Dehydrating and Preserving Hops

Just came across this fine blog post about how to dry and preserve hops. Pretty offensive, definitely NSFW.

http://www.raginggardeners.com/how-to-dehydrate-and-preserve-hops/?fb_source=pubv1

I didn't mind the vulgarity and attitude. I didn't find it amusing or clever either.

I thought the advice to use a simple food dehydrator was very misguiding. It doesn't take too many hops to fill a few racks on a dehydrator. This might be fine for a couple of plants the first year to two, but many growers will grow a LOT more than a dehydrator can handle. Not that owning a dehydrator is a bad thing in itself, but for instance I started with 3 plants, and the past 2 years I grew them up 6 strings.

Just those 6 strings filled a screen stretched across my 4x8 utility trailer TWICE. I had to dry in two sessions this year (last year I actually placed a second screen above the first, but this year due to scheduling I couldn't harvest all at one time).

My Chinook were ready before I was, so by the time I got to picking they were toast. The Hallertauer didn't fare very well, and produced only a few. I may move them next year.

4x8 screen only twice in one season with the plants? Maybe you need to amend your soil to get your plants growing properly?

Actually, it seemed to me since it only takes 8 hours or whatever to dehydrate, you could get all your hops processed very easily.

Yep, my soil isn't that great. Probably needs nitrogen or something. I'm not that into soil. I can grow grass pretty good, and that's all I really care about. But I get more hops than I can use as it is, so I'm not really interested in amending anything.

There is no way my hops would have dried in 8 hours.

Nm

mikebennett said:

4x8 screen only twice in one season with the plants? Maybe you need to amend your soil to get your plants growing properly?

Actually, it seemed to me since it only takes 8 hours or whatever to dehydrate, you could get all your hops processed very easily.

Click to expand...

A 4ft x 8ft screen filled once sounds like a fair bit of hops to me, never mind twice.

Right, I was just saying for three plants on 6 strings.

For me, picking the hops takes longer than anything else. With them in a big bag, just dehydrating them is pretty passive, even though it takes forever. I dehydrated some yesterday for 10 hours. Worked pretty well I think. Just have to do it a few more times, because my dehydrator only holds about 5 ounces of dried hops.