18/02/2024
More harvesting today - different variety. These ones going straight into the dehydrator. Thinking of adding the lupulin powder to one of our gins. :)
Dancing Pig Hops & Brewing
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- Dancing Pig Hops & Brewing
We're a small non-commercial hops grower, currently experimenting to see whether we can grow and supply fresh hops to local breweries.
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Our story...so far
We got into home-brewing towards the end of 2015 and, living on 21 acres, we wanted to try growing hops. Having stumbled across the story of Smith Rock Hop Farm in Oregon we wondered, if hops were happy here, whether there might be interest from local breweries in sourcing fresh hops locally, rather than from Nelson, where the vast majority of NZ hops is grown.
So we started researching and decided to experiment over a few seasons to see if we could firstly grow hops in our location and get any sort of harvest; whether the hops would grow back again the following year; and assuming the harvest was improving, see whether there was interest in the hops from local breweries.
In August 2017 we started installing a small amount of hops trellis. We sourced some Cascade and Fuggle hop plants and put them in the ground in the October. Although we’d read-up on the topic we were amazed at how fast our hops grew. At one point we embarked on a ‘hops race’ each selecting a plant and then measuring the growth after a 48hr period - 36cm being the winning growth spurt! During our first year we realised the importance of using sufficiently thick twine after having a number of bines come down in stormy weather in January.
In late February 2018 we harvested our first crop of Cascade and in early March our Fuggle. We used all the hops in a couple of fresh-hop brews of our own.
