Owly055
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- Joined
- Feb 28, 2014
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All my hops finally are up!! The cascade and magnum were slow. I have northern brewer, nugget, cascade, centennial, magnum, and golding.
I've been thinking about open source....... I use Linux on my primary computer and have for many years now. The principle is that people all over the world contribute to the project, and nobody "owns" it. Suppose we did this with hops breeding.......
John Doe has a handfull of seeds......... can he plant and assess all of them himself locally? Grow them and try each one in various brews, decide which ones have merit, and which do not?
Suppose those seeds are passed around and people around the world who have garden space and a community of home brewers around them plant them and try them.....
In an open source community, if you are the person who ends up with one that is special, you don't really "own" it in the sense of getting wealthy from it. You make it available to others. You share cones, cuttings, rhizomes, seeds, etc... with the object of making it widely available as quickly as possible. The goal being "better beer for all". Naming would reflect the origin of the seed..... so if I wanted to name the hop for my home town, it might be "Doe 3 Melville" indicating that it was from John Doe's 3 cross, grown in Melville.
Some of the hops that came into the open source community might be "feral", "escaped", or "liberated"....... But we won't examine the lineage too closely. If an interesting "wild" hop found in the woods of Missouri happened to resemble a commercial variety.... well, what can happen once can happen again ;-) .......... but that isn't the objective here. It's providing John Doe a way to reduce the time and labor involved in assessing those few hundred hop seeds.
Hop growers and breeders breed for resistance to this and that, and yield first, flavor second. Just like tomato growers.... A square tomato that ripened on exactly the same day, and was resistant to bruising and various pests would soon be the ONLY tomato available in the store.
You and I have ONE priority........... GOOD BEER
H.W.
I've been thinking about open source....... I use Linux on my primary computer and have for many years now. The principle is that people all over the world contribute to the project, and nobody "owns" it. Suppose we did this with hops breeding.......
John Doe has a handfull of seeds......... can he plant and assess all of them himself locally? Grow them and try each one in various brews, decide which ones have merit, and which do not?
Suppose those seeds are passed around and people around the world who have garden space and a community of home brewers around them plant them and try them.....
In an open source community, if you are the person who ends up with one that is special, you don't really "own" it in the sense of getting wealthy from it. You make it available to others. You share cones, cuttings, rhizomes, seeds, etc... with the object of making it widely available as quickly as possible. The goal being "better beer for all". Naming would reflect the origin of the seed..... so if I wanted to name the hop for my home town, it might be "Doe 3 Melville" indicating that it was from John Doe's 3 cross, grown in Melville.
Some of the hops that came into the open source community might be "feral", "escaped", or "liberated"....... But we won't examine the lineage too closely. If an interesting "wild" hop found in the woods of Missouri happened to resemble a commercial variety.... well, what can happen once can happen again ;-) .......... but that isn't the objective here. It's providing John Doe a way to reduce the time and labor involved in assessing those few hundred hop seeds.
Hop growers and breeders breed for resistance to this and that, and yield first, flavor second. Just like tomato growers.... A square tomato that ripened on exactly the same day, and was resistant to bruising and various pests would soon be the ONLY tomato available in the store.
You and I have ONE priority........... GOOD BEER
H.W.