growing hops at home (in brisbane)

i always assumed that hops only grew in temperate climates, and figured that brisbane’s humid sub-tropical climate wouldn’t really be suitable. i really liked the idea of growing my own hops, so not one to be beaten, i thought i would give it a crack anyway. here’s my experience from rhizome to harvest…

i bought my hops rhizomes off ebay of all places. after doing some googlage, i found there are various places to buy them, but ebay seemed to be the easiest at the time. i bought them mid-october last year – they arrived in some loose mulch and looked (not surprisingly) like roots… disclaimer here – i am not a botanist or horticulturalist, so i don’t really know what i’m talking about.

hops rhizome ready to go into the earth

hops need a good quality soil. not too heavily fertilised (to begin with anyway) and most importantly they need a well drained soil – a good sandy loam with something natural like manure or compost mixed in should do the trick. if you’re planting in a poorly drained area you could try mounding it up a bit (like potatoes?). the next important thing is position – i read all kinds of “requirements” that hops require to grow, but basically it just needs a good north facing aspect where it gets sun most of the day. and of course water – do not let it dry out, which means a good layer of mulch (periodically topped up with fresh green mulch) and a good watering every few days. with this years summer in brisbane, it wasn’t too difficult to keep watered… in fact i was worried about the lack of sunshine, but it didn’t seem to have too much of an effect. anyway, dig a hole deep enough to fit the whole rhizome in and completely cover it up with an inch of soil, then a good serving of mulch all over the top. in a few weeks (depending on the weather) some shoots should pop up, which need to be gradually trained clock-wise around something – you can use a string or stake or anything like that. for me, only one of the shoots that came up looked healthy so i cut the others and took a gamble.

hop vine at ground level, winding upwards

ideally you let them keep growing vertically but if this isn’t practical, you can train them out horizontally very easily (again clockwise). when the vine (bine) gets to around 50cm high, you can pluck off a few of the ground level leaves if you are having issues with dew/mold or insects. at this height it should start (if not already) to grow fairly rapidly – on some days it would grow 10cm/day. this is a good stage to give it a little extra nitrogen and some other macro nutrients to help it not only grow but to build up it’s root system before it really grows out. i make up own macro nutrient fertiliser using dry KNO3 then just chuck in some MgSO4, K2SO4, CaCl2 and some liquid micro nutrients. otherwise you could just throw on some osmicote or a good quality liquid fertiliser, shouldn’t really matter as long as you don’t over-fertilise.

a fully grown out hop vine

when the vine length gets to 2m+ the plant should start to bush up nicely (can start to do small regular fertilising, if you’re not using a slow release like osmicote). you should also notice that at each junction where leaves are growing from, lateral shoots will start to appear – these shoots are what will eventually produce the hop cones – which should be trained similarly to the main vine. when the vine is nicely bushed out, on the lateral shoots, flowers should start to appear. these will eventually mature into the hops cones so take care of them! now is good time to start adding a little extra phosphorus, as this is supposed to help flower/cone production. again i used a dry fert (KH2PO4) but you can use “anything” high in phosphate. if you look closely (at my terrible picture) you can see both the little spikey flowers and little cones starting to form.

the little spikey shape hop flowers and the baby hop cones forming

over a few months (up in brisbane the hops tend to mature a bit later than down south) you should start to see a lot of hop cones forming and getting to a decent size – they may go through little periods of high growth too.

a bunch of hop cones ready to pick

6 months after planting, i harvested the hops. there are a couple ways to tell hops are ready – first, they start to change form a fresh green colour to a more dryer yellowy colour and second, they become dry and springy to touch as opposed to moist and soft. they will also fill with a sticky yellow substance called lupulin and should have that beautiful hops smell. to harvest them, just cut the stem above each bunch and then after that cut each cone off individually. don’t wreck the whole bush (like they do commercially) as you will get more smaller harvests. chop up the scrape vine and bury it under the mulch.

the vine looking a little thinner after harvest

check out my other post on actually using the fresh hops in a brew. otherwise you will have to dry and store them – i still haven’t dried any yet, but apparently you lay them out on some flywire or something similar for a few days, then package and freeze them (a vacuum pack would be best). i will update when i try drying out the next harvest in the next week or so. i opened up a hop cone just now, to show a close up of the inside – check out the flap structures and all the yellow lupulin towards the centre – that sticky yellow stuff contains all the beautiful resins and oil that make beer, beer.

a close up shot of a hop cone cut in half

so i’ll stop it there – if there’s anything else i left out, ask i guess.

peace.