Hop Garden

My dad has been growing hops for years. (There’s some still growing on the property from when he lived in the house as a teenager.)  I first became familiar with the climbing green plant from him. Though, some people look at me funny when I say Gavin & I are growing hops. “What are hops?” they ask. The following is a brief explanation for those who may be foreign to the craft beer scene.

Hops are the flowers (also called seed cones or strobiles) of the hop plant Humulus lupulus.^[1] They are used primarily as a bittering, flavoring and stability agent in beer, to which they, beyond bitterness, impart floral, fruity or citrusy flavors and aroma;^[2] though they are also used for various purposes in other beverages and herbal medicine. [Wikipedia]

Shown below is our process of putting in the hop garden.

• Setting the posts – Using 4″ x 4″ treated lumber, Gavin first tarred the base of them, dug down ~2 feet with a post hole digger, placed them, checked to see if they were level & concreted them in.
• “Grubbing it out” as Gavin puts it, which means taking a shovel & pulling up the grass so the dirt is exposed, creating a bed for them to grow in. (I’ll tell you that rolling up the sod like a burrito is only fun until you try to pick it up.)
• He strung stainless steel cable from each post then anchored 13 strands of thick twine down to the ground for the hops to climb up.
• Lastly came the planting. There are 5 varieties in all: Hallertau, Horizon, Magnum, Sorachi Ace & Centennial. To train them to climb, we gently twisted them in a clockwise rotation around the twine & up they go. We used peat moss afterwards to mulch around them.

We finished putting in the hops near the end of May, 2018. They will need to mature & establish for a couple of years before we use them. The end result will prove well worth the wait when we can enjoy a cold homemade IPA from the hops that we grew.