Does this title sound like a horror film? Good! Because that’s what a hops harvest most closely resembles. At first, though, there is the novelty, that is very much like a bunch of teenagers at an abandoned summer camp…
The novelty began with the harvest of the first of our four hops poles. If you recall from hops post #1, I had cleverly engineered a 4-rope pully system that was intended to allow us to lower one rope at a time, unclip it from the main guideline, cut the hops, and gracefully slide the bines off the rope in order to harvest the hops cones in a comfortable setting off to the side. However, you may recall from hops post #2 that the bines entangled themselves at the top of the pole, which quashed that part of the plan. Instead, two of us working together lowered all four ropes at once, and cut them apart in order to free the ropes. There was also no graceful sliding off the ropes, as the bines wrapped themselves too tightly for that kind of nonsense.
Once freed from the entrapments of the pole and the root system, we laid the 4 bine+rope lines out on the lawn and worked our way through them one at a time. The photo below shows the lines ready for harvesting. Again, this is the smallest (and easiest) of our 4 poles!
At this stage, the ripest cones are about 2-3 inches long, a beautiful, chartreuse shade of green, with the tiniest bit of browning starting to appear along the edges of the petals. During the novelty stage of the harvest, we just stood in the yard and worked our way down each line, picking the hops cones off one by one.
We picked hops cones for over three hours (close to seven person-hours) and we harvested about a third of a garden bag. Once dried, this will amount to about 800 grams of hops. As near as I can tell, it takes 200-400 grams of fresh dried hops to make a 5 gallon keg of beer.
Novelty over.
A fun discovery during the hops harvest, which I executed in shorts and a tank top while Jeff, much more astutely, executed in long-sleeves and jeans, is that the plants are literally crawling with zillions of Asian Lady Beetles, which are absolutely NOT ladybugs, no matter how cute you think they look or how many aphids they supposedly eat. What they do, when you disturb their hops habitat, is fly onto your bare skin and freaking bite you. Like a bunch of little buggers.
The final step in our hops harvest adventure is to dry and freeze the cones. We rigged up a little shelving unit, purchased from Amazon and then outfitted with several extra shelves make from chicken wire and duct tape (engineering degree to the rescue once again!). Then Jeff set up a cheapo little fan behind the shelving and we just left it there for a few days. Once the hops was dry enough, we jammed it into Ziplock bags in 200 gram bunches and stuck in the freezer. Now to find someone looking to make 4 kegs of beer.
And eventually, we’ll move on to the next three poles. OMG. Note to self: wear long sleeves and pants!
