Hop seed pictures?

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sandyeggoxj

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Does anybody have pictures of seeds on a male plant? I found a ton of wild neomex yesterday and I think I found a male plant with seeds. In any case I could have probably filled up at least 3 5-gallon buckets without working very hard. Big light green cones that smelled wonderful.
 
seeds on a male plant?

Nope. Just like eggs in animals, hops seeds are found on the female (the one with cones). When pollinated by a male during the burr stage, seeds will form at the base of each bract on the cone. You can often press a mature, pollinate cone in your fingers to feel the seed.

Or, are you tying to identify the male plants? The male flower pods do look like seeds before they open.

Here are the male flower pods:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f92/so-you-want-breed-your-own-hops-464503/index24.html#post6242225

And here they are open:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f92/so-you-want-breed-your-own-hops-464503/index23.html#post6239595
 
Okay that makes sense. Many of the cones had seeds. They were small and black. Seemed like a few per cone. I wasn't thinking straight when I posted! I did find a male plant while I was looking around. It had a totally different look where the cones would grow. It was neat to see.

I'll post pics next week when I get on a computer. Pics are on a camera and I don't have a card reader or cord. Left the cell phone at home for the trip so no cell pics!

I can't wait to go dig up rhizomes next year. I'm also going to start planning for an AZ fresh hop pale/IPA next year! That will be awesome.
 
Does anyone want some seeds? I'm going to go back in a while and see if the seeds are ready. If they are I'll mail some to people.

This is all new to me so no guarantees...
 
Does anyone want some seeds? I'm going to go back in a while and see if the seeds are ready. If they are I'll mail some to people.

This is all new to me so no guarantees...

Be careful with this, i think its illegal to ship hop seeds into certain states.

Like in Oregon here

Please note that the state of Oregon remains under a hop quarantine that prevents the entry of hop roots and plant material from anywhere outside the state, except Washington and Idaho states.
http://www.oregonhops.org/roots.html
 
I'd be interested in some seeds and an update if you brew with these. PM coming.
 
Be careful with this, i think its illegal to ship hop seeds into certain states.

I am not a lawyer, but the quarantine clearly excludes "kiln dried cones of hops". Source: http://www.oregonhops.org/roots_quarantine.html

It is all about excluding live plant material to stop the spread of disease.

Shipping seeded cones should be fine as long as you dry them out first.
 
That was a fraction of what I found. I got tired of taking pictures. I filled up a few grocery bags and dried them back in the desert with ambient air. Ended up being about 10 oz of hops. They are vacuum sealed an in my freezer now. I also have some whole cone amarillo in the freezer that are vacuum sealed and they are a little softer in the bag. That leads me to believe that I didn't dry them enough. It was my first time harvesting hops and drying them. The aroma when I stick my nose in the bag is piney and spicy. There is a little floral that comes through. The aroma is very light and nothing like many of the big alpha hops that I like to brew with.
 
Nice! They look great.

Are you going to do a smash or something similar to test them out?
 
Yeah I think so. All I have for base grain is 2row, maris and belg pils. I'll probably just use 2row. I can't do anything smaller than 10 gallons so I think I'll do an extract batch in the 2 gallon range to try it out. If I like them I should. Be able to get at least 50# wet next season. Probably more! I get annoyed by picking them though. So we will see how much patience I have.
 
Wow that many? If they turn out good you may have found the holy grail.

Picking is a pain. I would use scissors and clip clumps off and bag them. When you get home you can remove the excess stems and what not.

No matter what it's a lot of work!
 
Hey mojzis, that is pretty much what I did! I cut the vines to pull them down and then plucked off the stem at the node and plucked the stems out later. Harvesting hops is definitely a labor intensive endeavor.

I have to thank my wife. She was the one who saw them and pointed them out. I didn't even think about looking!
 
Are you still able to send some seeds out? If so I would be interested. I will pm you my address.
 
Well, A little update is in order. I still haven't smashed the hops I harvested to see if they would be any good. But I did go back and collect seeds. The cones were nice and dry and falling apart. I got a bunch of those. I need to pull the seeds out and such and get rid of the extra biomass.

Also while I was there I did a little digging around. I came back with 3 rhizomes that should be female and one rhizome that should be male. I am fairly confident in the sex of what I dug up. There is a slight chance that they are all male. With everything dead it was hard to find the hops from the rest of the root mass.

The soil was loamy with a light sand component. It was dark, rich and very nice. I'll have some more soil information for people that are getting seeds. I have a couple things to look up on the soil.

If we communicated previously about seeds then you will get some more info via PM soon.
 
I have to ask. Why are looking for the seeds? Why are you looking for male plants? With the plans I have as well as the people around us, we really wouldn't want male plants introduced.
 
Just to experiment and play around. This stuff fascinates me and it is fun to learn by doing. FWIW, I think we should have enough distance between us for any cross pollination concerns to be mitigated.
 
Funny looking side arms are showing up. Here are a couple pictures. These look was different than the sidearms that I usually see on my centennial and willamette hops. They are obivously different hops but I am concerned about the look of these sidearms.


 
Could be a male or just one with unique sidearms? You'll find out soon enough.
 
Yep. Worried about the male part... I was digging up the wild rhizomes when everything was dead so determining sex was difficult. I was going on memory from a few months prior.

The bine is about 2' tall and adding about 1 node of growth per day on the warm sunny days. We just got some cloudy, rainy days so growth has slowed a bit. Expecting it to pick up full steam into the future. I'm at about 32.3 lattitude, fyi.
 
Yep. Worried about the male part... I was digging up the wild rhizomes when everything was dead so determining sex was difficult. I was going on memory from a few months prior.

The bine is about 2' tall and adding about 1 node of growth per day on the warm sunny days. We just got some cloudy, rainy days so growth has slowed a bit. Expecting it to pick up full steam into the future. I'm at about 32.3 lattitude, fyi.


I would not expect flowering at 2 ft of growth. Sidearm development, sure but not floral development. Anyways, maybe there was inconsequential damage that has lead to this strange development.
 
On the 19th:


Today:


I'm thinking it is a male now. So what should I do now? I'm not sure I really wanted a male that bad. I know I was looking for one when I dug them up but I seriously thought this was from the crown of a female.
 
I'm thinking it is a male now. So what should I do now? I'm not sure I really wanted a male that bad. I know I was looking for one when I dug them up but I seriously thought this was from the crown of a female.

Just snip the sidearms off if you don't want seeds. Actually, you can top it in order to keep the sidearms at a lower level (easier to work on). Just wondering why you don't want a male around? It's amazing how much bigger the girls cones get once they become seeded.
 
@PapaBearJay, Hopefully this year I can follow through with actually sending you something. Last winter just didn't work out for a lot of personal reasons. I guess I could send you a cutting mid-season if you want?

@B-hoppy, Bigger cones? Do the seeds have any impact on usage? Being whole cone they will be contained in my BK when I use them. I don't mind having the males around. I'm not in a hop growing area. In fact I am probably the only fool growing these things for a big radius around me.
 
The seeds are said to have a negative impact on the final product but at our level, I don't really think they do, at least I've not perceived any differences over the last 25 years of homebrewing. They pretty much float for the most part so there's not really interference when you're going from the kettle to the heat exchanger. I use whole hops and a counterflow so if you're set up to filter out the whole hops, you're golden!

I guess it's pretty common practice (at least it used to be) in the UK for the growers to grow their hops seeded. The increased surface area created by the seeds apparently allowed for more lupulin to accumulate and that's what they were after. I just think it's cool to see how much bigger the cones get when they're seeded as opposed to not. Even the cones that don't form seeds seem to be a bit bigger so it's up to you. If you let all the sidearms on the male form, you'll most likely have tons of seeds. I'd just keep one or two which might keep the amount of seeds at a tempered pace. It's up to you at this point!
 
Does anyone want some seeds? I'm going to go back in a while and see if the seeds are ready. If they are I'll mail some to people.

This is all new to me so no guarantees...
I know I’m a little late to the game in this one, but I just stumbled across this. How did they turn out? Do you still have any seeds or rhizomes of these?
 
Ha that was a long time ago! The whole project kind of fizzled out and never got around to doing anything with them. If you are in the SW they aren't too hard to find in the mountains.
 
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