Harvest Ale 2008

Wild hops from both locations were picked last Sunday and used in a Harvest ale brew on Monday. Dried the leftovers - about an oz of each type, and will be using them as dry hop additions in the keg.


Here is a pic of the dried hop cones. MM on top, Sudbury on the bottom.

Wild Hop update for "other" batch

Pics taken 8/20/08:

Many hop cones are turning brown even though they are still too green to pick.

Hard to see from this pic, but cones are growing everywhere here - all over the vegetation and even in the trees. Cones here are not turning as brown as the other section.

Road Hop Update

Pics taken 8/02/08

More Wild Hops Found

Another stash of wild hops were found in the area. Unfortunately these hops have lots of male plants growing around them and ended up being seeded last year - but they had a good pungent aroma. I will attempt to make some beer from these if no one beats me to the harvest.

Photos taken 7/26/08

The three following pictures look like the male hop bines growing over the rest of the vegetation.

The rest are pictures of female hops in burr stage - ranging from beginning of burring to near the end where bracts are starting to form the basis of hop cones.

This last one is a closeup of one of the most developed burrs. You can see the bracts of the future hop cone just starting to develop.

Road Hops 2008

Photos taken 07/20/08





Hops are wrapping around the utility pole and on the support wire to the left of the pole - growing all the way to the top of the pole. Hopefully a crew does not come and chop them all off the pole - I don't care if they pare them back from the top since I won't be able to get to those anyway. They are also growing on the left and right of the path on other vegetation and the guard rail.






Here's a closeup of buds about to burr. No male plants were spotted in the area and last year's harvest didn't have any seeds.






This is the story of my discovering these hops and what I did with them last year.


At the end of the summer this year, I was driving to dinner with my wife and in-laws after a day of house hunting (I need a place to grow my own hops) and spotted a bush with yellow berry like droplets clinging on for dear life as it was growing around an utility pole on the side of the road. While my wife and her parents were disussing the houses that we saw that day I yelled out "HOPS!!!!". As soon as I passed the bush, I slammed on the brakes and made a quick turnaround to verify what I saw.



Yup, they were hops all right. Luckily my inlaws know about my freakish love of hops and my wife's father is a hop head himself - I thank him for passing his ideals to my wife ;-) - and were not startled or scared by my excitement. The next day my father-in-law and I went back to the bush and started picking all of the largest cones. I thought they were ready to pick since they were large and had a paper like feel, but after drying them out and seeing them shrink to a the size of peanut told me otherwise.
But I did brew with those "road hops" two weeks later. I planned to make a harvest ale that was based on a malty brown ale base, but knew that I wanted to use wet hops as well as freshly dried hops and commercial varieties to round out the aroma and flavor and hedge against it being too grassy since they were wild hops and I had no idea what impact they would have on the beer. On the morning of the brew day, I got the mash going as usual, and while the mash was resting, headed out to pick the hops. An hour later I returned with a grocery bag full of fresh hops. I added a few handfulls while collecting the wort (first wort hopping with fresh wild hops!) so that I could pull them out pretty much intact during the boil - again I did not want to overpower the beer with grassy bitterness. Here is a pic of the hops swimming in the wort - don't you love my low tech rig ? Check out the aluminum "sparge arm".






I added commercial hops for bitterness and througout the boil and towards the end of the boil I threw in more handfuls of fresh hops as well as some of the previously dried wild hops I picked two weeks prior. A sip of the wort before fermentation told me that I did not overdo it and the wild hops imparted a nice spiciness - not the train wreck I was hoping to avoid. After two weeks of primary fermentation, I transferred the beer to a keg and added about an ounce of freshly dried wild hops (the second picking) along with an ounce of centennial and cascade hops. The beer came out wonderful with just a little elongated grassy bitterness from the fresh hop addtions, but it had an upfront hop flavor and aroma of wild and commercial hops all tied together and balanced by sweet malt.

Sierra Nevada Harvest Ale

This is the first year that Sierra Nevada has bottled their Harvest Ale - previously this could only be found on draft at a few select bars around the country, so it is good to see a wider distribution and its nice to be able to enjoy a few of them at home and not have to worry about getting in a car afterward.

Although this is an enjoyable beer with a deep malt backbone, I don't believe that this one lives up the hoppy hype that is depicted on its own label. For me (see my thoughts on fresh hop beer), this one is indicitive of all fresh hop beers where there is not the hop aroma or flavor that you get from using dry hops, but gives a pleasing elongated grassy bitterness. Contrary to what one might think when reading the statement "Fresh hops are richer in natural hop resins producing unmatched aromatics and layers of spicy-sweet notes that hop fanatics like us dream of all year", this one is a malt forward beer with only a bit of hop spiciness in the nose and a grassy bitterness that barely offsets the deep crystal malt flavors.

Good to see another seasonal from Sierra Nevada, but this one will only get me to buy a couple of bottles as a novelty to get me by until Celebration hits the stores.

Hoppy Beers Deteriorate Faster Than Dark Beers

Just a quick note to emphasize my views about oxidation of hoppy beers that I stated in this article.

In an interview with Hugh Sisson of Clipper City, Andy Crouch asks Hugh how important is freshness dating?

I think it’s pretty important from thew standpoint that it gives you some
credibility with consumers. The only thing that is tough about it is that
quantifying anything in one simple measurement is typically misleading. For
example, because of the nature of the dark malt in darker beers, there is a good
resistance to oxidation. Dark beers could be dated a hell of a lot longer than
they are. One of the things that people don’t understand is that the most
delicate beer we make is the Loose Cannon because of all the hops that are in
it. The hop compounds will oxidize quite quickly and that’s kind of
counterintuitive. Many people think IPA’s will wear like iron. Guess what,
they’re wrong. At least doing something that gives the consumer some sort of
criteria in determining whether something is fresh is a good idea. Anything we
can do to give a consumer a way of determining whether the product is as it
should be is good.

Just because hops are considered a beer stabilizer and has antiseptic properties, doesn't mean that hop forward beers won't oxidize faster than beers with lesser hop character.

Hops - The New Wonder Drug?

Up until now, I've only known hops to give pure enjoyment in the aroma, flavor, and bitterness it lends to beer and to help when you are having trouble sleeping. Now pharamcutical companies are looking to hops to help with joint pain and other inflammatory related health problems.

Metagenics has announced that it has been awarded new patents related to Luduxin and Tetrase which provide anti-inflammatory properties good for joint health. Metagenics says that it has linked these two-hop derived ingredients to help against inflammation in a number of health conditions such as osteoarthritis, autoimmune disease, low bone mineral density and metabolic syndrome. The antioxidant properties of hops also help regulate substances such as eicosanoids, cytokines, and damaging free radicals that can negatively effect health. The company also says that by comprising reduced iso-alpha acid derivatives, Luduxin and Tetrase offer effective anti-inflammatory support with high degrees of predicted safety. Metagenics is also continuing to look for additional applications for this new technology.

Metagenics is not the first to develop extracts and derivatives from hops to use as an anti-inflammatory supplement. Pharmachem and John I Haas (JIH) have collaborated on the introduction of a standardized extract of hops - Perluxan - to help relieve pain caused by inflammation.

Considering all the snowboarding I do and the injuries I have sustained to my ankles and knees, maybe someday I will be ingesting hops in pill form as well as liquid form. More hops can't be a bad thing.