A BREWERY'S sell-off of Herefordshire's biggest hop farm - to a strawberry grower - has sent shivers through the UK hops industry, writes PETE BLENCH.

Carlsberg Tetley's sale of Brierley Court Farm near Leominster - once ranked as Europe's biggest hop farm - is seen as a bad omen at a time when there is a world hop surplus and brewers are reducing the bitterness of beer.

Bishop's Frome hop farmer John Pudge said the sale was a worrying signal for the industry.

His cousin Charles Pudge, chairman of the NFU national hops committee, said there was a risk the UK industry would contract to such a degree that its service industry would become "unviable." Supplies of pesticides and sundries could be threatened.

That concern was echoed by Kent hop farmer Tony Redsell, chairman of the National Hop Association, who added: "The Brierley sale proves brewers can buy hops on the open market more cheaply than they can grow them."

Carslberg Tetley supplied 30 per cent of its hop needs from Brierley mainly for its popular Leeds-brewed Tetley bitter. Some 250 acres of the 400-acre Herefordshire farm was devoted to hops in recent years.

This year's crop of 100 acres will be the last to be harvested at Brierley in more than 100 years of hop growing on the land. The farm was hit by a disastrous fire - which caused more than £1.5 damage - at the peak of the hop harvest last September. But the brewery said the fire played no part in its decision to sell up.

Donna Cresswell, spokeswoman for the Northampton-based firm, told the Hereford Times: "It's not commercially viable for us to maintain our own hop farm any more. We took a decision to concentrate on what we do best - brewing."

The Brierley farm has been sold to a Herefordshire strawberry grower for an undisclosed sum.

People in the industry say the scenario is not necessarily all doom and gloom. Mr Redsell said a brewery pulling out - as other breweries had done in the past - could even benefit other growers. Mark Berry of Hopmania at Munsley Gate who markets hop confetti and other products thinks the climbing plant has a great future.

He said hops were appearing in hop asparagus, in an upmarket plum and hop yoghurt, as a 'natural' pipe cleaning fluid in food processing and as a stress reducer in livestock feed and licks.

The UK industry has shrunk from 20,000 to 5,000 acres of hops in the last half century but Herefordshire remains the biggest hop-growing county.