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An oast, oast house or hop kiln is a building designed for kilning (drying) hops as part of the brewing process. They can be found in most hop-growing (and former hop-growing) areas and are often good examples of vernacular architecture. Many redundant oasts have been converted into houses. They consist of two or three storeys on which the hops were spread out to be dried by hot air from a wood or charcoal-fired kiln at the bottom. The drying floors were thin and perforated to permit the heat to pass through and escape through a cowl in the roof which turned with the wind. The freshly picked hops from the fields were raked in to dry and then raked out to cool before being bagged up and sent to the brewery. The Kentish dialect word ''kell'' was sometimes used for kilns (''"The oast has three kells."'') and sometimes to mean the oast itself (''"Take this lunchbox to your father, he's working in the kell."''). The word ''oast'' itself also means "kiln".〔 Oxford English Dictionary 〕 The earliest surviving oast house is that at Cranbrook near Tunbridge Wells which dates to 1750 but the process is documented from soon after the introduction of hops into England in the early 16th century. Early oast houses were simply adapted barns but, by the early 19th century, the distinctive circular buildings with conical roofs had been developed in response to the increased demand for beer. Square oast houses appeared early in the 20th century as they were found to be easier to build. In the 1930s, the cowls were replaced by louvred openings as electric fans and diesel oil ovens were employed. Hops are today dried industrially and the many oast houses on farms have now been converted into dwellings. One of the best preserved oast house complexes is at The Hop Farm Country Park at Beltring. ==Hop drying== The purpose of an oast is to dry hops. This is achieved by the use of a flow of heated air through the kiln, rather than a firing process. The process for the traditional oast: Hops were picked in the hop gardens by gangs of pickers, who worked on a piece work basis and earned a fixed rate per bushel. The ''green hops'' were put into large hessian sacks called ''pokes''. These would be taken to the oast and brought into the stowage at first floor level. Some oasts had a man-powered hoist for this purpose, consisting of a pulley of some diameter on an axle to which a rope or chain was attached. The green hops when freshly picked had a moisture content of some 80%, this needed to be reduced to 6%, although the moisture content would subsequently rise to 10% during storage. The green hops were spread out in the kilns. The floors were generally of square battens nailed at right angles across the joists, placed so that there was a similar gap between each batten, and covered with a horsehair cloth. The hops would be spread some deep, the kiln doors closed and the furnace lit. When the hops were judged to be dried, the furnace would be extinguished and the hops removed from the kiln using a ''scuppet'', which was a large wooden framed shovel with a hessian base. The hops would be spread out on the stowage floor to cool, and would then be pressed into large jute sacks called ''pockets'' with a ''hop press''. Each pocket contained the produce of about of green hops. It weighed a hundredweight and a quarter () and was marked with the grower's details, this being required under ''The Hop (Prevention of Fraud) Act, 1866''. The pockets were then sent to market, where the brewers would buy them and use the dried hops in the beer making process to add flavour and act as a preservative. Oasts sometimes caught fire, the damage sometimes being confined to the kilns (Castle Farm, Hadlow), or sometimes leading to the complete destruction of the oast (Stilstead Farm, East Peckham in September 1983 and Parsonage Farm, Bekesbourne in August 1996).〔Kentish Fire p19〕〔〔〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Oast house」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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