New Hop Traditions

In early May 2026, we embarked on a journey into the unknown. The mission? To grow our own hops, right on our doorstep in Cornwall. As you know, we love hops, but growing them is a whole new world for us. Luckily, we had help. The brilliant grounds team at Heligan Gardens stepped in and joined us on our mission, and without them, we’d have been up a creek without a yield. Set back on the rolling hills overlooking Mevagissey and the sea, we dug what would be the first hop trenches seen in Cornwall for hundreds of years.

As the vines started to grow, so did our excitement. Brewing a beer with fresh hops from our own backyard has long been a dream of ours. Something that, until teaming up with Heligan, seemed more like a pipe dream. Over the next few months, we checked our vines like millennials check their phones. We couldn’t wait for harvest, and when that day came in early September, we all but skipped our morning coffees to get up there and start picking.

With two large buckets in hand, we marched through Heligan, joined by Jeremy Fielden and his team, and began picking our first year’s harvest of beautifully fragrant, sticky Cascade hops. After carefully plucking the buds from the vines, we’d completely filled half a bucket with our fresh hops, leaving the other one and a half bursting with pure, dewy-eyed optimism. Give us a break; it was our first step in the hop-growing world, and as we’ve learned, hop vines are a bit like rose bushes. Cut them back, and they’ll grow back stronger and more abundant year after year. We can’t wait to see what future harvests bring as we cultivate hops right next to the Verdant in Residence bar, building on our strong relationship with Heligan Gardens. 

With the hops safely strapped into the backseat of an electric car that could probably have told us to leave one bucket at the brewery, we made our way back to show everyone the fruits of our labour and add them to our EKG fresh hop cask brew alongside East Kent Goldings from Anthony Rudgard-Redsell at Redsell Farm, whose hops have been blowing us away with their quality and pungency since our first meeting in 2023.

With every hope of giving us an even better chance at a verdant (I’ve always wanted to use that word in a different context) harvest next year, we’ve come up with new approaches to ancient traditions to appease the hop gods. You may be familiar with Corn dollies, wassails and the heaps of weird and wonderful harvest traditions dating back millennia. Well, in true folky form, we’ve created our own. 

With the brilliant mind and guiding hands of Sue Hill, best known for her jaw-dropping organic sculptures at Heligan and The Eden Project, we’ve created what we’re calling a ‘Hop Dolly’ using the cascade hop vines and cones we collected at Heligan. Our Hop Dolly signals the start of a new folk ritual, rooted in nature and tradition, and will hang for one month at a time in each of our Cornwall venues before being placed among the hop beds at the start of the next growing season.

Getting our hands dirty and becoming part of the hop-growing process has been an unforgettable experience, and we can’t wait for you to try our two new fresh hop brews, one with EKG and Cascade is available in cask now, and the other using Harlequin is coming your way very soon.