When Ebenezer Shoobridge first planted the first crop of hops in the land at Bushy Park in 1864, it was unlikely that he would have known the magnitude of what he started.
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Fast forward 152 years, Hop Products Australia now calls the land home, and has upgraded its facilities and size to become a prominent player in the global hop industry.
Its varieties of hops go on to form the base of well-drunk and much-loved beers across the world.
For 11 months of the year, the farm is mostly quiet.
But in March, it transforms into an almost unrecognisable hive of activity.
Its workforce of 19 full-time workers swells to include 130 casuals.
It runs two, 10-hour shifts a day, with production only ceasing for four hours a day.
The hops are picked, processed to be sorted from their vines, dried, bundled, and pressed into pellets, which are what brewers around the world are so keen to get their hands on.
Inside the processing shed, it’s all systems go.
When The Sunday Examiner visited, it is day two of the 2017 harvest season.
Our guide is HPA’s Owen Johnston, who joined the business from Hobart’s Moo Brew.
The first hop variety to be harvested is Helga.
Her vines are lifted up out of tractor trailers, and dangled from the roof.
From there, they whizz around the shed, fly through shutes, and tumble down conveyor belts.
The overall affect is very much like a Willy Wonka chocolate factory, for beer lovers.
By the time the final shift worker clocks off at the end of the day, the plant will have produced 20 tonnes of wet hops.
Then the factory starts back up four hours later, and the process starts again.
Johnston said 2017 was an exciting year for the farm’s history, and its connection to its founding planter.
Shoobridge’s direct descendants still own acreage at Bushy Park. This year, HPA has leased that land.
“For the first time in 30 years, hops will be grown on Shoobridge land. That’s a really nice historic connection for us,” Johnston said.
At the time that Shoobridge planted his first vines, there were 70 hop farms in Tasmania.
Today, there are two. The second is at Branxholm.
While today, the 255 hectares of hops can be harvested in a month, it would have been a much slower process in Shoobridge’s day.
The vines would have been hand picked, Johnston said, bundled into hop pockets and taken to the end of the row.
There, the wife and kids would sort through the vines, picking by hand the hop fruits off the vines.
Today, this is done by tractors and machines.
“It’s all about teamwork, it just looks a bit different now,” Johnston said.
The intense four-week stint of work attracts all kinds of employees – from returning regulars in the area, to backpackers, like Giulia Labombarda, from Rome, Italy, who has been in Tasmania for about two months.
It’s her second day on the job, and so far, she’s loving it – especially driving the tractor.
On the opposite end is Toby Smith, a second-generation, full-time hop farm worker.
Toby has been working at the farm for about five years, and follows in the footsteps of his dad, who has seen 37 harvests.
The past is woven throughout the Bushy Park farm.
Many of the original buildings and infrastructure that Shoobridge built in his day still stand, including the text kiln, which performed the same duties that the modern processing plant on-site does today.
Nearby is where it is believed the Shoobridge planted his first rows of vines.
“The romance of the story is that Shoobridge has come out here and planted in the joint of the Styx River, and the Derwent River,” Johnston said.
“There’s no sea breeze, and you get hot, hot summers. The only thing working against us out here is that we don’t get enough rainfall.
“But, placed in the middle of the Derwent and the Styx, we get that natural flow, which is good.”
The season itself was looking dicey for a good yield of hops, Johnston said.
But March’s warm, sunny days were contributing to a “strong finish” for the crops.
Those sun-kissed hops will, by the end of March, be in the hands of brewers all around the world. It’s in those safe hands that Shoobridge’s legacy will be transformed into beer.