Storm Brewing wrote: ↑Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:10 pm
I am a newbie to the art of growing hops and expect to be harversting soon. I have two bines, a Fuggles and a Notts Eastwell. They are against a 10 foot south facing wall at the moment so the bines have reached the top and cascaded down 2-3 feet.
I have some elementary questions if someone is able to advise?
1. When can i expect to harvest this year ( i live in Bedfordshire 10 miles north of Luton - i understand latitude is a significant factor??)
2. I understand the principles of drying the hops for storage but if you use the hops straight away can you use them fresh without drying?
As others have indicated, you harvest when they're ready. Latitude is important to hops because flowering etc is very day-length sensitive, but the whole of the UK is "in the zone" from that perspective, it's more just a question of temperature. Harvest will be earlier in a hot summer in Scotland than in a cold summer in Kent.
The Tuesday after August Bank Holiday is the traditional start of the hop harvest, in Kent at least, and it goes through the whole of September. Obviously it varies a bit depending on what the weather has been like - it might be a week later this year because of the cool weather, and quality definitely varies with vintage - the cloudiness in August this year means they're likely to be "earthier" than usual, you need direct sun to really bring out the citrus flavours.
And harvest time depends on the variety as well - there are early, maincrop and late varieties, the Goldings family (which includes Eastwell) tend to be earlier than Fuggles and obviously something like Amos Early Bird will be earlier than the other Goldings.
But bottom line - expect them to be ready in mid September, but don't rely on the calendar, let the hops tell you when they're ready. You want at least some of the "petals" of some the cones to be just starting to go brown, and the cones in general to be somewhat "papery".
As for question 2 - yes. If you want to Google more, the language gets confusing - in Kent they refer to green hops, and that usage seems to be the norm in most of the UK, not least because it's great for branding commercial beers even if it is a bit meaningless from a literal point of view. In the US they tend to use "wet hops". And UK commercial brewers tend to use 7x the weight they would use for dried hops, whereas in the US the ratio tends to be quoted as 5-6x, I'm not sure whether that's reflecting actual moisture content of hops grown in their near-desert conditions, or just that their hops tend to be more aromatic than ours.
Drying evaporates a lot of the most delicate hop compounds, so to really appreciate what green hops bring compared to dried hops, you want to use them at cooler temperatures, after the boil if possible - and aside from not knowing the alpha content, using them for bittering is a bit of a waste unless you've got more than you know what to do with. So just as a rule of thumb, if you only have a few green hops you want to use them in the whirlpool or as dry hops, and then work "backwards" as you get more. Also it can work quite well to pick some early for brewday, and then have a second picking (from the same bine or a different one) for a dry hop a week or two later. They do need to be totally fresh, they need to go from bine to wort in a matter of hours - certainly within 24 hours, the Kent brewers would say that even after 12 hours they are only good for compost. The amount of green matter is a bit of a problem, I would only dry hop for 24 hours or so, to minimise the amount of "green" flavours - and also it physically absorbs a lot of wort.
It's a lot of work - but the results are truly special, probably my desert island beer would be a EKG green hop bitter of 4.5% or so, just a good pale malt and no crystal or anything.
