Serendipity

On a visit to a local Alpaca farm this weekend, we ran into a display of a farm in the area I had not been aware of: Pompey Mountain Hop Farm, located just down the road from us.  These people are pros, as I could tell by grabbing two fistfuls of dryed hops cones from last year and taking a good sniff.  Instant trancendence.  I tried to install an early love of the hops in my son by putting a cone up to his nose to smell, but he just smacked my hand away and pointed at the big John Deere going past with a heart-felt 'Uh!!'.  Oh well.  He is only one.

What could be better than finding a pile of lusty hops on a such a Sunday? The nice lady said that they will be selling rhizome stock of their 5 varieties next spring. 

That, my friends, is serendipity.  

Now we're hopping

In 2007, we planted four varieties of hops along the silo, in the hoppes the silo would make a good trellis. We even made twine runners up and hoisted them up with a rope. That didn't work so good, because we found that the hops ripened at different times, but were all connected at the top by the one rope, so they all had to be harvested at once.

Not this year. A joint design effort produced the device below, which hangs on the rim of the silo and allows us to lower the vines for each plant from inside the silo. After building two of four and putting them in place, it looks like it will work great. In the two days between building them and photographing them, the vines had already grabbed the twine and started their clockwise spiral up. One (the Columbia) even has a vine 12 feet tall already.

Hops Drying

After we harvested the hops this summer, I tried two different methods of drying, both suggested in the Homebrewer's Garden. The first method was to place the hops in a food dehydrator with a temperature control device. Since my dehydrator doesn't have said device, I took a risk and tried to keep an eye on them. Well, this didn't prove all that successful. Some of the hops got over dry on the outside (brown and crispy) while others were still retaining some moisture. I eventually pulled the plug on this method and bagged what I thought was salvagable in double Ziplock Freezer bags and put them in the freezer.

Method two was to air dry the hops in a paper grocery bag. This worked much better (the hops kept their coloring and dried completely. I am not sure if the occasional shaking dislodged some of the lupulin though. However, it was very aromatic to open the bag when finished drying, which took about how long the book said (I don't remember exactly but I think it was 3-5 days). This method was suitable because we had a managable amount of hops. If we had had a larger yield, another method of drying would probably be necessary. The hops dried this way were also bagged (separately from the dehydrator hops) and frozen.

Time will tell if the hops crop this year was a success as they were used in the Jumping Jack Steam Ale currently aging.

We also need to determine how and when to pick the hops, if there is a way to prolong production, and if the various varieties come into season at different times.