How to grow hops in your garden
The plants, perennials, leaf out every spring and usually put out pounds of buds in the late summer.
If you love the bitter, citrusy or floral notes of an India pale ale, you can thank hops for that: The conelike flowers provide a bitter kick and balance the malty, sweet characteristics in any beer. They are especially prevalent in the more bitter beers.
And if you love brewing with hops, or just like drinking beer, you should know the plants are easy to grow in your backyard.
The plants, perennials, leaf out every spring and usually put out pounds of buds in the late summer. Before Prohibition, Northern California was a hops hotbed. These days, they’re mainly grown in the Pacific Northwest, but many California homebrewers have plants of their own — and you may have spotted Sacramento-based Ruhstaller Beer’s hops farm off Highway 80 near Dixon.
Growing your own hops is as simple as acquiring a rhizome (a segment of hop plant root), planting it in the ground in early spring against something it can climb upon and making sure it gets adequate water and plenty of sunlight.
Rhizomes can typically be ordered online or from some specialty homebrew stores. More Beer in Los Altos, for example, offers Cascade, Centennial, Chinook and other types, and shipping is free. You’ll want to order or pre-order them in the next few weeks, and plant them in the early spring, after the last frost has finished.
Gary Glass, director of the American Homebrewers Association, says one of the most notable aspects of the plants is how quickly they can grow. The vinelike plants, or bines, can grow as much as a foot per day, he said. Hence the importance of planting them next to something climbable.
“Commercial growers will grow them up to 18 feet tall, but for those of us who aren’t going to put up poles and string, you can use a trellis or anything that allows them to grow and keeps them off the ground,” he says. Leaving the bines on the ground makes them more susceptible to mold and diseases.
There’s a reason commercial growers want to keep them that large.
“The taller they get, the more hops they’ll produce,” says Ryan Burnett, who works at Star B Ranch and Hop Farm in Ramona, in eastern San Diego County. “An 18-foot hop vine will produce more than a 10foot hop vine.”
Phillip Warren, who runs Hopportunity Farms, a pick-your-own hops operation in eastern San Diego County, recommends starting with just a few plants and choosing well-known varieties that do well in California, such as Cascade, Nugget or Magnum hops, to see how they fare.
The plants need not only plenty of sun, but also plenty of water, says Warren, who gives each of his plants 3 to 4 gallons of water per week using a drip system that waters them every other day. There’s a fine line between enough water and too much, though, and overwatering can lead to root rot. Look at the ground: If the soil looks muddy or if there’s sitting water anywhere, you are overwatering.
The vines’ signature cone-shaped flowers are typically ready to be picked in August or September, but depending on weather and conditions, it’s possible to harvest early some years — and to do it twice.
Warren says he can get as much as 1.5 pounds from each of his hop plants. Homebrewer Robert Wise, who has grown hops in Long Beach and on Coronado Island, gets a couple of pounds per plant most seasons, but one year, he harvested 5 pounds from a plant.
“I pick the flowers as they come up,” he says, “and if you pick the plant completely bare in say, the end of June, early July, it’ll sprout a whole new batch of flowers by September.”
You don’t need a lot of hops for beer making. For a 5-gallon brew, Wise uses half to a full ounce of hops. But hop buds need to dry before they can be added to beer.
When Glass was growing his own hops, he’d set the buds on a window screen, placed on an elevated platform, so air could blow through them and dry them. Wise puts his hops in a tray and lets them dry in a sunny area.
At the end of the season, Wise cuts his hop plants down to the rhizomes so they can sprout again next year.