Give me pointers on Hops and growing them myself.  Wife wants to try next spring to grow some looking for leads on good information about growing our own hops and how to start them off.

Lots of info out there.  I'm hoping to start growing some next year too.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/grow-your-own-hops.html

Thanks, so far we are "concerned" by some of the stuff we have found so far and the spacing it states we need between plants we aren't planning on growing a crazy amount just a few since I am new to the home brew thing.  I think one info area I read said they have to be spaced 5 feet apart which a couple of hop plants would take up my entire backyard.

Something to think about is how you plan on using them after they grow?  "Wet hops" can't just be used the same way you currently add in your store-bought hops...just something to think about.

Really??

 
They need to be dried first and then vac sealed for storage.


You can use them to make a wet hop ale if you want also. That would eliminate the drying time.

Yes.  There are some different things to consider.  

Have to brew when they are ripe, cause they are crap a week later (you aren't drying them like commercial operations)
You don't know the AA %, so using them late boil where that doesn't matter much is pretty important.
There are some more, there is a whole brew strong show on them:  http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/post526/

I have a neighbor trying to grow some this year. He had some tall poles with a wire across and wires coming down every so far to make a sort of trellis for them to climb. Last I heard he was having trouble with bugs eating them up.

 
A local brewery dry hops with "wet hops" whenever they get a harvest from a local hop farm...AFAIK, they don't use them for anything else.


More importantly, I've found Brew Strong to be incredibly useful.  I started listening to their olders ones a few weeks back and am catching up rapidly.

We grew some this summer and tried to do this just off our back patio to provide a kind of functional privacy fence and allowed us to try this out. The plot we used was roughly 30" x 120" and we used three plants to start. I had set up a small wire with smaller poles across the entire section with three levels of cross wires that eventually led to a trellis.

What we saw:

Initial growth was great and the plants went crazy in direct sunlight. We did experience a bit of a dry spell and this seemed to stunt them for a bit. Once they started budding out the plants seemed to slow the outward growth. One plant looks like the bugs liked it more than others, not sure why or what bugs , but we did have some Japanese beetles hitting the fruit trees hard this here.

Things we will change

Next year we go from thee plants to two in that section as it got way to thick.

Change the layout of the trellis to facilitate growth , but a bit more separation.

Install beetle traps if that was indeed the culprit

Did you have a harvest?  If so, what was your yield?  

Also, this looks like a pretty interesting/useful service if you are getting serious about growing hops.



http://midwesthopanalysis.com/

We took about a bushel down from what we had , could have been more but the one plant was pretty worked over by bugs. I contacted a local micro brew and they were less then enthused about using our hops or letting us use their equipment.

I did hear of another place near me that does allow you to do this so I will be trying them this week.

No offense to your homegrown hops, but would you want to put something out there with your name on it that you have no idea how good it is?  Harvesting hops a couples weeks early or late can mean difference between fruity and nasty onion/diesel according to some of the pros that talk about it.  So if I were a brewery owner, I wouldn't go thru the trouble of making a multiple hundreds or thousands of $$ ingredients (no idea how big they are) and then throw in some "I have no idea how this will turn out" hops and then maybe have to dump it later.

Also, what do you mean by "use their equipment"?

 
Yeah you might want to clarify the use their equipment thing.


They need to know oil & acid percentages so they can reliably predict what they will come up with.


Post a picture of your hops so we can see what exactly you have picked and what kind of condition they are in currently.

I grow both Brewer's Gold and Cascade hops.

They are invasive as hell.  I use them as decorative landscaping growing on a trellis on my front porch.  After the third year they really took off (my plants are about 7 years old)  I have to continuously chop them back.  They'll shoot past my trellis and start going up my rain gutters, everywhere.  

I usually dry, vacuum seal and freeze the hops in 1oz (dry weight) packages.  The tricky part with brewing with wet hops is weighing them.  For that I take some wet samples, weight them, then cook in the microwave to dry the crap out of them.  Weigh them again and you'll be able to calculate moisture content and be able interpolate the amount of wet hops to add.

I find it's difficult to be consistent with my home-grown hops.  It can also be a pain to pick (it takes a lot of hops to be 1oz of dry).  I usually make an experimental IPA with the hops every harvest time.  

I'm going to plant Saaz hops on my back porch as soon as I get it built.