Hops in the Garden

I am now growing hops in my garden. This is with the goal of eventually making beer directly from the four basic ingredients (water, barley, hops, and yeast), using fresh hops grown in my own garden.

The inspiration for this goal comes from a few places. It started with the 2014 book "The Perfect Keg" by Ian Coutts. This is a fun Canadian work of non-fiction in which the author documents his attempts to grow his own barley in order to make beer from scratch, at the same time learning various brewing tricks from master brewers. It's a fun read. Coutt's desire to start from scratch is something that I understand, and kudos to him for pursuing that.

For some time now, I have enjoyed a range of YouTube videos on home brewing. These have fired up my interest in all-grain brewing (i.e. starting from barley itself). At some point, I will post links to some of the more interesting videos I have seen.

In early May, my wife and I attended a free seminar on growing hops at the Enjoy Centre, here in St. Albert. The seminar was run in part by the proprietors of Northern Girls Hopyard. They even brought along some hop plants for sale. At that time, they only had Cascade and Centennial hops, which, I understand, are used mainly in brewing IPAs. So, I separately ordered two Golding hops plants from them and picked them up two weeks ago.

I re-potted the hop plants in large planters. Why not in the ground, you might ask? The answer is that I was warned by a friend who has previously grown his own hops that they basically start growing everywhere. Hops propogate through rhizomes (i.e. the roots grow and send up new shoots), which means that you need to manage them. Putting the hop plants in a container seemed like an easier option.

The Northern Girls recommend the use of twine for the hop 'bines'. This requires hanging the twine from some kind of overhead point of contact, which was not practical. So, I tried a bamboo pole instead of twine. Fortunately, the hops have taken to this perfectly, with a tiny bit of training at the beginning:

Hop plant growing clockwise up and around bamboo.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the hops turn out. They are certainly growing quickly.

Czeck Pilsner & Red Ale

Over the last three months, I made two beers from kits. The first kit was a Czeck Pilsner wort kit by Festa Brew. The second was a Red Ale kit by Brewer's Best.

Festa Brew wort kits are quite easy, but I kind of wonder about the final quality given just how long the bags of pasteurized wort might be sitting on the shelf before you purchase it and take it home. When I bought this Czeck Pilsner kit from Estate Brewing in Edmonton, the owner told me that it was a very popular kit and his stock was being sold quickly. In the end, it turned out to be a nice beer, but I'm not convinced it's much like actual Czeck pilsners like Pilsner Urquell. The main difference, to me, is that the kit beer has much more citrus flavour.

Needing a new challenge just to keep my interest, the next kit I bought was an ingredient kit from Brewer's Best. The kit included malt extract, malted barley, freeze dried hops, yeast, priming sugar, and bottle caps. In order to make this beer, I also needed some new equipment - in particular a 6 gallon stainless steel kettle, which is basically a gigantic pot.

Brewer's Best beer ingredient kit.

This was the first time I have made beer from an ingredient kit, and it was a lot of fun. After the usual sanitization, the process consisted of bringing 3 gallons of water to 150 ^oF, steeping malted, crushed grains (in a bag), bringing the wort to a boil, adding liquid malt extract, and then adding two different types of hops (Golding and Willamette) at specific times. After the hops were added, their aromas began to fill the entire house, which resulted in my kids all separately asking, "what's that smell?" (Nobody was complaining, it's just that nobody had smelled anything like it before!)

The biggest challenge was trying to cool the wort down to room temperature after the boil. I had not invested in one of those coiled wort chillers, so I had to resort to taking the kettle outside and placing it in a pile of snow. (Yes, we get snow in April in Edmonton.) It took about 2 hours to get the temperature down to, which seems way too long. I need to buy a wort chiller.

After that, I added water to bring the total volume to 5 gallons, pitched the yeast, and the fermentation started up right away. After 3 days, the foam head had collapsed and I siphoned the beer into a carboy. After 12 days in the carboy, and noting that specific gravity was not changing, I proceeded to bottling. This meant transferring the beer to a large bucket, mixing in the priming sugar, and then filling and capping bottles.

Three weeks later, I tasted this Red Ale and I was floored. First of all, I have to characterize the taste as distinctly "fresh". There are just no off-flavours at all. For example, many commercial beers (especially from cans for kegs) have a metallic tinny taste that kind of ruins it. Other beers can develop skunky flavours that arise from photochemical reactions in the beer, especially when the beer is in clear bottles. And sometimes there are flavours that make me think the beer has just been sitting around too long. This beer came out fresh, and it's certainly fresher tasting than any of the beers I have made from wort kits.

Second of all, as described on the kit label, this beer is "smooth and easy drinking", a "balance of caramel malts and specialty grains", with low hop bitterness. I am not a fan of many IPA's, but I do enjoy beers that have complex caramel flavours that come from malted grains. So, this beer suits my tastes just about perfectly. I have told friends that this is the best beer I have ever tasted, which might seem like an exaggeration, but it's true for me. I will probably make this beer again, and it has me salivating over the possibility of making beer from your own malted grains.