I’m fed up with talking about the weather, but I can console myself with the fact we have grabbed every opportunity so far and progress is not too bad.Varieties focus
Varieties focus: Brewery pushes for larger Maris Otter crop
Merchant works to grow acreage of long-forgotten brewers’ favourite, Maris Otter.
A South Shropshire brewer is encouraging local growers to supply greater quantities of old malting barley variety, Maris Otter.
Although long departed from the HGCA Recommended List and out-yielded by most modern varieties, Otter is favoured by brewers large and small for its depth of flavour and easy-handling qualities.
Hobsons Brewery, of Cleobury Mortimer, recently invited a group of interested local farmers to Hall Farm, Leinthall Earls, near Leominster, to hear first-hand from manager Stuart Hutchings how they might achieve a 50 per cent premium over the spring barley price.
Hall Farm is part of Gatley Farms, a 890-hectare (2,200-acre) mixed enterprise comprising arable, beef and sheep production.
Nick Davis of Hobsons explained the company’s requirement in the short term is for 61ha (150 acres), more than half of which has already been secured at Hall Farm.
“This may rise to 200-300 acres as time goes on,” he said. “Hobsons’ business ethos is to source ingredients locally, within the West Midlands region, where most of our beer is consumed.”
Sustainable approach
Hobsons has built a commendable reputation in this part of the world for its sustainable approach to business.
A wind turbine provides more than a third of the brewery’s electricity requirements and rainwater is captured from the extensive roof of the bottle and barrel store and used for cleaning, vehicle washing and toilet flushing.
Heat from the cold store is recovered - four boreholes were sunk to provide constant water at 11degC, which is then compressed and used for heating and cooling.
Back at Hall Farm, how to grow Maris Otter was the subject addressed by Mike Farrell, of merchant and the variety’s sole supplier, Robin Appel.
“Growers should select soils with low levels of residual nitrogen, and where their experience has shown levels of nitrogen in the grain have been low,” he told the group. “As a result, Otter will mostly be a second or later cereal in the rotation.
“Applications of nitrogen should clearly be guided by soil fertility levels, but we would
advise not to exceed 100kg N per hectare as a top dressing by mid-March.
“Growers should try to avoid very high plant and tiller numbers to help ensure the number of grains present are well-filled.”
In official trials, Maris Otter was around 7 per cent lower yielding than Halcyon, he said, but in practice experienced growers regularly achieve yields of 6-7 tonnes/ha (2.4-2.8t/acre).
Hall Farm manager, Stuart Hutchings, recounted his strategy for growing a successful crop of Maris Otter.
“We drilled it on September 28 at a seed rate of 155kg/ha in a sloping field where the generally light soil has a pH of 6.6,” he said. “However, it can be drilled until mid-March, if necessary.”
Disease susceptibility
“Because of Otter’s susceptibility to mildew and rhynchosporium, we applied a fairly robust fungicide programme, involving Helix (prothioconazole+spiroxamine), Swift (trifloxystrobin) and Fandango (fluoxastrobin+prothioconazole).
“A relatively early application of growth regulator is recommended, so chlormequat was applied at round about growth stage 31, which this year was on May 5.”
Maris Otter was bred in Cambridge nearly 50 years ago, specifically to provide a barley variety that would give consistently high quality malt for the cask conditioned ale market.
It was bred by crossing the two varieties Proctor and Pioneer and very quickly became the foundation ingredient of many of England’s most revered cask conditioned ales.
However, after many years of being the country’s most popular malting barley, cross pollination and the use of uncertified seed signalled its decline.
In the early 1990s, Robin Appel and H. Banham, of Norfolk, acquired the sole right to market Maris Otter seed and set about cleaning up the variety, with the aim of reinstating its commercial viability.
A decade later, the variety was bought outright and NIAB was brought in to eliminate any remaining contaminates and select the best ears for propagation.
The extent to which the real ale sector has embraced the return of Maris Otter is underlined by the fact that eight of the last 10 winners of the CAMRA Champion Beers of Britain were brewed using the variety.
Its profile was further boosted last year when Marston’s Brewery and Marmite joined forces to make a limited edition beer using Otter to commemorate the Ashes cricket series.
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