UK hopping rates 1914 - 1939

I told you I had more hop numbers. I just had to rummage around in the nether regions of my spreadsheets to find them.

The title is pretty self-explanatory.  I've taken the figures I have for beer production and hop usage, nailed them loosely together and calculated the average quantity of hops used per barrel of beer produced. And I've thrown in the OG and ounces of hops per gravity point so the effect of gravity changes can be removed.

I think it's a pretty nifty table. Especially as it tells me something unexpected. Or rather confirms soemthing I was reluctant to believe. Remember those hop numbers from Barth Reports? There was  one set that showed average hopping rates for various countries. I was sceptical of the UK ones, because it showed the hopping rate after WW I as higher than before it. That couldn't possibly be true, could it? Average OG had declined abourt 25% so logic would demand that the hopping rate had undergone a similar fall. Not true at all.

What makes that increase in hopping even  more surprising, is that the price of hops had more than quadruples between 1914 and 1920:

Price of English hops per cwt.
	£ s. d.
1914	4 3 9
1916	6 14 0
1918	18 15 0
1920	19 10 0
Source:
Brewers' Almanack 1955, page 63.

Here's another way of looking at it:

Fall in OG and hopping 1914 - 1920
	1914	1920	% fall
Average OG	1052.15	1039.41	24.43%
Average hops per barrel	1.73	1.62	6.36%
Sources:
Brewers' Almanack 1928, p. 110
1914: 1953 Brewers' Almanack 1955, page 62

OG fell 24% but the hopping rate only by 6.%. I'd like to explain it, but have absolutely no idea why this happened.

Surprisingly, the hopping rate per gravity point stayed at close to the 1914 level for most of the 1930's. Not at all what I would have expected.

Here's the full table:

UK hopping rates 1914 - 1939
year	bulk barrels	hops	lbs hops per barrel	Average OG	oz. hops per gravity point
1914	36,162,273	559,423	1.73	1052.15	0.53
1920	34,776,258	503,140	1.62	1039.41	0.66
1922	27,815,249	398,506	1.60	1042.88	0.60
1924	25,927,783	350,428	1.51	1043.04	0.56
1926	25,987,830	355,375	1.53	1043.23	0.57
1928	24,981,731	330,662	1.48	1043.17	0.55
1930	24,488,629	307,289	1.41	1042.90	0.52
1931	22,561,497	277,406	1.38	1042.50	0.52
1932	18,864,711	219,587	1.30	1041.04	0.51
1933	18,931,185	222,868	1.32	1039.52	0.53
1934	20,378,879	233,419	1.28	1040.99	0.50
1935	21,598,179	248,744	1.29	1041.06	0.50
1936	22,207,859	258,300	1.30	1041.02	0.51
1937	23,608,658	270,592	1.28	1041.10	0.50
1938	24,339,360	277,846	1.28	1041.02	0.50
1939	25,691,217	285,715	1.25	1040.93	0.49
Sources:
Brewers' Almanack 1928, p. 110
Brewers' Almanack 1955, p. 50
Brewers' Almanack 1955, page 62

Next time we'll be seeing what happened during and after WW OO.