We Have Slain The Hop Monster!

     When first we set eyes on our new Portland residence, we thought "what a dump, but with potential..." and as we discovered all sorts of odd and bizarre quirks, we noticed this old, limbless trunk with wire fencing around it. It wasn't the only odd, cordoned off section of terrain with indiscernible purpose, and we figured what the hell, lets wait 'em out and see what happens. Well, this one particular tree along the back fence eventually started becoming the ladder for some kind of vine that we couldn't identify. So we continued to do all of our other home and garden activities and ignored it for a long time.
   
     Then, my partner noticed that the leaves had a familiar shape that she had suspicions about... and a session via web browser later we were convinced that we may just have a hop vine growing in our yard (time for a bit of giddy delight). What we could not yet know, however, was the sex of the plant... yes, if it had been a female, there would be no story to tell here because it would have shown off some blossoms and been otherwise useless to the telling of this tale.

     We went to Portland Nursery (we love it) and checked out the hop varieties they had to match up our leaves. It was without a doubt a hop vine, and by our best leaf comparison it looked to be a Magnum variety, which would make an good primary alpha hop when used in the making of potpourri, (wHAt?!?) sorry, I meant BEER. We went home and started thinking "Okay, now what?" I decided in my heart, right then and there, or sometime in that general time period, at least, that if it produced any cones, we were going to use them to make Beer (we'd been planning to start homebrewing for a while, but hadn't yet committed to the supplies to do so yet.) We still weren't so sure about the sex of the plant, so we asked the representative from Seven Dees Nursery (when we went to OMSI After Dark) about what we should look for, and he assured us that if someone went to the trouble of planting hops in the yard, it would most assuredly be a male.

     He was right, soon we had little tendrils with tiny budding cones appearing all up and down that rapidly growing vine. Within a month that 20 foot tall Cedar trunk was entirely enveloped by what we started to dub "The Hop Monster". We watched, waited, and shared big smiles as we watched those tiny little buds start growing from spiky little balls into green petaled balls and then into bright pale green cones! I started doing research into when the right time to harvest would be... and that was actually more difficult than I thought it would be, because I found a ton of conflicting opinions and advice. I decided to take a laid-back approach and sort of took the aggregate view of let them get full and pick 'em before they dry-up.

     Once the cones stated showing a browning trend I started to accelerate the harvest preparation. The race was on to build or buy a food dehydrator (we bought) and pick a good day to start pulling all those vines! As I saw a whole shoot go brown in one day I started to get rather worried and anxious that they would all go without warning and all that anticipation would have been unfruitful.

     So as the day came, we got out the gloves and started pulling, but we had no ladder, no good means of climbing that trunk, and no pole pruner. Yeah, we put a lot of effort in preparing for this harvest operation, can you tell? so we had out our little step-stool, our shrub rake, pruners, and the hoe, and we pulled and cut and unraveled as best we could but we could only get the vines about halfway up. Then our friends showed up. We had offered to give them some of our harvest for making a wet-hopped Beer and fortunately David is a little taller than the rest of us and was invaluable in helping get all but the very top of the trunk cleared! Suddenly we were swimming in hop cones with enough to load up a bag to send as a thank-you and still have loads left over!

     We got a little scratched up and a wee bit warm out in the sun, but we left that thing almost as bare as how we first found it (we will get those other cones down, I swear it.) now the drying process has begun and I'll tell you how they turn out. Next week: we plunge into the Craft of Homebrewing with a heap-ton of homegrown hops... this had better work!