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.

I've had a run of bad luck with my beers lately. The Brown Ale I did a while back seems to be infected and the Ordinary Bitter I did last weekend is really infected. I mentioned this to Rich, a fellow homebrewer, and he pointed out that this was one of the reasons the Germans started lagering their beers during the summer. They found it hard to actually brew anything during the warmer months. Of course now we know that it is because of the higher amount of infectous bacteria in the air during the warmer seasons. I've come to the conslusion that I will either have to stop brewing during summer (nooooo!) or find better ways of keeping my un-inoculated wort away from the beasties that would love to ruin it. This last beer that I did I had a big issue with wort chilling. I chilled it down to 100f with my immersion chiller but after that it wouldn't drop. After I waited about 45mins for it to drop I decided to just cap it off and stick it in my fermentation box and let it cool. I came back down after about 3 hours and it was still at 80f. So, I pitched my yeast and closed it up. The yeast was a little suspicious as well. Usually when I just pitch a vial (OG=<1.040) I will just put the vial in my pocket and vent the CO2 every hour or so while I'm brewing. This vial never built up any pressure. I think the vial must have been exposed to some high temps while in shipment to my LHBS since it's "use by"date was Aug '07.

A couple of pics of my lost beer:




























My plan is to attempt another English beer this weekend, probably a Dark Mild or an ESB. That is if I get my chilling techniques down. I want to use a sump pump in a bucket or cooler of ice water to push water thru my immersion chiller and adding a ball-valve with a "hop stopper" like item on the inside to filter out the hops (I'm using leaf hops).

We'll see how this beer comes out. If it gets infected I may just have to stop brewing during the summer, or switch to extract brewing and return to the kitchen for a few months.