tissue culturing hop cones/leaves to get a hop plant?

[Jonathanquist]

Did some reading on tissue culturing and was wondering if anyone here has tried it on a hop before. I was thinking about doing this with amarillo and other propreitary blends since they are hard to get.

 

[TheBeerGardener]

Were you thinking about doing this with live plants or something you bought for brewing?

If you are talking about brewing hops you purchased, there is no way. You will need living tissue to create genetic clones of any plant.

 

[The Soft Underbelly]

If your idea is to slice off a bine, maybe use some rooting hormone and get a "new" plant, you'll have an easy enough time.

I've propagated my Cascades 7 Chinooks with far less effort than that. As they sprout in the spring, i'll pull up some of the smaller or out lying bines - typically some of the roots come up with it - put those in a pot, or a bed, in soil, mild fertilizer and prob 95% of the time they take root. the 5% failure rate is more due to my dogs, neglect, etc than it is anything else.

Don't know if that's what your asking about, but hops are super easy to clone in my experience.

 

[Jonathanquist]

I was thinking of using hops from my lhbs to accomplish this. I more recently found out even if I could pull this off it is illegal.

 

[OppamaBrendan]

My little plant almost died last summer so I was pretty desperate to propagate even a single leaf that had been knocked off (of 3 remaining in the plant). I got the single leaf to develop roots by supporting the leaf with bamboo skewers across a glass and leaving the stem (petiole) to hang down into water. I didn't know where to buy rooting hormone here in Japan at the time so I made willow-water in order to boost the plant hormones that promote growth. Although the leaf rooted it was weak and when I moved it to potting soil it died. Temps were hot (30-40 Celsius) at the time which probably did nothing to help.

I don't know about using cone structures, the hormones in the plant are probably geared towards flowering at that time so it would be tough to change them into a root growth phase.

If you are trying to grow roots make sure you have a high humidity environment since the plant part will have a tough time making up for lost moisture.

 

[sweetcell]

your best bet is to use fresh (green) hops which you can only get in the fall at harvest time.

hops you get at the lhbs have been dried (kilned) and frozen. i suspect there isn't any viability left in there, but would be happy to hear that i'm wrong.

 

[Jonathanquist]

Do they do fresh propreietary hops.

 

[nagmay]

Do they do fresh propreietary hops.

Yes. In the Pacific NW, during the fall, some homebrew stores supply limited amounts of fresh hops (including proprietary varieties) directly from the growers. However, as others have mentioned, propagating from these cuttings would be highly frowned upon by the growers. If they found out, they might stop suppling fresh hops - which would be a loss for us all.