2011 Hops crop

[Hawoh]

Hawoh: kinda jealous of your crop there... looks excellent

I'm thinking of using mine wet. My biggest bounty (pictured) are Nugget so my plan is to probably use them all in one shot towards a batch modeled after Troegs Nugget Nectar. Although it tempting to keep some and spread them over more than one brew.

[Dave Savoie]

Is there any real benifit to using wet hops VS freshly dried ones and do wet hops give more of a Vegetal or green flavor

[JohnQ]

My 2 thoughts on this are that A) my soil is too acid/basic for their liking or B) They really love heat, which they got more of being in black pots above ground.  (I suppose a combination of both isn't out of the question.)
B

Is it possible that the the 2 in the pots had much better drainage, as they tend to want the rhizome wet, but the roots not so much?  Pots tend to drain the liquid and only retain the dampness that the soil has absorbed.

It was lack of sufficient drainage that totalled my crop, and the ones that I've rescued are still between 2 and 4 feet.

I know my gardener has to water her planters every day, while the stuff in the ground can go much longer without adding water.

JQ

[Brian_S]

So hows the harvest going?

I just picked my 5 month old potted teamakers (2 plants) and got 16oz of wet cones, as a comparison my 3 year old cascade produced ~34oz of wet cones (2 plants).  There appears to be a definite advantage in yield by potting rather than ground planting a baby plant.  (A larger sample is required of course)

I also did a wet hopped batch of the Haus Pale ale from Homebrewtalk and man does it smell nice.  I increased the quantity of each hop addition by a factor of 5.5 to compensate for the extra moisture......Ummm 11 oz of cascade.

B

[JohnQ]

What emoticon would be the appropriate one for envy?

JQ

[Brian_S]

So any updates?  Did anyone gets cones and if so how did you go about drying and packaging?

B

[Kyle]

no cones this year, but lots of leaves. Next year they'll go in the ground instead of containers. All 7 plants lived.

[brew]

No cones for me either - my cascade seemed to have a hard summer - but they are in the ground now and will stay there...

[Hawoh]

I only got about 20 grams in the 1st year of my Nugget plant and 0 grams of Cascade in its first year, so don't be discouraged by 1st year results. They take a couple years to mature and really yield a good crop.

To top things off, this year was a horrible year, at least for my hops. I have a lot of cones, but a lot have browned and died, which I've never seen before.

[Richard]

Yeah mine are thin on the ground (or rather, the vine) too... I'm cool with that if they perform better next year.

[Thomas]

I'm late to the hop harvest here but I wanted to throw in my results. Unfortunitly I labeled all my plants with marker on duct tape and quickly lost track of which plants were which, but I had a kinda awesome harvest. I had to move for September 1st, which meant cutting down my huge hops and tomato plants, but had I left my hops in place I could have done a few brews. All of my plants produced cones, likely 3-6oz wet per plant. I picked off what I could and dried them, but they were still slightly immature and I won't be using them for anything other then looking pretty in a bowl. Even though I grew my plant in 4 gal pots on my deck they took off like crazy. By the end of september they had taken over the deck, each plant had 2-6 bines, and had grown all along my 20 foot deck.