Most folks know that hops is used in beer but brewers aside, few people know what it really is or why.
js
-- PHOTO OF THE WEEK:
Nice hops, and love your telescope as well...nice place you got there.
Gerard
I've been tempted to grow golden hops as an ornamental several times, but have yet to buy a vine or two.
Cheryl
Well do it and you can give me the cones to make beer.. I like Cascade, Perle, and Tetnanger.
Also, I thought hops were used as preservative in beer.
Great hop pictures! I worked as office manager for a hop farm here in Idaho for about 15 years so I'm well aware of what hops are. :-) Even learned to like the pungent smell of hops when they were harvested. NEVER learned to like the smell of hop trash (what's left after the cones are shaken off the vines). In the winter, you did NOT want to follow a truck that was hauling the hop trash out to spread on the fields.
worse than rotten spuds??? Buzz--hauled the 'taters
That was one of the original reasons; now it's mostly for flavor.
I guess rotten potatoes and rotten fermented hop vines are probably pretty much equal in the stink category!
Where in Idaho are the hops grown? I live in Eastern Washington, might be an interesting trip.
Bill
Two areas in Idaho - northern Idaho - almost to the Canadian border and the area around Caldwell, Parma, & Wilder, Idaho (southwest Idaho where I live). Not nearly as many hops being grown around here any more. The farm I worked for got completely out of the hop business a year after I retired and others have cut back on their acreage. Hops are terribly expensive to grow with lots of hand labor required and not as much money in them as there used to be.
Is that the reason hops completely disappeared from CA?
nb ....3 summers on a Sacramento hops farm
Will do Dan!
C
Very nice photo. I first saw hops growing when we visited the historic Strawberry Banke village in New Hampshire. They were being used as a decorative vine on a fence and arbor and were quite attractive.
My son-in-law is growing a few selected varieties for home beer brewing that he ordered from someplace in Oregon. In their second year, the vines are quite pretty and there is enough "fruit" to harvest.
gloria p
Not sure. When I first started working for the hop farm (1983) I think hop growing in California had already disappeared. If not then, soon after.
Isn't the internet great? Film of early hops farming around Sacrament:
Thanks for the link!
Not completely. Take a look at this link...
Rick Knight
I saw that, but thanks. Turns out that Signorotti guy has hops farms in states other than CA, too. I didn't work for him and didn't work in Sloughhouse, but worked on a farm out on Sloughhouse Rd near there. I was by there about a year ago. It was all ranchettes and horse farms and riding academies.
Hops used to be heavy business in CA. All that housing developement between Hwy 50 and the American River near Watt Ave used to be hopyards, too. I now live a hundred miles away, in the greater SFBA, and there's still remnants of that era. In the next town over is a major thoroughfare, Hopyard Rd.
nb
Tell me more about that "shaken". We tediously pick them and it aint fun.
js
Shaking isn't something that you could do at home very easily. When the hop trucks arrive at the picker, the hop vines are attached to chains with hooks that pull the hop vines up out of the trucks. The vines are shaken violently enough that the hop cones fall off. Then the hops go by conveyor to the dryer where the hops are dried to the desired moisture content. I asked my boss how he knew when the hops were dry enough. He had done it for so many years, he could tell if they were dry enough just by sticking his hand in the drying hops. The hops are then baled in burlap using a big press.
When my sister-in-law was a teenager she used to work in the hop yards picking hops by hand. I can't imagine picking 100s of acres of hops by hand, but that's how they used to do it. Must have taken humongous crews to get them all picked or maybe there wasn't as many acres in hops then.
Now the hops are grown on high trellises and a worker in a crow's nest cuts the vines and strings at the top. Another worker cuts the vines and string at ground level and the hops drop into trucks with high sides and off they go down the road to the picker with some of the vines dragging along behind! Although some growers in Europe have tested growing hops on low trellises. Since I'm not around the hop business anymore, I don't know whether that became a feasible option or not.
There - that's probably more than you ever wanted to know about harvesting hops!
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.