Obtaining Male hop plants

Hello everyone!

First of all yes, I realize that male plants are worthless for producing cones to use in brewing. I am however interested in being able to cross breed hop varieties.

As such I would need males to cross with the much easier to find females and I was hoping someone here had a source or could point me in the right direction to acquire male plants. Google searches have failed me thus far. Currently my plan is to obtain a female and stress it so that it will produce the "male parts", stamen? whatever, I am a chemist not a biologist. I can learn all that as I go. However I would much rather take the less risky route and be able to buy a male plant directly.

At any rate I have the resources of the chemistry and biology departments of a local university. Meaning a greenhouse, knowledge I don't have of genetics and breeding, and what I believe to be most important (hopefully) a GCMS (gas chromatography mass spectrometer) to analyze oil contents from the hops. I say hopefully as the GCMS instrument can only detect molecules up to a certain size and many natural products can be quite large. I believe the standard in industry is to use an HPLC or LCMS to analyze hops and/or beer.

Alas, I digress. That is my plan anyway but it of course hinges on being able to get both male and female plants...

Any help (thoughts, suggestions, comments) would be appreciated!
Thanks!

OSU is involved in a USDA hop breeding program. I would give them a call.

Grand idea! Thank you very much, I was not aware of that. I will give them a call.

I was going to make a post but found this before I did so, so I will add on. Im pretty sure I found male hop plants on my nature walk near Harrisburg Pa and I like the OP stated they are pretty useless for brewing. Any idea how you would go about using these unknown variety of male hop plants and already established female Cascade hop plants? Also do you know any other uses that we can do with them? Thanks.

if you do a search you may be able to find hop seeds, which if you can get them to germinate have a 50% chance of being male-hope this helps

blacksailj said:

Im pretty sure I found male hop plants on my nature walk

Click to expand...

Those actually look like H. Japonicus rather than male H. Lupulus.

Just an update in case anyone cares, I found a nice resource.

http://www.ars-grin.gov/cor/humulus/huminfo.html

Lots of information, plus if you have a legitimate research project you can obtain germplasm material from the USDA through there.

You can get hop seeds on ebay, that'd be one way to do it.