Great Expectations No.20
The seal
Acrylic on canvas
10cm x 7cm
2024
by Jake Lamerton (Ash-next-Sandwich)
An Oast House (also called an oast or hop kiln) is a traditional agricultural building designed to dry freshly harvested hops for brewing beer.
An oast house consists of a rectangular one- or two-storey building (the "stowage") and one or more kilns in which the hops were spread out to be dried by hot air rising from a wood or charcoal fire below. 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 earliest surviving oast houses date from the 17th century after the introduction of hops into England in the mid-16th century. Early oast houses were simply adapted barns, but by the 18th century the distinctive tall buildings with conical roofs had been developed to increase the draught. At first, these were square, but around 1800 roundel kilns were developed in the belief that they were more efficient.