Homegrown Hop Harvest is Complete!

The first year plants had their ups and downs, two bines, the Willamette and the Northern Brewer's were non-existent, grew just enough to ensure some action next year. The other two bines, the Magnums and the Cascades went nuts and produced BIG TIME! With those two bines I got almost a pound and a half of homegrown organic hop goodness!  1.43 pounds or 23 ounces! The tallies are 12 ounces for the Magnums and 11 ounces of cascades. The cascades were a nice late surprise as we had the nice warm October weather here in Minneapolis and the matured in those two weeks and headed to the drying racks. Both plants matured late but since mother nature was kind so were the plants. I cannot imagine having two more mature plants as I feel like I have been picking and drying hops for the past two months, but once I get to brew with the hops all of that pain will be forgotten. I think that I am going to brew a nice American pale ale with the homegrowns, I will probably brew something similar to the Amarillo pale with the homegrowns for a nice comparison. I also have a breakfast stout waiting in the wings to be brewed which I will probably use the magnums for bittering. So there you have it, homegrown hops pay off big time and they are not that much work. For those of you wondering, I ordered the rhizomes online and got them in march and planted in Late April early may. I dug a nice big hole, placed some bone meal in the hole, filled the hole with compost, placed the rhizome in the hole and covered it with about 2 inches of compost and a thin layer of mulch. I also grow bushes along the fence so I already had drip irrigation there so I just moved the hose to be near the hops as well and watered them about for a few hours every week or two and bam! Please let me know if you have any questions about the hop setup! Cheers!

Furious Clone in the bottle and some tips

I was able to bottle the furious clone on Saturday.  It took about 2 hrs as I had to clean and sanitize a bunch of bottles and I had to remove the labels on about 50% of them.  Bottling went smooth and fairly quick.  I ended up with 12 22oz bottles and 25 12oz bottles.  Now it is just two weeks and I can drink it!  I cannot wait and I will update this post with the tasting.

A helpful tip for the fellow brewer, I bought a 18 gallon HDPE tub on a whim at home depot for $6 thinking that I could use it to store equipment and such, and it has really come in handy.  It came in handy on brew day, but where it really shines is bottling.  I put about 5 gallons of warm water in it and also added some one step cleaner.  The labels and most of the glue came right off of the bottles.  This made it so easy to clean them up, just a wipe with a clean scrub sponge and the glue was totally gone.  I rinsed the bottles with a bottle jet prior to putting them in the one step.  After the bottles were cleaned, I emptied the tub, put the now cleaned bottles back in it and poured in 10 gallons of water and 2 oz of star-san over the bottles.  I know that I just could have used them after the one-step as that is a sanitizer as well, but due to the amount of glue that was most likely dissolved I decided to rinse the bottles again with the bottle jet and then use the star-san.  While it was probably overkill I just didn't want to lose my first batch to infection. 

On another note, I have saved up some money and I am now focused on brewing my second batch of cream ale and then ditching the extract brewing in favor of all grain.  I am going to go the cooler route and I am going to purchase the round 10gallon Rubbermaid cooler.  I am debating if I should just bite the bullet and get a sparge arm, but I don't have a hot liquor tank and I think that I am just going to start with the batch sparge or fly sparge and see how it goes.  Expect much more on this as the parts are purchased.  I cannot wait to relax and have a homebrew!!!