Homegrown Hops 2018

I need to cut mine back. My transplanted Chinook plants are coming up, but the centennial are coming in huge. Ugh.

 

How do you plan to measure the resultant bitterness?

 

Hahahahahaha. Ahem.... seriously?

 

Of course. How else can you prepare a recipe? Unless, as jmdrpi says, you are only using it for flavor/aroma hops, or experiment with different batches each year until you get it right. I grew my own hops for about 20 years, but gave up on them because the bitterness in the beer varied, and I had to toss some of the experimental batches.

 

Well now that it isn't getting below 32 degrees here in Maine, I have finally started a long haul of planting.... I plan to have pictures in the next few weeks but as of right now, I have 55 of 146 plants in pots/plastic pots, waiting for the final touches on my yard.

 

Nothing yet, my field is in a cold micro climate so it will b a few more weeks.

@OldBrewer measure bitterness by experiment , of course, or at least that is what I do. I'm not going to send them to a lab cause they are mine and not for sale.

 

If you use them as late addition or dryhops in an ipa it wouldn’t matter so much but I can see how t could be frustrating with a low ibu beer using boil additions

 

The University of Vermont does testing on hops for $35 per sample for a generic "brewing characteristics I believe. You need a 200 gram or something sized sample, dry them to their requirements, and pretty much over night them too them. Depending on how much you typically harvest, this might not be to crazy if you want to know. Where I am going to have a crap load of hops, I plan to do this for at least a few of my samples.

 

I planted some Chinook at my mom's 2 years back, and am expecting a large harvest this year – last year's was fantastic for being so young.

Centennial, cascade and columbus are all on their 4th year in my yard, but I don't have high hopes... The soil is too compact, clay-like and isn't well drained enough for them to really thrive. I also kind of just let mine go every year, but this year I'm going to try harder to care for them. They get plenty of sun, so I've narrowed it down to shitty soil. I topped them off yesterday with some peat/manure mixture, and worked it in. Hoping that, along with watering regularly, helps.

 

The hops like any kind of vegetable waste. So just dump your kitchen waste around the hops, especially over the winter. If you plan to grow several different varieties of hops, make sure that they are in different parts of your garden. I grew mine close together and eventually I couldn't tell which hops were which. They send out runners that can travel many feet underground. Mine grew as tall as about 34 feet (I attached a rope from the ground to the top of the chimney around which they spiraled). I think the story about Jack and the Beanstalk is all wrong. Beans don't grow that tall, but hops certainly do. Jack's beanstalk was likely a hopstalk :-)

 

Digging in very old back mulch with a touch of lime will losses up your soil over time. Compost and manure is great. I use all 3

 

I think it depends a lot on the amount of sunshine, rain and other factors during each year such as when they are harvested, how they are dried, stored, etc.. I sometimes found that the Cascade hops seemed more bitter than I expected. I grew Cascade, Nugget and Hallertau. I mostly used the Cascade and Nugget for bittering and the Hallertauer for flavour/aroma.

 

I saw those in your photo, that looks/sounds like a great idea. Thanks for that. I'm guessing it's still early enough to carefully dig out the rhizomes and transfer to something like this, right? My bines really haven't started climbing yet

 

My cascade, cbus and centennial all mix together, so I always just say it's a 3C blend

We have a huge compost area in the back, so will be dumping some of that on them for sure!