Steven@greenius’s personal blog

I have just made a blog post on the Oxford Brewer’s Group blog about hop harvesting

Also, at the weekend I was in Copenhagen visiting the European Beer Festival. This was an amazing event with lots of interesting things. Expect some blog entries from me about this over the next few days.

And thirdly… last week we released the Camra Good Beer Guide 2009 mobile edition to coincide with the launch of the book. You can find more information about this on the Camra web site.

I am making some cider at the moment. I have approximately 10 gallons (50 litres) brewing away. The juice was part of a bulk order from the nearby Millets farm which was split amongst members of our Oxford Brewing Group.

There is no recipe to speak of… basically I made some dried wine yeast (10 teaspoons) into a starter with a little brown sugar boiled in water and cooled. Pitched it into the apple juice in the containers I collected the juice in (food grade 5 gallon plastic). The next day it was fermenting out of the top and all over the floor… so I took it outside for a few days until it had calmed down.

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After reading an article in the Craft Brewing Association’s magazine Brewer’s Contact which indicated that beer that is sparged too much may have some off tastes, I decided to try a bit of an experiment.

The plan was to collect two seperate runnings from the sparge, dilute the first runnings to match the second, and then treat both runnings the same in terms of hops, boiling, etc. Then to compare the tastes. (more…)

In January 2007 I brewed a beer using the wild hops I had harvested in the autumn. it was intended to be a basic bitter/ESB so that I could evaluate the character of the wild hops. To complicate things, this was the first brew I did since we had our kitchen redone, and there were many other changes to my usual procedure.
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Last autumn I harvested some wild hops that I found growing locally to use when brewing my beer.

The hops were found growing along the path between South Abingdon and Sutton Courtney. Here is a link to a google map somewhere near where I found them. They were picked on 27th September 2006 and dried using a large cardboard box with lots of holes in the bottom. After drying they were compressed and stored in a plastic bag in the freezer.

This year I am growing hops in my garden. I planted Fuggles and Bramling Cross rhizomes that I got from A Plus Hops as part of a combined order with other members of the Oxford Brewing group. The fuggles currently has two bines growing up, one is already over 2 meters high. The bramling cross took longer to come up, and I only have one bine about half a meter tall so far. They are growing up strings and bamboo canes. I tied two canes together so they can get up to about 3 meters. As this is the first year, I am not expecting a massive harvest.

If you are interested in growing your own hops, then I recommend joining the Grow-Hops group on Yahoo groups.

The Oxford Brewing group is holding a Taste & Swap day at Kennington Village Hall on 2nd June 2007. An invitation is open to any craft brewers who can make it to Oxford that day.

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