Growing hops from seed

[Apimyces]

Awesome. I have a degree in horticulture . It IS actually possible to grow hops (anything really) from seed true to species as long as you're the only one growing it for miles around and only have one species that is pure to start with. Well, not exactly, you must have total control of your growing conditions. I grow tobacco, many strains but I prefer to grow cigar varieties. I have grown them all for seed. Hops are vines so the containment would be more difficult than tobacco with a height of around 5 - 8 ft tall. I bag the flower/seed heads so bees ,wind and other pollinating "factors" stay out in order to get a pure seed.
Cool to see what youre doing and have a started seed.

Hop seeds will "breed true to the species", of course, but they will not breed true to type. At least, not to the extent that one would generally desire. Sure, if you cross a neomexicanus to another neomexicanus, the offspring should remain true to neomexicanus parameters. But if you cross a Cascade-derived male with a Cascade mother, the offpsring will not be identical to the mother.

Because hops are reputed to have a high level of heterozygosity. They are basically all F1 hybrids. It's like if you took an oval watermelon, and crossed it to another. You'll get some oval watermelon offsprings... and some oblong ones, and some spherical ones. Because oval watermelons are the result of being heterozygous for co-dominant shape alleles.

I'm not saying it's impossible to get true breeding hops, though, just that nobody have bothered to put the monumental efforts into making it possible. As with any crop, that'd just require the breeder to continually inbreed a strain until the desired level of homozygosity is obtained. But doing so doesn't really grant much, and would require decades of inbreeding efforts.

I would love a root cutting from this when you can. No hurry. Nice job, Hydra .Love it.

How'd it turn out? I had a plantlet with 3 cotyledons, and another with alternate leaves. Neither survived when brought outside, though.

 

[Soulshine2]

how did what turn out? I said Id like a cutting when he can.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

I have a degree in horticulture . It IS actually possible to grow hops (anything really) from seed true to species as long as you're the only one growing it for miles around and only have one species that is pure to start with.

Doesn't work with dioecious species like hops or humans, with different genetic backgrounds needed to make male and female individuals. The fact that hops are mostly propagated by cuttings rather than seed means they are pretty heterozygous so even if you had self-fertile ones they would still need many generations before they bred true to type.

Hops are vines

No they're not. They're bines. Vines have tendrils, bines twist their main stem around a support.

Any news from @nagmay on results for 2018?

By way of my own update - as a bit of fun I sowed some seed and most of the cones from ~60g of commercial Ernest cones after brewing with them. Got six plants, the two from seed have really got away, one of the ones from planted cones is looking a bit sick, the others are OK but are a few weeks behind the seed ones. Ernest is interesting as about the only British hop which is 50% Neomex (open pollination of Neomex AA7), she's the aunt of Progress and the great-aunt of Target.

As for breeding strategy - kinda up to you how serious you want to be - and what kind of hop pollen you have floating about. Even the Wye breeding programme responsible for effectively all modern high-alpha hops, started with wild pollination of North American hops such as Neomex AA7 and most famously Manitoban BB1. But obviously it's a bit limiting. Of course you can't test male hops for flavour (directly), but you can use male hops from "good" flavour lineages, and test them aggressively for agronomic characteristics like disease resistance. But as has been mentioned, the professionals are growing 10k's of seedlings.

For me it's a bit of fun, I don't have the space to grow lots but it will be interesting to see what happens with my Ernest babies. Ernest is meant to be resistant to wilt but susceptible to mildews, so I won't spray them and just let Darwin work his magic. If the daughters make tasty cones and some males survive and they behave themselves, I might let them buy dinner for my Chinook or Centennial and see what happens...

 

[Apimyces]

how did what turn out? I said Id like a cutting when he can.

I meant I'm asking @nagmay how his Hydra turned out, if it kept it's initial growth patterns.

 

[Soulshine2]

Doesn't work with dioecious species like hops or humans, with different genetic backgrounds needed to make male and female individuals. The fact that hops are mostly propagated by cuttings rather than seed means they are pretty heterozygous so even if you had self-fertile ones they would still need many generations before they bred true to type.



No they're not. They're bines. Vines have tendrils, bines twist their main stem around a support.

Any news from @nagmay on results for 2018?

By way of my own update - as a bit of fun I sowed some seed and most of the cones from ~60g of commercial Ernest cones after brewing with them. Got six plants, the two from seed have really got away, one of the ones from planted cones is looking a bit sick, the others are OK but are a few weeks behind the seed ones. Ernest is interesting as about the only British hop which is 50% Neomex (open pollination of Neomex AA7), she's the aunt of Progress and the great-aunt of Target.

As for breeding strategy - kinda up to you how serious you want to be - and what kind of hop pollen you have floating about. Even the Wye breeding programme responsible for effectively all modern high-alpha hops, started with wild pollination of North American hops such as Neomex AA7 and most famously Manitoban BB1. But obviously it's a bit limiting. Of course you can't test male hops for flavour (directly), but you can use male hops from "good" flavour lineages, and test them aggressively for agronomic characteristics like disease resistance. But as has been mentioned, the professionals are growing 10k's of seedlings.

For me it's a bit of fun, I don't have the space to grow lots but it will be interesting to see what happens with my Ernest babies. Ernest is meant to be resistant to wilt but susceptible to mildews, so I won't spray them and just let Darwin work his magic. If the daughters make tasty cones and some males survive and they behave themselves, I might let them buy dinner for my Chinook or Centennial and see what happens...

thanks for the corrections. Its been 30 yrs since I acquired my degree, havent used it much since.

 

[Apimyces]

Well, to be technical, it COULD work with dioecious species. It just requires more crosses and thus starts more slowly.

All you need to do is keep doing sister/brother mating, and every generation you lose a portion of your heterozygosity. You'll randomly lose alleles with every cross, should be about a quarter at first per cross and gradually move towards half in the later generations.

To be noted, though, that "true breeding" varieties in perfect-flowered species are not actually 100% inbred. They are just homozygous for a few targeted genes. If someone decided "I want hops that grow from seeds and all have small round cones", that would probably be quite feasible, as it is with, say, tomatoes. But the issue with hops is that the traits that are sought after are not quite as simple to evaluate as what one might seek in, say, a watermelon (rind color, flesh color, shape, etc.), where simple visual cues make up for most of the selection work.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

All you need to do is keep doing sister/brother mating, and every generation you lose a portion of your heterozygosity. You'll randomly lose alleles with every cross, should be about a quarter at first per cross and gradually move towards half in the later generations.

The point is that if you will never be homozygous for sex chromosomes, as you need the parents to have different "alleles" of the sex chromosomes - or at least of the sex-determining region. So I guess you could wait until you were homozygous for every other gene and then kill all the males, but that's the end of sex in that line. Assuming you haven't got problems with homozygous recessives killing you long before that. And of course hops are unusual in that the crop is sex-linked.

Of course, this is all moot - hops are a long way from homozygous, many of the common commercial lines are only 2-5 generations away from landraces - Citra is a great-granddaughter of Fuggle for instance. By the standards of most crops, that's absolutely nothing.

 

[Apimyces]

The point is that if you will never be homozygous for sex chromosomes, as you need the parents to have different "alleles" of the sex chromosomes - or at least of the sex-determining region. So I guess you could wait until you were homozygous for every other gene and then kill all the males, but that's the end of sex in that line. Assuming you haven't got problems with homozygous recessives killing you long before that. And of course hops are unusual in that the crop is sex-linked.

Of course, this is all moot - hops are a long way from homozygous, many of the common commercial lines are only 2-5 generations away from landraces - Citra is a great-granddaughter of Fuggle for instance. By the standards of most crops, that's absolutely nothing.

Well, sure, you'll never be homozygous for sex. Unless...

I have read of an article that uses chemical treatment to initiate fertile off-sex flowers, allowing self-pollination. I think it was to initiate fertile male flowers on females, but could be the other way around, I don't recall.

Ah, yes, here it is: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140196164A1/en

And of course, one could also bypass a lot of the inbreeding by developping a proper double haploid.

But practically-speaking, just about anyone could take a male and a female, harvest the seeds, destroy the previous generation, culture the seeds until flowering, pre-emptively destroying all but the most promising male, then harvesting the seeds from the most promising female, destroying that generation, sowing those seeds, etc. Without any fancy tech or chemicals, after say ten generations of randomly doing this, your offspring will be fairly homozygous. Won't be 100% homozygous, but neither are your typical "true breeding" ancestral vegetable variety. Using the same protocol, but with guided selection (instead of just taking the "most fit" of each sex in a cross, you carefully look at the traits, especially the recessive ones, to actively retain the plants that express the most homozygosity), you can achieve similar results even faster. In this regard, the speed at which you will increase homozygosity is, in ascending order, by selection of the fittest (might favor heterozygosity), utterly random selection (picking 1 male and 1 female of each cross without regards to any traits such as fitness), and phenotypic selection (picking 1 male and 1 female that are most alike and displaying most homozygosity on known genes).

Citra, speaking of the devil, is also an inbred grand-daughter of 'Hallertauer milltlefrueh''s self-crossed offspring. Both Citra's father and mother were issued from the exact same cross: https://patents.google.com/patent/USPP21289P3/en

And since we are on that tangeant, many other cultivars have a similar inbred pedigree. Now, I still reckon that even these crosses have a high level of heterozygosity, though. Hops are said to be quite prone to inbreeding depression. Doesn't mean it's impossible to breed true-to-seed varieties, just means that it makes no economic sense to put all the work required to achieve it. Whose gonna invest decades to develop a hop that breeds true to seed and that anyone can then rip off, to sell cheap seeds to growers that won't see any yields for years?

The only interest to sexual reproduction is the creation of novel genotypes. Otherwise, vegetative reproduction is much, much more advantageous on all levels, barring only importation regulations and fees.

 

[nagmay]

I would love a root cutting from this when you can. No hurry. Nice job, Hydra .Love it.

Sorry, but the little hydra eventually reverted back to a normal growth pattern. She also didn't pass the taste tests. I have a few other mutants that we've been keeping around for breeding purposes, but they all have serious defects as-is (low quantity, no disease resistance, etc...)

I've been meaning to give an update on the breeding progress, but it may be a bit longer. Right now I'm in the middle of the 2018 harvest.

 

[Apimyces]

Sorry, but the little hydra eventually reverted back to a normal growth pattern. She also didn't pass the taste tests. I have a few other mutants that we've been keeping around for breeding purposes, but they all have serious defects as-is (low quantity, no disease resistance, etc...)

I've been meaning to give an update on the breeding progress, but it may be a bit longer. Right now I'm in the middle of the 2018 harvest.

He's alive!

What other kinds of mutations have you spotted?

 

[marc_]

Looking at the Citra patent...

Citra's parents aren't patented. Has anyone tried to track down those hops? The USDA is usually really good about providing plants to people in the US if they have access to them.

 

[nagmay]

What other kinds of mutations have you spotted?

We have identified several dwarf plants, one with super large cones, and another whose cones are more pinkish than green. Though, my favorite is still the one with the strange, long, asymmetrical leaves that I've posted about before.

I'm a sucker for mutants, so were keeping them around - but as I said before, they all have issues... bad flavor being the big one.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Look forward to the annual update. Don't knock the mutants, they may have a role for ornamental usage particularly something visual like the pink one. Variagation would be a good one to get in that regard....

 

[Apimyces]

Looking at the Citra patent...

Citra's parents aren't patented. Has anyone tried to track down those hops? The USDA is usually really good about providing plants to people in the US if they have access to them.

Citra's grandmother, Hallertau, is publicly available. As are some of its great-grandparents (and/or higher up).

However, I don't think Citra's grandfather, '853-144M', is a USDA accession. And neither of Citra' parents are.

 

[marc_]

So based on recommendations here I got leaf hops and now have at least 3 mosaic (I haven't gone through the whole bag) seeds.

So, I've got a bunch of perlite... Do I spray it with water and put it and the seeds in zip lock bags in my fridge? How much water? Do I zip the bags air tight? Should I wait until 60 days before I can plant outside? Should I put the ziplock bag in a paper bag to block the light?

Any recommendations would be appreciated.

I know I shouldn't get my hopes up over a few seeds, but...

 

[marc_]

Also, does anyone know where to get fresh hops in Canada?

I know a few people have been able to root the bine tips found in fresh hops. I'd love to find some Citra or Mosaic fresh hops to scour for bines.

 

[Apimyces]

Also, does anyone know where to get fresh hops in Canada?

I know a few people have been able to root the bine tips found in fresh hops. I'd love to find some Citra or Mosaic fresh hops to scour for bines.

Where have you seen that? Packaged hops shouldn't have any bine bits, and if they did, they are pretty certainly dead dead dead.

If you meant strobile tips... well, the "dead" comment equally applies. And I've never heard of rooting strobiles, I highly doubt it would work (at least, not without high tech equipment and chemicals for special in vitro procedures).

As for sowing, I use paper towels. I don't like perlite, at all, though some swear by it.

 

[marc_]

If I use paper towel, do I leave the ziplock bag unlocked? Do you change the paper towel ever? And I assume you would put the seeds in the fridge in the spring a month or two before I can transition them outside?

And, I was surprised about people rooting fresh hops (this is packaged fresh hops, not leaf hops), but I personally know someone who rooted some centennial from packaged fresh hops and if you search older discussions on this site there are a couple people on here that rooted bine tips.

 

[Apimyces]

If I use paper towel, do I leave the ziplock bag unlocked? Do you change the paper towel ever? And I assume you would put the seeds in the fridge in the spring a month or two before I can transition them outside?

And, I was surprised about people rooting fresh hops (this is packaged fresh hops, not leaf hops), but I personally know someone who rooted some centennial from packaged fresh hops and if you search older discussions on this site there are a couple people on here that rooted bine tips.

Humid paper tower in a sealed ziploc bag in the fridge for 6-8 weeks is pretty standard.

As for the rooting, can you share pictures of what you are talking about? Because I'm not sure I'm following. Hops will fairly readily root with traditional cutting techniques.

If by "fresh hops" you mean "live plant", then yes, you can clone live plants with a number of techniques. But you will not find any Citra or Mosaic growers in Canada as far as I'm aware. And if you go find a grower that has them (wherever), they won't let you just take some bines to propagate.

 

[marc_]

Supposedly you can sometimes find bine tips in packaged fresh hops. Sometimes these hops can be fresh enough that you would be able to root them. The guy I know just put the bine tip (1 or 2 inch bine in the packaged hops) in water with rooting hormone and it developed roots. The bine he rooted was centennial so nothing too exciting, however there are people on this forum who have rooted proprietary hop bines that were found in packaged fresh hops.

I don't have pictures because I'm not the one who did it, but I'm sure you can imagine the procedure - green bine tip still fresh enough, put in water with the rooting hormone, bine tip grows roots.

 

[Apimyces]

Can you give a link to the posts/websites where people claim to have done this?

What do you mean by "fresh hops"? Can you link to a supplier?

Because I only buy whole leaf hops... and I've never seen a bine in them, and even if there were... they are so dried, there's no way it's going to grow back.

 

[nagmay]

What do you mean by "fresh hops"? Can you link to a supplier?

At least hear in the PNW, you can pre-order fresh hops in the fall from local home brew stores. These are essentially cones picked from local farms in the last 24 hours.

 

[Apimyces]

At least hear in the PNW, you can pre-order fresh hops in the fall from local home brew stores. These are essentially cones picked from local farms in the last 24 hours.

Huh... sounds look poor quality if there's bines in them, though.

 

[marc_]

So any updates after the 2018 harvest?

Any big plans for 2019?

 

[Apimyces]

I started my germination trials. First seedlings started showing up yesterday, about a third already germinated by now. Been 6 days out of stratification, looking good so far.

I'm going to limit myself to a bit more than 200 plants this year, haven't yet chosen all the accessions I'll be growing this time. Again, I'm later than I wanted. I'd rather have finished stratification for all my seed lots by now, or at least have a month in.

 

[yanick74]

The crosses for 2019!

 

[marc_]

The crosses for 2019!

Lots of Amalia crosses...

It's a neomexicanus that you don't hear much about. What are your thoughts on the plant? Production? Flavour? Etc?

 

[yanick74]

Amalia is very aromatic, the aroma of grapefruit predominates and the flavor of peach. hybrids with European varieties give very interesting and vigorous plants, perfect for very hot weather.

is one of my favorites, here in the tropical climate, at nine months of age from the seeds, the cones reached up to 7.5 cm in size

 

[Apimyces]

Interesting set-up. Seems practical, but very space consuming. I can get away with a bunch of stacked ziplock bags in my fridge, but not sure my wife would agree with my stacking so many pots in there.

 

[yanick74]

Interesting set-up. Seems practical, but very space consuming. I can get away with a bunch of stacked ziplock bags in my fridge, but not sure my wife would agree with my stacking so many pots in there.

I had not thought about the repercussions with the wife, I hope that tomorrow she will return from the trip and see the full refrigerator, be indulgent with me.