So a few weeks back I ventured into the hop garden at my friend’s house.  We harvested the hop cones from the 2 year-old Cascade plants we have growing along a fence in their backyard.  Last year we got very little hops, not even enough to really use, but good bine growth.  This year the bines were longer on June 1 than they got the entire first year.  As the summer continued the hop bines became littered with flowers and eventually plump hop cones.

Sunday, August 30 we harvested the Cascade hop cones.  We harvested 15 5/8 oz wet (444g) of luscious hops!  Below are some images of our hop harvest.   After I got the hops home I set them out on some non-fiberglass furnace filters and bungee corded them to a box fan for drying.  I can’t accept credit for this drying method, I got the idea from Alton Brown’s Beef Jerky Good Eats episode on the Food Network.  Below are some pictures of my drying rig.  I blasted them with the box fan for 4 days, I’m sure they were plenty dry after about 2 days, but wanted to be sure.  After drying, the hop’s weight had decreased by nearly a factor of 5!  The 15 5/8oz (444g) of wet hops now tipped the scale at 3 5/8 oz (106g).  Finally I put all the dried hops into a vacuum seal bag and sealed them up for storage in the freezer until brew day.  You can seem them sealed up in a bag not much longer than an average size banana.

Now the brainstorming begins for a recipe using these hops.  Although it shouldn’t take too much brainstorming.  We want to showcase our hops in an American Pale Ale, so the recipe will be rather simple with a clean yeast and we will use only these hops.  Look for the recipe sometime soon!  Until then, enjoy the hops pictures!