Hop growing in the Garden of England on Astini News

"The hop gardens turn gracefully towards me," Charles Dickens rhapsodised on a train going through Kent, "presenting regular avenues of hops in rapid flight, then whirl away."

The familiar criss-cross scaffolding of hop poles and wires that scored the sky and whirled away as far as the eye could see is today limited to a few farms that supply hops to small and medium-sized regional breweries who specialise in real ale.

From 1960, the decline in hop production in Britain was precipitous. Machines replaced the hop-pickers and apples replaced English hops because cheaper hops from the United States, New Zealand and Germany were attractive to the big breweries. It looked like a familiar British agricultural catastrophe.

Then something remarkable and unexpected happened: English hops became precious, interesting. There was no more grubbing up. And now, hop growing is on the brink of a revival. English hops are unlike hops grown anywhere else. Family-owned breweries such as Shepherd Neame of Faversham, Britain's oldest brewer, and Adnams of Southwold, together with regionals like the Marstons group of Burton upon Trent and Greene King in Suffolk depend on "aroma hops" to give their beer its resinous, peppery and fruity characteristics. The growth of microbreweries, serving small markets and individual pubs, is making English hops almost fashionable again.

This weekend's hop festival at Faversham, now in its 21st year, promises to be the biggest yet, as visitors from across the country descend to celebrate the golden days of hop picking.

Each hop variety, with its varying amounts of alpha acid, provides a unique contribution to the flavour and taste of beer. "There is a terroir to hops, as there is with wine," says Dr Peter Darby, the country's foremost hop expert.

"English hops are subtle, understated. The East Kent Golding, for instance, is prized for its delicate aroma. The farmers who use it would claim that the salt-laden winds from the North Sea blowing over the hop fields make the difference. That is slightly poetic, but probably true."

"For the first time in years," says David Holmes, head brewer at Shepherd Neame, "there are young growers in their twenties and thirties who are reviving old hop gardens. It is very positive."

Ross Hunter, director of the youthful Surrey Hills Brewery, predicts that hops will make a comeback if research can produce varieties with the right floral and citrus characteristics that small brewers want.

"Why not? Everyone wants to use English hops. We've got the best barley in the world for brewing," he says.

"At Surrey Hills, all our bittering hops are English, but our aroma hops are a mixture of English and foreign. We're dedicated to finding a way of using all English hops.

"Hops are a wonderful thing. I'd stick them in apple crumble if I could get away with it."

Hunter's brewery, which produces 5,000 pints a week of its most popular beer, Shere Drop, has relocated from the Guildford area to Denbies, the vineyard in Dorking, where he hopes to grow hops on spare land. "The hop price rose a couple of years ago," he says, "it's almost worthwhile to grow them again."

Clive Edmed farms at Horsmonden, not far from Tunbridge Wells. When he bought Hayle Farm there were 30 acres of hops left out of the original 100 acres. Thanks to the real ale market, he is back to 60 acres.

"We had planned to grub them out," he says, "but there were contracts. I got addicted to growing them. It was a challenge. No two years are the same. No two months are the same. I think somehow it gets a hold of you. Farmers who used to grow them still come round here for a sniff of the hops."

The romance of hops never really went away. It persists like the pungent atmosphere of an oast house drying floor, nowhere more than in Kent. The mass exodus of city folk for a three-month life-swap of hard graft in the open air ended nearly half a century ago but it is still part of popular culture. "It was a huge social movement," says Dr Darby. "The Salvation Army was involved in the welfare of hoppers. Nine months after the hop harvest, there would be a flush of unplanned babies born to hop pickers because the hop has a lot of phyto-oestrogen, a chemical that influences the hormones. I'm told many of those babies were given the name Hopkins."

Earlier this year, fruit farmers Teresa and Robin Twickham, from Matfield, invited a group of former hoppers down from London for the day to visit the hop gardens (now apple orchards) where they had spent timeless summers. Forty-five of them arrived by coach, spinning tales of the last days of hop picking before mechanisation.

Brenda Peel, 60, of Bow, had not been back for 50 years. "You didn't see the poor side as children," she said. "We didn't know any other kind of fun. We swam in the river, climbed the trees. In the whitewashed huts we slept on 'ticks', mattresses filled with straw. There was a special shed with fires for the buckets and kettles. We left our four-bed flat in Stepney and came by train or lorry with our pots and pans. It was very primitive, not glammed up like Darling Buds of May."

Before the Second World War, most families made their way to Kent on "hoppers' specials", trains from London Bridge station that wound their way through the night stopping at every station to offload pickers. Travelling at night meant that the trains were cheap and didn't interfere with ordinary railway traffic, but they were the oldest stock and families were packed so tight that children were stowed in the luggage racks.

"We just loved the life," said Margie Locke, 78, from Shadwell. "I go back every year, just to reminisce. We had nothing, but you learnt so much about living and what you could survive on.

"It was a lovely life but my children and grandchildren would never accept the conditions – no hot water, hardly any light in the huts. The toilets consisted of a shed with a long wooden seat with holes, some big, some small. Lime was put down to disguise the smell."

Tony Redsell, chairman of the National Hop Association, owns three hop farms between Sittingbourne and Canterbury. In his local pub, the Three Horseshoes at Staplestreet, he was approached recently by a stranger saying: "My grandfather would like to buy you a drink."

"Blow me down, it was one of our East End hoppers, very elderly now. He'd recognised me 25 years on. The old-timers who worked here still come for the smell and to relive the experience. On a warm, balmy autumn evening you can smell hops drying from half a mile away."

There is no one to hymn the humble hop, as there is to extol the grape, but Redsell is as eloquent on the subject as any poet. "You never get hops out of your system," he says. "If I cut myself I would surely not bleed. It would be alpha acid coming out."

• Faversham Hop Festival runs today and tomorrow. www.favershamhopfestival.org; or call 01795 542285

• The National Hop Collection at Faversham opens next year, has 250 varieties dating back to 1700