Homegrown Hops for Homebrew

You can grow enough of your own hops and herbs to make a real contribution to the flavor, aroma, and uniqueness of your homemade beer recipes.

By Joe Fisher And Dennis Fisher
Updated on March 23, 2023
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by AdobeStock/kishivan
People brew beer for a lot of reasons, but the two most important things to do in homebrewing are to enjoy yourself and to make beer that you like.

Homegrown hops and herbs contribute to flavor, aroma, uniqueness, and nothing is more local than using your own.

Advantages of Growing Your Own

We started brewing beer in the early 1990s, during the first great wave of homebrewing interest after things got going in the 1970s. As organic gardeners, we wanted to grow our own hops right away and it was natural enough, a little later, to combine these two disciplines in a book called The Homebrewer’s Garden. These were practically pre-Internet times, and there was very little informa­tion available to the homebrewer on home growing. Our book filled that void with descriptions and growing tips on unusual and mostly unused historical brewing herbs and basic hop and barley cultivation and processing information.

Many things have changed since those early days, not only in homebrewing and in the larger beer culture but also in our own lives. We moved back to Maine; bought some land; built houses, barns, and greenhouses; became organic farmers; and kept growing hops and brewing beer. Meanwhile, in the greater world, small brewing was a sleeping giant that stirred, yawned, stretched, and woke up roaring. Beer — good beer — is now pretty much everywhere. Organic beer, while still a niche market, is a strong niche. The number of new busi­nesses, not just breweries and tasting rooms but also malt houses, homebrew suppliers, and hop farms, is almost staggering. We live in a golden age. Many of the people founding these businesses started out as homebrewers. We were pleased to learn that a few of the people we interviewed for this new edition of the book read our first edition when they were beginning grower-brewers.

Not long ago, we looked about and noticed that we had a couple of decades of growing experience under our belts and that it seemed like a good time to update The Homebrewer’s Garden, to reflect not only what we have learned but also the changes in the world of beer. Since we wrote the first edition, many new varieties of hops and barley have appeared, and some of these would be great additions to any home-growing operation. The small farming revolution that parallels the one in brewing (and we have a foot in both camps) has meant that tools, materials, and information that used to be difficult or impossible to find are now available to the home grower. We’ll tell you how to find and use them to grow great brewing ingredients in your own garden.

Homebrewers today can buy most of what they need in homebrew supply stores or online, and this is a great convenience for all con­cerned. But if you have a little land or even a sunny porch, you can grow enough of your own hops, herbs, and adjuncts to make a real contribution to the flavor, aroma, and uniqueness of your homebrew. Everything you need to make beer can be grown in garden-size plots, including grains for malting. And even if you grow nothing at all, we can still show you how to find and use a variety of unusual brewing ingredients, and how to modify grains by roasting, toasting, and smoking. You may be more interested in hops than in other kinds of herbs. We’ll tell you where to find hop rhizomes, where to plant them, how to tend them, and how to harvest and use the hop flowers. Or you may want to learn about malting, but not about growing grain. We tell you how to locate various types of grains and what to do with them once you’ve found them. We also provide recipes using home­made grains, homegrown hops, herbs, and adjuncts.

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