Page:Notes on five years' experiments on hop manuring conducted at Golden Green, Hadlow, Tonbridge.djvu/14

12 to Mr. Alfred C. Chapman, F.I.C., of 23, Leadenhall Street, London, a gentleman of well-known chemical authority in connection with brewing matters, in order that he might make comparative analyses of them and assign to them their relative value as judged from the standpoint of the brewer. The duplicate set of samples was submitted to a well-known firm of hop factors, also with a request to classify them in their order of merit from a market point of view. The samples were submitted for judgment in each case under cipher numbers which afforded no clue to their origin.

We have, therefore, for the last two years, in addition to merely quantitative yields, the scientific verdict of the brewing chemist, and what may be called the market verdict of the hop factor; and it is interesting to compare both the results, the one for a season in which the crop showed itself to be almost wholly dependent, as regards quantity, on the manure supplied to it, and the other for a season in which the hop plant, although not altogether ungrateful for manure, could nevertheless have got on fairly well without it. In such a season as the last it is obviously doubly interesting to ascertain the effect of the manure on quality.

I will first give the results of the chemical analyses of the hops for the two years, viz., determinations of total resins and of soft resin. The results of modern investigation tend to show that it is very largely to the presence and proportion of the latter that hops owe their preserving value, though the quality of hops is by no means wholly dependent on this one feature.