hop
out of the kiln. It would also gardens or yards were picked
shelter the hops from the they would be placed into
weather, in particular the rain. long hessian sacking called
cribs, then transferred to bags
called pokes and brought
into the stowage on the first © Alamy
Hop drying was
floor. To make life easier for expensive, but potentially
the workers, a hoist was often profitable for farmers
placed on the outside of the Cooling the hops
building so that the heavy The first floor of a stowage would be used to cool the
sacks could be lifted in using hops that had been dried within the kiln. They would be
a chain or a rope. spread as thinly as possible across the floor using a large
shovel called a scuppet and left there until they were
deemed suitable for bagging. The larger the stowage,
the more hops could be cooled at any one time.
Bagging up
In order to bag the dried, green
hops, the workers would place
an empty pocket sack beneath
a hole in the floor and make
use of a hop press. This would
pack the pockets with about
150 imperial bushels worth of
hops and they’d each carry the
stencilled details of the grower
on the outside – something that
became a legal requirement
under The Hop (Prevention of
Fraud) Act 1866.
The storage area
The largest section of a
hop kiln (or oast house
as they were also known)
was the stowage where
hops would be pressed
and stored in long sacks
(or ‘pockets’) using a
hop press after being
dried and cooled. A good
number of these were
two- storey timber-framed
rectangular buildings with
the storage section on
the ground floor. Some
of them, however, were
single storey and others
were built using brick.
Illustration by: Adrian Mann
17
