Hops from green house

[Izzie1701]

My cousin has a ton of hops in his back yard. They were purchased at a green house simply as hops. We are in Canada. I grow cascade here with great success. I'm thinking of trying a small batch with some from my cousins yard as he has TONs. Figure maybe it will turn out to be a great find. What variety would you guess they would be if sold as "hops". I'm sure there an easy to grow cheap hop so not sure if there would be one that's typically just sold for fence covering.

Thanks

 

[day_trippr]

If they were sold as ornamental there's a good chance they'd be Humulus japonicus.
Not a brewing stain, iirc...

Cheers!

 

[Izzie1701]

Looked at some images of this one and I don't think it is. It has a leaf very similar to cascade. I guess some pics may help

 

[TeeJo]

No, pictures won't help. Pretty much all the varieties look about the same, at various points in their development. Sometimes, you can tell the variety if you have one beside it to compare, grown under the same circumstances,, but other than that, visual ID is a crapshoot.

What will eliminate them as Japonicus is whether they drop seeds and grow from those, each year, or if they continue from last year's root system. The brewing hops grow from the same roots each year.

To ID them, about the only thing you can do on the cheap, is to gather and dry some, and start comparing the smell and such, with a known sample. You can pay to have an analysis done, and you will get a pretty good idea what the variety 'might' be, or you can pay a bunch and get a full work-up done which may or may not still tell you what you have.

TeeJo