East Kent Saison
Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project

As some of you know, we love a bit of beer history, and we love to follow the seasons. We find ourselves drawn into the past through the stories told by beer and its ingredients. Today, for example, hops are harvested by machine, cleaned, dried and processed into pellets and vacuum packed into spacey Mylar bags. Back in the early 20th Century, however, migrant workers picked hops by hand. In Kent, this meant families leaving the slums of central London to pick hops for a few weeks each autumn in the Kentish countryside. The whole family worked, getting paid (not very much) by the bushel.

Well, we find this stuff very inspiring. So we thought about a beer that might have sustained these workers. It would have needed to be refreshing, plentiful, and probably contain whatever grain was available, plus local hops. In other words: a saison. An East Kent saison.

That’s what this beer is, and we hope you enjoy it. We used Whitbread Goldings as the hop, and pale malt, and this saison was fermented with an English ale yeast. But try to forget all that and close your eyes and imagine the poor families knackered after a days hard hop-picking, sitting round a fire outside the sheds that were provided for their accommodation, singing and carrying on and probably getting a bit plastered. That’s what this saison, brewed in their honor, is all about.

This beer is the first (and possibly only) release in a series of beers dedicated to Saint Arnoul of Soissons, the patron saint of hop pickers. From what we’ve read, our historical Kentish hop-pickers needed a Saint so it certainly feels correct to honor him in this way.