While the single-batch 2010 Cascade First Ale is quietly fermenting away in Hobart as you read this – spare a thought for a couple of blokes who have brought it all together for the past nine vintages.

Cascade’s head brewer Max Burslem and maltings manager Roger Ibbott face separate challenges each March to ensure the first of the new season’s hops and malted barley is ready in time. And the pressure was ramped up a further notch or two this year with the brewing date brought forward due to an impending international brewing conference in mid-March.

“It’s always a challenge for First Harvest because there isn’t a long period between harvesting it and using it,” Ibbott says.

Cascade Brewery is the only Australian brewery to have an onsite maltings and Ibbott have been involved there for the past 37 years. Over that time he has developed long-term relationships with many local grain growers and he see his role as rewarding their “loyalty” to Cascade, rather than chasing lower prices for the malting barley.

 “This year’s first grain came from Woodbury [in Tasmania’s southern Midlands] and was delivered to our grain store on December 31. It was sown around late May/early June before the winter rains.

“We aim to use the first grain delivered into the store for First Harvest, as well as the first hops received.” Because barley requires a dormancy period of two to three months before its ready for malting, the timing of this year’s First Harvest brew presented Ibbott with a smaller than usual window.

Despite a wetter than normal winter in most parts of Tasmania, Ibbott says there’s plenty of good quality malting barley around this year.

“Some early crops were affected by it being too wet but, generally, it’s been a good growing season,” he says.

Meanwhile, Max Burslem has to select three new experimental hop varieties each year to use “wet” in the annual limited-edition brew. In a slightly different twist, this year’s hops were harvested in the morning at Bushy Park Estate – 40km west of Hobart - and tipped into the brewing kettle later that afternoon.

The hops are added at three different stages of the boiling process to produce bitterness, flavour and aroma; this year’s trio was named, respectively, Glenleith, Oakley and Text, after three historic kilns or oast houses which are still standing on the 230-hectare Bushy Park property.

The Text kiln is the oldest, having been built in 1867 by hop pioneer Ebenezer Shoobridge, and so-called because the brickwork features several biblical texts. The imposing building has been heritage-listed and – like the eight oast houses still dotted around Bushy Park - it was superceded in the 1980s by a modern gas-fired kiln.

The new hop varieties which have been incorporated into Cascade First Harvest brews in recent years come from a breeding program begun more than a decade ago at Bushy Park by the late hop breeder Grey Leggett. This year’s trio were bred from parent varieties drawn from England, Germany and Japan.

Each year around a dozen such “experimental” hop strains are trialled at Carlton & United Breweries’ Abbotsford plant in Melbourne to evaluate their flavour potential. Because the hops are used “wet” – or unkilned – the evaluation process represents something of a calculated guess and gives every separate vintage of First Harvest Ale a notable point of difference.

While I’ve eaten young hop shoots before – they are considered something of a delicacy in Belgium – a dessert served up by Rodney Dunn at his Agrarian Kitchen as part of a hop harvest luncheon featured both fresh hop cones and malted barley. Dunn steeped the two brewing ingredients in milk and then made a rich ice-cream which was both resinous and malty-sweet.