I won’t bore you with details of my quest, but I have a lead on some fence row hop vines that have been growing in this area since the 1860’s.
1, I assume thay are an English variety, but have no way of knowing what kind. Still worth growing?
2, They produce small 1" hop cones and grow very healthy vines, but haven’t been pruned or harvested for years. When would I pull some Rhisomes?
3, Will the introduction of a heritage vine in with Willamette, Northern Brewer, and Brewers Gold have a Negative effect on them?
Thank you.
Wisconsin was a huge hop producer in the 1860s, on par with the big Northwest hop producers of today. Your old hops are most likely an old Getman noble variety or else Cluster. We have a lot of German heritage in Wisconsin and they began brewing the second they got here so they no doubt brought their rhizomes with them.
Get your rhizomes and plant them anytime that the soil is not frozen. You might be able to do it now, otherwise wait until March or April when the ground thaws.
I’d agree they’re probably Cluster. Are they all female? If there are males, I’d guess they’re cluster seedlings. Cluster is thought to be a variety resulting from a cross of European stock with a wild American male. Nothing European tastes like Cluster. Planting newer varieties next to them won’t hurt a bit.
How do you determine gender? Please don’t tell to lift a leaf, and you’ll just know.
To dmtaylo2: That’s the boring details I was talking about, except my ancestors came from Kent and Sussex Co. England. They settled in Sussex in 1836 and brought hops with them from Oneida NY after thay had worked off their indentured servitude obligations. Hops was the first cash crop they grew here, and “Weaver Bros. Hops Brokers and dealers” was viable in Sussex until 1896.
My children are 9th generation to live on land that my family homesteaded in 1840. Like I said it’s a quest.
The post so nice you sent it thrice!
Those are not boring details, not at all! I find the history very interesting. I never knew we had pockets of English folks big enough to where they brought their own hops over. So yes, I suppose in your case, these might really be English hops. But there is a lot of likelihood as well that they were crossed with wild American hops (like Cluster) and maybe even German varieties. Sorry I can’t be of more help – I really don’t know if you’ll have much luck trying to figure out what kind of hops you’ve got. Best thing you can do is to brew with them and see how much you like the final result. If they’re good, they’re good, regardless of what kind they are.
As for telling the sex, I had some male flowers pop up on my Cascade plant this year. This is common with some of the Northwestern “C” hop varieties like Cascade, Columbus, etc. So anyway… the male flowers don’t look like cones at all… they look a lot like little green grapes, tiny "balls, so to speak, but made of leafy stuff, not berries. If you squish the male flowers, they still have lupulin in them, but not anywhere near the quantity to where they are worth harvesting like the female cones. So you’ll probably want to keep the female plants, and skip the males. If these hops have been growing wild for a very long time, it is likely that you have a mix of the two sexes, just like I experienced with my normally female Cascade plant. Every once in a while, a female miraculously turns temporarily male, which allows cross-pollination and seeding in the wild. At that point, of course, there’s no telling what variety you have anymore.
Duh! I don’t know what I did, but I can’t get back in and delete the duplicates.
Back in about 1990 while working in Upstate I got some cuttings from a fellow in Madison County. He told me they were from plants that had been used to establish the first commercial hopyard there back in the 1800’s. Canadian Redvine was one variety and the other two, I think, were Hersbrucker and Tettnang. They never did anything (maybe 2 ounces per plant per year) but the Redvine is a beast with a character similar to Cluster and is still beating the drum to this day. So what you have may be one of these three or something that was brought from England.
Like Dave said, you’ll know if you have a male by the appearance of the flower parts and some females do tend to throw a little male bloom from time to time, nothing to worry about. Think of a cluster of bb-sized grapes with the petals opening up to create a ‘fluffy’ type of appearance as opposed to the much tighter and larger structure of the female cones: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Value … Common_Hop).
It’s hard to nail down the exact variety without doing an oil profile on them or possibly DNA testing. Hope this helps.
[quote=“flytyer”]
To dmtaylo2: That’s the boring details I was talking about, except my ancestors came from Kent and Sussex Co. England. They settled in Sussex in 1836 and brought hops with them from Oneida NY after thay had worked off their indentured servitude obligations. Hops was the first cash crop they grew here, and “Weaver Bros. Hops Brokers and dealers” was viable in Sussex until 1896.
My children are 9th generation to live on land that my family homesteaded in 1840. Like I said it’s a quest.[/quote]
Actually, a very interesting story. How many people can say their beer is brewed with heritage, family heirloom hops? Go for it!
