As an experiment to find the purpose of Twitter I decided I was going to "Tweet" all week and come the weekend decide if this was something goofy or if it was something I just didn't understand. I have already found one use for it. I follow James at Basic Brewing on twitter and yesterday I got a message on my cell phone saying "Interviewing Chris Colby in an hour and a half on growing hops in planters. Send me your questions!" So I was able to rattle off several questions directly to him. Then on the way home last night after a late meeting I was standing outside putting gas in my truck in the 17 degree weather with the wind blowing and I get this text message: "CharliePapazian: Is it time for a beer yet?"

...Charlie felt my pain... he knew what I was thinking. ...yes Charlie, it WAS time for a beer.

Well, if you look back to one of my previous posts about growing hops you'll see that in 2007 I tried to grow four plants. I didn't post about it but they failed... miserably. I decided that was from poor soil conditions as well as the fact that they just didn't get enough sun light in my back yard. I've attempted to grow a few different veggies and other plants in my yard over the years and we are just too shaded to be able to grow much at all. However, last year I did find an area over on the North side of my house that seems to get plenty of sun. I built a raised bed, filled it with compost and grew huge tomato plants as well as a huge crop of catnip. So, I've decided to try growing some hops over there as well this year. Since I don't want to give my raised bed away to only growing hops I'm going to try to either grow them in some small to medium sized containers or build a small raised bed behind my current one. It'll have to be pretty small, maybe 2ft x 2ft because there are some rather large holly bushes back there that are kind of awkward to work around. They probably need cutting back (or down) as well, so maybe that will give me a couple more inches to work around. Last year I planted the catnip and tomatoes as I said earlier. The catnip was perfect but the tomatoes grew HUGE, almost as tall as I am and they were equally that wide as well. But, they only produced about 10 or 15 tomatoes. And I think I know why, as I learned a little bit about soil in last weeks Master Gardeners class. Certain soils will encourage either vegetative or reproductive growth. Meaning my soils encouraged vegetative growth since the plant itself was huge but didn't produce much in the form of the reproductive portion of the plant, the tomato fruits. The catnip on the other hand was great because I wanted the leaf part of the plant, or the vegetative portion, not the flower or reproductive portion. That is something I will have to watch on the hops since I really want the flower portion and not the leaves. I may end up with a hop vine (or bine) that is 20ft tall and has 1/2 oz of hops on it. I'd rather have a 6ft tall plant that has 2+oz of hops on it. This will take a little more research, luckily I have about a month before hop rhizomes go on sale so I should be good.

Woo hoo, I managed to avoid blogging for the entire 2008 year! Well, that wasn't really on purpose to be honest. 2008 was a dry year for me in the brewing world. I think I may have actually only done four or five batches all year. I'm off to a little bit better start this year since I've started doing small batch beers. I did a one gallon English IPA back around Jan 2nd that I just bottled it up this past weekend. I'm probably going to do a few more of these since they're easier and quicker to do. Plus, I can do them inside where its nice and warm. I plan to pick up a small two gallon cooler and convert it into a small mash tun so I don't have to buy expensive malt extract all the time. Plus, if you buy 55lbs of base malt you can do A LOT of one gallon batches. Yeast is going to be the most difficult thing for me to figure out. Knowing exactly how much yeast to pitch will be tricky. I'm thinking that this is where using my slants will come in handy. For a one gallon batch I can grow my slants up to about the 50ml size and be good. Instead of trying to grow them up to a full 1000ml volume. Dunno, time will tell.

I will also be doing as many full batches as time allows me to do so. I have the ingredients for my house APA as well as Norther Brewer's Cream Ale. I've had those for a good while so I need to get them going as soon as I can. Yeast, again, is a problem. I don't have any on hand right now and since the LHBS has closed down I can't make a quick run to pick some up. I may have to just grow up a 1000ml starter and cut a little off of it for small batches as well.