This is the part of brewing nobody films.

This is the part of brewing nobody films. Before the kettle, before the yeast, before anyone smells a single hop cone, there is a horse in a field, a compost pile, and a brand new hops crown going into ground that has been waiting for it.

These particular plants started as seed from @experimentalfarmnetwork, a Polish accession that EFN sourced through Sheffield’s Seeds and offered as an untested botanical sample, which is exactly the kind of seed that gets me up early. Almost every hops plant on the commercial market is clonal, propagated by rhizome from a named female cultivar so the cones come out seedless the way brewers want them. Grow hops from seed instead and you get both sexes in the field, which means a breeding population, which means the chance to select something nobody has named yet. That is the whole play here. I am collecting varieties on purpose, stacking diverse genetics into one block so the next decade of crosses has somewhere to go.

Hops is a Cannabaceae plant, the same family as the hemp already growing across this farm, and the parallels run deep. It is a perennial bine that climbs twenty feet a season on stiff hair-like hooks along the stem, throws spring shoots that come up like slender little asparagus and cook the same way, makes seed as nutritious as its hemp cousin, and carries compounds long used for sleep, hot flashes, cardiovascular health, and depression long before anyone thought to put them in beer.

Run-a-Muck is twenty five acres of closed loops and long bets, and a Polish accession that might throw a Pennsylvania-adapted offspring in three years is exactly the kind of bet I am here to place. If you are sitting on hops genetics worth crossing, you know where to find me.

#runamuckfarms #permaculture #experimentalfarmnetwork #farmlife