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.
