In the Race
Now, here, you see, it takes all the blogging I can do to keep in the same place.
If I want to get somewhere else, I must blog twice as fast as that!
You see, I'm in
the Red Queen's Race...
My Young Transplants
By Janet Evans
Monday, Sep 1 2008, 05:15 PM
I’ve mentioned before that my son and daughter-in-law live in Colorado (transplants from Franklin, by way of Pittsburgh) and that they brew beer. They grew their own hops this year and just brewed some Pale Ale with them.
I had never seen fresh hops and when I visited them earlier this month found the pods, growing like ivy on their back fence, to be beautiful.
They sent me photos last week of the ripe pods.
Here is some information on hops, in case you are unfamiliar with what you have been drinking in that beer...
"Hops are the female flower cones of the hop plant (Humulus lupulus). They are used primarily as a flavoring and stability agent in beer, and also in other beverages and in herbal medicine. The first documented use in beer is from the eleventh century. Hops contain several characteristics favorable to beer, balancing the sweetness of the malt with bitterness, contributing flowery, citrus, fruity or herbal aromas, and having an antibiotic effect that favors the activity of brewer's yeast over less desirable microorganisms. The hop plant is a vigorous climbing herbaceous perennial, usually grown up strings in a field called a hopfield, hop garden or hop yard. Many different varieties of hops are grown by farmers all around the world, with different types being used for particular styles of beer."
"The first recorded reference to hops was by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia. The first documented instance of hop cultivation was in 736, in the Hallertau region of present-day Germany, although the first mention of the use of hops in brewing in that country was 1079. Not until the thirteenth century in Germany did hops begin to start threatening the use of gruit for flavoring. In Britain, hopped beer was first imported from Holland around 1400; however, hops were initially condemned in 1519 as a "wicked and pernicious weed". In 1471, Norwich, England banned the plant from the use in the brewing of beer, and it wasn't until 1524 that hops were first grown in southeast England. It was a further century before hop cultivation began in the present-day United States in 1629. " from Wikipedia
Early season hop growth in a hop yard in the Yakima Valley, Washington with Mount Adams in the distance
