OAST
(ohst)
A
farm building used for drying hops in preparation for the brewing
process Common clues: Drying
oven; Hops dryer; Tobacco-curing kiln; Brewer's oven; Kiln for
malt; Brewery fixture; Hops heater; Curing kiln; Malt kiln;
Tobacco dryer Crossword
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4-bed oast conversion in Goudhurst Video: Kent
Oast House
An
oast house is an example of vernacular architecture in England,
especially Kent and Sussex.
They
are farm buildings used for drying hops in preparation for the
brewing process. They consist of three or four 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 it escaped
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
earliest surviving oast house is that at Cranbrook near Tunbridge
Wells which dates to c. 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.
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Oast".
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