Hops contribute flavour and bitterness to beer, but their most important role was to act as a preservative, enabling beer to keep longer and to be traded and transported. Ale, by contrast, being brewed without hops, had a shelf life of no more than a fortnight and historically it was brewed on a small scale for local consumption.
Before the mid-16th century, hops were imported to England from the Continent. The famous Graveney Boat, a vessel dated to c.AD 895 that was found under 2m of soil in the Graveney marshes near Faversham in the early 1970s, had a cargo of hops along with quern stones from the Rhine Valley. We also have records of hopped beer being imported from Hanseatic towns to London in the 14th century.
Religious refugees from Flanders and France are credited with introducing hop-growing to Kent. A 17th-century rhyme of unknown authorship claimed that ‘Hops, Reformation, bays and beer/Came to England all in one year’. Another contemporary commentator wrote that ‘hops and heresies came among us, saucy intruders into this land’. Ale brewers clearly did not like the competition: hops were branded a ‘foreign weed’ and Andrew Boorde, the author of A Dyetary of Healthe (1542), asserted that beer ‘makes a man fat’, citing the ‘faces and bellies’ of the Dutch as evidence. Despite this, there were 32 beer breweries in London in 1574 compared to 58 ale breweries, and production went from 312,000 barrels in that year to 648,690 in 1585.
