Anybody grown their own hops?

You've just hit the jackpot! ;-) My 'Grow-Hops' Yahoo Group now has

835 members; most of them either already grow their own hops or, like you, are looking for information specifically about growing hops. I'm sure that you will find that we are the largest and best resource on the Internet for information about growing hops. Photos, Links, Files, etc. Please visit us at

Cheers.

Bill Velek - PERSONAL sites =

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830+ members Grow-Hops, Barley or Herbs: 820+ homebrewer group just for Equipment:

Bill Velek wrote in news:83938$47a0ebb2$6214cdf6 $ snipped-for-privacy@ALLTEL.NET:

Thanks a million!

Going to sign up now.

Sort of, my neighbor down the street has wild hops growing and has shared some with me. I have no idea what they are, but they make a nice finishing hop. Other than just to do it all yourself, I regard growing your own hops in the same category as growing and malting your own barley... you can do it, but it's not clear that you can do it better, so it's just for fun.

Upstate NY is one of the prime places to grow hops, and used to be the hop capital of the country. You can still grow a fine hop, but you really need 12-14 ft frames and the equipment to harvest. Either that or a lot of fenced land where dogs don't roam.

You can see hops growing at the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown NY, if you want to make a weekend trip. Baseball Hall of Fame, Fenimore Museum, Farmer's Museum, Omegang Brewery and Cooperstown Brewing.

I've never grown and malted my own barley, so I can't really compare it with growing hops. However, let me speculate a little bit. Growing and harvesting barley has got to be a "bitch" ... really. I can't even imagine a nice plot of barley in my yard that is not filled with weeds; since grains are 'broadcast', and therefore don't grow in "rows", how does a person even conceivably get into the plot to weed it? And most of us don't own a scythe. I guess we can take a sharp butcher knife and grab handfuls of barley and cut it that way ... but then we need to 'thresh' it. I can't envision me or my family tossing barley up in the air on a windy day to get rid of the chaff; but I suppose there are modern techniques ... if you can afford/justify them on a small scale. Okay, now that you've worked your ass off to produce grain that you can probably buy more cheaply somewhere, and which probably is just as good in quality or better ... you need to malt it. At this point, I'm actually personally interested, but with using barley that I can buy from some other source so that I can avoid the headaches of growing it. From what I've read in "Homebrewer's Garden" (by Joe & Dennis Fisher), I suspect that with the right equiptment that can be given double duty (e.g., an aquarium pump and airstone that you can use for malting and also for making yeast starters), you can malt barley with a whole lot less effort that growing it. But to each their own!

Now, let's compare that with growing hops. At todays prices, a person can typically harvest up to a hundred bucks worth of hops from a single plant, based on harvests of up to 2.5 pounds/plant times $40.00/pound. And I can't imagine that it would take anywhere NEAR the amount of work as growing barley.

Denny Conn grows along a chain-link fence, IIRC, and harvests about 2.5 pounds from one plant. I built an arbor using two parallel trellises,

12' apart, that are 8' tall. Many growers find walls on their homes to grow against -- see the pic at

I use a pair of scissors to cut the bine and the twine that supports it, and a large plastic bin to gather it (a cardboard box will do just fine)

Last year (my first to grow), my 'lab' took to sleeping in the shade of the hop bines; hops are known to promote very vivid dreams in humans, so I'm wondering it that's why he kept sleeping under them. I never saw him eat any; frankly, I'm pretty sure that dogs are no more interested in eating raw hops than in eating raw poison ivy or other vegetation; I believe it's the sweetness that hops have after they are boiled in wort that makes them appealing to dogs.

I'm very satisfied with growing hops. If anyone is interest, we have a LOT of info at

-- which now has

945 members. I'm confident that we now are the largest organized group of hop growers on the Internet ... or even in the world.

Cheers.

Bill Velek