Hop Growing

[Wez]

I took the dog out yesterday afternoon to a different local park, I was amazed to find that two of the fields are seperated by hop plants and they are absolutely heaving with cones! I'll get a pic when I go down there with some carrier bags :party: I have no idea what they are, as i understand it they may be ornamental ones :wha:

But, this provoked a discussion with Mrs Wez and she's agreed to let me grow some in the garden next year, so I'm looking for some advice from those of you that have already been doing this, what should I grow? where do i plant etc etc.

I intend to grow hops just for flavour / aroma as I wont know the AA i'll avoid bittering hops.

Looking forward to seeing what you guys can suggest :thumb:

 

[Buzz]

I'm also thinking of getting some hops for the allotment next year. Be interested to keep an eye on this thread so I know what to do too :thumb:

 

[Aleman]

They are pretty easy to grow, but spread like crazy, it's pretty difficult to muck them up, Give them plenty of water and sh*t and tehy shoot up.

I neglected mine pretty badly this year, in fact I didn't cut the bines of from last year, and left the hop frame lying where the wind blew it over last year. . . . still got a crop of hops, going to pick and dry them tomorrow . . . it won't be a lot but it'll be the first harvest I've had in the three years they have been in (Its got too wet, and they turned brown before I could get them the other times)

I have no problem using mine as bittering, After all the brewers of old didn't know what variety the hops were, or what the Alpha Acid was, adn still used them to make beer.

 

[Wez]

Good point on the bittering, I do fancy growing a challenger plant, which will be good for both I guess.

 

[Aleman]

Could I suggest a dwarf variety such as Prima Donna (First Gold), as they only grow to 8-10 feet, I have a Fuggle and really have difficulty trying to support it at 25-30ft :?

What I may do for next year is sink a couple of Scaffold poles 6ft into the ground on either side of the garden, then sting a wire between them, and twine over the wire . . . And I can grow a Hallertau on the other side of the garden :party:

 

[Wez]

Good advice on the FG I'm a FG fan

You have to post pics if you sink those poles in :thumb:

 

[BrewStew]

wow what a co-incidence that this thread got started just as i got back from a weekend at the old dear's.

me mam's quite the green finger and is unlikely to be moving house anytime soon, unlike me being in rented accomodation. when she told me that she was going to dig up her grape vine and couldn't decide what to replace them with i piped up and said hops! dad's on board, especially after he tasted three of my beers and was well impressed.

so long story short, i now have a spot that sits in sunshine all day long for which to grow hops. i'll be watching this thread with much interest!!

i'm looking to grow either Hallertauer or Northern Brewer hops. where might i get me some that are ready for planting? and when is the best time to plant them?

 

[Aleman]

I have a contact with a nursery in Germany where I can get a whole range of Noble/Continental hops . . . Northern Brewer might be a bit tricky. For a lot of Varieties, there is Deacons on the Isle Of Wight, or A Plus Hops (Service is very patchy), And I have details of some others, but I'll need to do an email search for all the contact details

Pretty much any time is the best time to plant . . . You get them as a chunk of rhizome (Bit of woody stick) That you dig in a hole and cover with 1/3 John Innes No 3 , 1/3 Soil and 1/3 peat free compost. March/April time the bines will poke their heads above ground, Pick off the first few shoots (Fried in olive oil . . . nice) Then pick 3 or 4 bines to grow. Keep them well watered in the dry spells and feed once a week with liquid manure . . . . towards the mid to end of August a regular feed of Tomato Fertiliser will encourage good flower formation (high in Potassium).

That's really it, they are very hardy, and unless kept under control can take over a garden quite easily.

Just to reiterate, Hop Bines will grow to 25-30+ feet . . . You can train them horizontally though . . .but it is a lot of work trying to keep them from escaping. The support structures need to be strong

 

[MEB]

Aleman's advice here is pretty much all you need to know.

But i'll add some more for those who are interested...

Hops are a member of the Cannabis family-a little bit of useless information here- You can splice a cannabis plant onto a hop rhizone and it will grow quite happily. Same the other way round. When i say 'you can' that means i've had little success splicing any plant onto a different rootstock-except for Acers. But i'm told it can be done.

I've started doing some reasonable research into hop growing. It appears that the hop industry here in NZ has more power than the US government. Your NOT allowed a named var, your not allowed to grow more than one 'ornamental' var, your not allowed to germinate the seeds you get from hops supplied by NZ Hops and your certainly not allowed to become a hop grower unless you have 25 Hectares and $2 million to invest? So who would ever want to grow hops in NZ? What a blinkered stuck up bunch of twats.

So i've got a bunch of seeds from my Nelson Sauvin and NZ slovenians that i'm going to germ out at the weekend. :twisted: I plan to keep these under carefull control till i can weed out the males and begin my 'cubing' process. Cubing, for those who don't know is basically keeping an original and then systematically breeding it with generations of offspring till you get the desired result. Thats a very basic explanation there. As i've bred fish and plants for a living Mendels laws of genetics is a book i adsorbed and learnt from. It's quite interesting too. It's also how when weird claw handed 'circus' freaks had offspring the children had the trait too. It's because grandad would have offspring with his grand-daughter. Generally known as 'fixing'. Sick but unfortunately true. Perhaps this is why there are laws that stop that sort of thing nowadays??? Luckily though-not in fish. LOL

Hops need lots of sun in the UK. They thrive in full sun. They like rich soils-the uptake of nutrients to sustain the incredible growth rates is quite demanding. As Aleman stated it is quite hard to fcuk up hop plants-but it can be done. You need to really be on top of your game to grow them in pots-but it can be done. Personally(and this is just me) i'd prepare the soil prior to planting. I'd use fish meal, potash and some good quality medium-J innes 3 is fine-better still compost you have made your self from food scraps from the kitchen mixed with some newspaper and grass cuttings. I can give you the ratio's for mixing this up if your REALLY interested. Otherwise 10% fish or bone and the same of potash in the total volume of mix used should be ok. I'd then supplement this with liquid feeds. An organic fish meal would be ideal-right up untill the first signs of flowering started. Then STRAWBERRY food is more suited to the required NPK for hops than tom food but tom food would be fine. Again i'd use organic. My reason behind organic is simple. This is the first generation of children who are expected to have shorter lifespans than their parents. What are they fed with? Chemically fed foodstuffs. Doesn't take Einstein to work that out does it? I've been growing my own food crops for well over 20 years and i constantly try the new 'miracle grow' product on a selection of my food crops. Sure they grow well, yield more weight per plant etc. But no-one i've ever given any of my chemically grown veg's to has thought they were great tasting. Bigger yes, better, NO.

I've had this argument so many times i'm not going into it anymore. If you haven't grown organic then you cannot argue with me. So don't cos i'm not interested. I like growing organic, i've tried both-virtually every year. The organic's win every time. Yes it's more expensive to buy organic fert but it's so simple to make up some emulsified fish mix that the expense argue is unjustified. And your own organic compost is completely free, cuts down on landfill and can be made to suit requirements.

I'd encourage everyone to try and grow some hops. Let them be for the first season and DON'T expect a harvest-then you won't be disappointed. Your second season will yield some nice hop cones for you and then from the third you'll be laughing. Don't worry about AA%'s. Face it, your taking the fact that when the hops you are using were tested they were x% AA. You think they arrive to you with the same %? You think they remain the same for the month's after when you store them? Chances are No is the answer to all the above Q's. Just be content in the knowledge that your beer you have brewed was made with, hopefully, organic hops that you have grown yourself. Now how good would that be?

 

[fivetide]

Morning. The need to rip down my old hop bines and bed the root systems in for the winter has led me to write a series of blog posts on my personal experience of garden hop growing. I need somewhere to put up all those photos in one splurge. Anyway, the first episode is up - it may prove useful to some people thinking of planting in the spring. Cheers.

 

[fivetide]

Good morning beer lovers! As promised, the second and last post detailing how our own hops were amatuerishly harvested, dried and stored is now up on our website, with a dozen or so photos to look at, if you're interested.

I can't wait to see the first buds pop through the ground to grow into our 2009 bines! Who's growing for the first time then?

 

[BrewStew]

awesome post!

i'd better get my order in for a few rhizomes from the isle of white sharpish then if winter is the ideal time to plant

 

[Buzz]

Great pics Fivetide. Where did you get the WGV from as I use them a lot in my house ale and might be tempted to have a go. :thumb:

 

[Vossy1]

Gr8 write up F :thumb:

 

[Aleman]

Can I say that you should not worry about using home grown hops for bittering . . . brewers in the 1800's didn't know the AA of the hops they were using either . . . often they didn't know the variety :shock:

Go for it I say

 

[BrewStew]

Aleman,

as a guide, would you say that home grown hops are higher or lower in AA's? or about the same?

 

[Aleman]

If its a 'average' growing year then I would assume that they were the same as commercially grown, if its a poor year . . . like this one . . . then certainly lower

 

[BrewStew]

so would you say they're rarely higher and that no home grower would need to worry about over hopping?

 

[fivetide]

Cool! I'm going to buy a new Northern Brewer plant, but not until February I'd imagine.

 

[Aleman]

so would you say they're rarely higher and that no home grower would need to worry about over hopping?

Not really . . . In an exceptional year then you might end up with a higher AA than expected, but you can judge it by the amount of lupulin you see . . . My Fuggles this year did very poorly and the lupulin is less than I would see in commercial hops . . . so use more of them for bittering, or use them for flavour.

If you work on the basis of a 10 Year average for the commercial figures you won't go far wrong (the 10 Year average is what GW, MO and DL use in the recipe books . . . Durden park don't bother quoting Alphas in theirs )