Ernest Stanley Salmon

Ernest Stanley Salmon (1 June 1871 – 12 October 1959) was a British mycologist and plant pathologist best known for his work in breeding new varieties of hops.

He specialized in the study of powdery mildew,[3] a fungus which commonly afflicts food crops, is a particular issue for hops, and for which there was no widely known treatment at the time.

While hops were propagated by root cuttings, "cloning" certain genomes, little effort was expended in preserving specific strains or in producing new, high quality cultivars.

Farmers would experience a full crop yield perhaps once in a decade, leading to overplanting, which in turn caused large variances in the supply and price of hops between good and bad harvests.

[1] By 1917, Salmon and Wye had partnered with the East Malling Research Station to grow hops on a larger scale, in order to evaluate the commercial properties of promising crosses.

[ESS 3]: 578 Salmon's first goal for the hop breeding programme, as an extension of his research in plant pathology, was to develop disease-resistant strains.

[1]: 16  Salmon noted early on that English brewers were forced to blend in American-grown hops for their higher preservative value, despite this inferiority, and his breeding research expanded to include this criterion.

[note 3] It can take a decade or more to bring a single variety from first breeding to full scale farming[11] and some of Salmon's hops took far longer than this to see commercial use.

[note 4] At the time Salmon began his research, the accepted method for breeding hops was to simply cross the best representatives of a given variety.

Later, to select for specific characteristics, field workers would bag each cluster of cones before the female bines flowered, to protect them from wild pollination.