Hop harvest

My hops were finally ready to pick Sunday. I was afraid the days of rain we've had would ruin them, but no such thing. When we finally had a dry day, my hops were fine, and just ready for harvesting.

I shot this same branch in an earlier post. You can see how much the cones have grown in a week.


I picked more than 5 oz. of Sterling hops, and about 3 oz. of Cascade. Here's the Sterling. Btw, I didn't do anything to enhance the colors. Hops are really this beautiful.


I added my Cascade hops fresh into a pale ale I was brewing. I'd already added bittering hops (Super styrians) – you can tell by the hop gunk on the spoon and the sides of the brewpot. The fresh hops are just for aroma.


And there it goes. I've never had fresh hop beer, so I'm really looking forward to this.


As for the Sterling hops, they went into my new food dehydrator so I could ready them for later use. They'll be going into the Oktoberfest I brew later this month.


Here are the Sterling hops in a one-ounce, vacuum-sealed bag. I froze them for later. Once the hops were dried, they only weighed two ounces, so I have one more bag frozen with this one.

As for my fresh-hop pale, I tossed in Safale-04 Ale Yeast, and when I woke up for work 6 hours later, it was already happily bubbling away. That should have been a hint.

When I got home, the airlock was filled with green bubbles, and it was starting to bubble through the holes in the cover. As I was getting some sanitary solution together, I heard a hiss. It was spraying straight up against the ceiling of my closet, and onto my clothes, too.

I'm not sure why it overflowed. I had a gallon of empty space in my carboy, and it wasn't a high-gravity beer. But I do have a lot of beers that start fermenting vigorously, then die off almost completely after a few days. I'm not sure why.

Hops are almost ready

Here's one of my Sterling hop plants. I ordered some Nugget, Cascase and Sterling, two rhizomes each, from Northern Brewer and started them in pots after a few days in the fridge.



They all grew in the pots, but one of the Nugget vines didn't survive transplant into the ground. The other hasn't grown well. The leaves are yellowing and it hasn't produced any flowers or cones. Maybe it'll do better next year.



There are a couple of things I did wrong. One was not to prune enough. When my job at the newspaper went full time, it coincided with my getting a ton of hours at Staples and I hardly saw my vines for weeks. The other mistake was not properly supporting them. I started with a tomato trellis for each type. After a week and a half, the Sterling vines had outgrown its trellis. So I found a long piece of edgework that was eventually supposed to go in my house somewhere. I pushed about a foot of it into the ground and wrapped the vine around it. The vine climbed up that, too, and hung off, and grew back down the vine, then up itself and just got more and more tangled. That diagonal stick you see above is the original piece of wood, weighed down by the weight of the vine and the cones. The green post beside it is a metal vine trellis I picked up at Lowe's. I really underestimated how fast hop vines grow. I'll still get a good yield this year, but next year I'll be better prepared.