FRESH NEW BRANDING BRINGING THE NEW TO YOU HOP CROP

Would you like to know what the harvest will look like this year? Yes, so would we. Predicting now how a crop will perform in late Summer is impossible. However, signs are encouraging with some good rainfall so far and now we are approaching some warmer days growth will start at a pace. The plants are already showing strong clean growth and our team of farmers here in the UK are optimistic. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed for high yields, strong alphas and beautiful aromas!

Many of you have been keen to brew beers with the newer Charles Faram hop varieties only to be disappointed by the lack of availability. Sorry about that but this is very encouraging. So much so that we are planting more of them this year so more brewers can get their hands on beautiful varieties such as Godiva™ and Harlequin®. Have you included them on your 2023 contract to try yet?

In Germany, significant rainfall has helped reduce concerns about another drought. Cool temperatures in April have contributed to the slow development of plants. At the moment plants are roughly 14 days behind expectation, but they are expected to catch up with better weather.

In the US, growers are stringing. Concerns regarding a repeat of the cold spring experienced last year which delayed growth significantly have not come to fruition and development looks normal. Snow was sufficient to replenish irrigation supplies and so far, the outlook is good.

Back at the office, the team have been extremely busy! We’ve had a brand refresh, revamped our website and gone online with our brewing supplies with an easy-to-use store for your convenience. You will need to register to use it and we hope you find it a useful resource, saving you time in your busy schedules. There’s more interactive and hop business functionality to follow in the next few weeks. Ben, Charlie and Ash are continuously improving the digital offering, so get in touch if there’s anything that you need to be loaded online.

Hop Hype

Do you know that we offer our everpopular variety Jester® in Type 45 hop pellets? The 2022 crop batch is now in stock and the quality is stunning with bright, crisp and tropical aromas complementing the trademark grapefruit and blackcurrant. And grown right here in the UK!

Check out the Faram website or get in touch with the sales team for an up to date picture of all the products available. Whether its hops, malt, dried yeast, finings, sensory training kits, bottle tops or closures they are very keen to hear from you.

For those looking forward to trying new hop products, we partner with Totally Natural Solutions and we have some exciting new products.

HopGain® Floe is a flowable liquid hop extract, suitable for addition in the whirlpool or as a dry hop. It allows high hopping rates, giving you impactful beers whilst not contributing to bitterness and reducing losses normally associated with heavy dry hop loads.

We are very happy to confirm our close relationship with NZ Hops, the grower cooperative famous for bringing varieties such as Nelson Sauvin®, Riwaka™, and Motueka™ to the world. This close relationship allowed us to be the first to bring you the punchy pineapple, peach and grapefruit Nectaron® and now the exciting variety Superdelic® is about to land on our shores. Described as red fruit, candy, citrus and tropical, we are certain this will be a hit with brewers. Please speak to your contact at Charles Faram for more information and to discuss availability.

Talking of new and exciting hop varieties, we have some exciting new varieties from the US to share with you. Zappa® (passionfruit, spice and mint) is grown by our good friend Eric Desmarais and has wild Mexican roots! Vista is a new public variety (peach, papaya and pear), high impact and cost-effective. YQH-1320 is an exciting new variety discovered as a wild hop and now tamed, it promises a mouth-watering blend of pineapple, peach, guava and lime! From our own breeding program in the USA, we now have CF298 and CF299 available as Type 90 hop pellets to complement the hop cones of these exciting new varieties. CF298 brings warm, rounded blueberry, tropical and pine whilst CF299 brings lemon, peach and lime.

Hopefully lots of you had the chance to come and see us at BeerX. We enjoyed two fantastic days and nights of getting to catch up with lots of our friends. We held an interactive session with a panel of esteemed brewers from Utopian, Emmanuales, Attic and Buxton to talk about how you can utilise locally grown varieties in both new and existing highly flavoured, bold and modern beer and lager styles. It was great to see so many curious and interested brewers getting enthusiastic and motivated about using our hops from our Hop Development Program. So much so that our hop session had the highest attendance, and we were the most favourited exhibitor.

We’d like to thank everyone for their attendance and support, we really hope that you enjoyed visiting us and benefi tted from our content.

British hops are a cost-effective and environmentally favourable move for all UK breweries, and this doesn’t come at the expense of high-impact flavour and aromas. The brewers on the BeerX panel also demonstrated how British hops can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with notorious big hitters from other countries to complement each other.

By creating fruity, flavoursome, and aromatic new varieties that can be grown on local farms by our local growers we hope to reverse the recent reduction in the UK acreage whilst at the same time helping to reduce the carbon footprint created by shipping containers of hops around the world. By examining our farming methods and looking at ways to reduce our environmental impact we’re also reducing our reliance on fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides whilst also reducing C02 and food miles!