Wild Hops! Now what do I do with them.

[wefdog]

Maybe the cross bed so many times over the years you have a new variant. You can patent it and be rich!

 

[stachist]

Don't know if anyone is still on this thread.. but...

I harvested some wild Iowa hops too!

Mine are from Grinnell - I'm here at Grinnell College. And so happens that I am a Chemistry major... And the semester I harvested them (Fall 2012) was also the semester I was taking "Instrumental Analysis." The class had an independent project portion, so I used the HPLC to determine the alpha acids. I also tested an old UV-Vis method from the 1950s.

If anyone wants more info on how to do any of this (either of the two methods) - let me know and I can dig up my notebook and pass on the procedure.

As for drying the hops - I used the "2 air filters bungied to a box fan with hops sandwiched between them" method. It worked ok, but some hops got pretty smushed and started to come apart a bit. Made a little bit of a mess in my dorm room... but beer is why we go to college, right?

 

[vincentAlpha]

I'd be really interested in finding out how the beer was using the wild hops. I just found out from my grandmother that not only will she grow some hops for me (I was going to buy a couple starters and let her try, nothing she can't grow) but that where she lives there are loads wild hop plants! So odds are I'll be going with letting her grow the wild ones after a transplant and see what comes of it.

 

[Wolfdust]

So you found some wild hops, you dried them and....? What happened, how was it? Let us know. Was it any good? What did it taste like?

 

[muels]

He never used them....
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=38708