Peter Lines pulls his tractor over to the side of the road to take a call from Pursuit of Hoppiness.
“Yes, I am on a tractor … I haven’t got a horse,” he says with a laugh. It’s a joke that threads its way through our conversation after it was suggested I give Peter a call to talk about his “old school” farming approach.
“I guess we’re not like a lot of these shiny new flash ones — we’ve been growing hops here for 150 years and I’ve spent my whole life growing hops.
“I’ve built everything here myself. The sheds are perfectly fine — there might be the odd second-hand window in them, but it doesn’t affect the quality of the hops.
“There’s a lot of pride in what we do. I reckon I’ve got one of the tidiest hop gardens in the country. And our quality is right up there.
“We do have a different farming set up. Compared with today’s more corporate climate we’re more the original style. The family’s very involved and I do a lot of it myself. I don’t have any fulltime staff but we get by.”
A bunch of backpackers were there in late November for the hard work involved in training the hops. And another dozen will lob in for harvest in March when they’ll spend four weeks picking hops and two weeks picking grapes.
At 66 and a working life of 50 years, Lines is still heavily involved in everything on the farm as is his wife Marlene.
“It’s my hobby. A lot of people think I’m crazy. I could retire tomorrow but I’d be bored senseless. I’m a very hands-on farmer.”
In his lifetime of hops, Lines has seen a lot changes — mostly from the days of commodity hops to today’s “fashion” hops.
“These days hops are like the fashion industry, things can chop and change easily and breweries can go from one hop to another. Those old brands were never going to change the recipe so they only wanted a limited amount of hops, and they wanted them cheap.”
That said, the fashionable hops have been a great revenue driver. “To be fair, we’ve had 10 or 12 pretty good years.”
Lines now grows a dozen different varieties — mostly Nelson Sauvin, but there’s still some Green Bullet and Dr Rudi there a far cry from when the hops didn’t have names and the only thing that mattered was their alpha acid level.
Lines other hobby is the on-farm brewery that he set up with fellow hop grower Colin Oldham. It was originally called Totara Brewing, but now they are called Hop Farm Brewery.
“We make about 600 litres a week,” he says. “A few years ago we were doing twice that amount but we’re not getting any younger.”
They have a core range of five beers, which are on tap at a few pubs around the Tasman region, as well as occasional seasonals. The odd rigger finds its way to local supermarkets and they have a “network of fellas with man caves who will buy kegs off us”.