Grow Your Own

A little over a year ago, as part of a gift for my mother, I flew up to Oregon and installed a hops garden at my parents home in Tumalo.  I knew that they had some spare tipi poles lying around which I could use to create a unique frame for some hop vines.

After picking a good spot on their three acres I set to work, removing a small juniper and more than a few sizable rocks from the area.  The tipi (an 18 footer) went up and the rhizomes went in the ground, complete with a gravity fed soaker hose!  I can't quite remember at this point, but I think there were 16 plants--4 Chinook, 5 Centennial, and 7 Cascade--planted between each pair of poles, with two lengths of twine running up the each triangular face of the tipi.  Last season things went alright.  The plants only grew to about 6 feet and 3 Cascade plants never even broke ground.  I'd chalk it up to planting a little late in an already short growing season.

This season, things are looking much better.  We replaced 3 Cascades that didn't make it and did a little fertilizing.  This year the soaker is running 24 hours a day, which is okay in such sandy soil and the plants seem to love it.  The result?  The biggest hop cone you've ever seen!

Clearly there is more growing to be done.  But the sides are filling in quite nicely and it's creating a neat space inside.  Hopefully this season the entire thing will fill in, but definitely in a couple years, once all the plants really mature, this will be quite the cool spot to grab some shade and enjoy an Arnold Palmer or a cool beer, if you're into that sort of thing.

From a brewing standpoint, this is also quite exciting.  I'll need to teach my parents when and how to harvest, but I think I can look forward to an impressive shipment of fresh hops to play around with this fall.  The only problem is that once the plants get to the top they will just start tangling around and create a big, knotted mess.  While this will work wonders to create shade in the middle of the day it may not be so easy to determine which hops are which during harvest.  The solution?  Say "fuck it" and just brew away!  Chinook, Centennial and Cascade can all be used as late addition hops and work well in APAs and IPAs, so I think blindly adding hops by the fistful in the last 10 minutes of the boil could yield some great, one-time-only big hoppy beers.  Talk about seasonal brewing.