What is an Oast House?
An Oasthouse is a building use to dry fresh hops before they are sent to the brewers to be used for flavouring beers.
There are usually 3 main rooms in the Oast, the kiln, the drying room and the cooling room. Then there are areas to sort and store the hops.
An Oasthouse contains at least one kiln and uses the simple method of convection to dry hops.
Before they reach the Oast, firstly the hops are grown in a hop garden in rows about 1 metre apart, and trained up poles or string. The rows are wide enough to gain enough light to grow and for them to be accessed by the horse and carts and later for the tractors to pass and collects the pockets of hops that are picked from the bines.
They are then taken to the Oasthouse where they are sorted out, removed from the string bines that they are trained to grow up, then placed in the kiln(s) to dry out. They are then packaged up and sent off to the Brewer.
The first form of Oasthouses appeared around the latter part of the 1500's, with the increasing use of hops as a profitable crop, but it wasn't until the mid 1700's that Hop production and the Oast house really became a more familiar business, and not until the mid 1800's that it was in full production and many of the Oasthouses that can be seen today originated.
Ellen McNulty is President of www.lynotttours.com
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