A Homebrewer's Hop Garden

Somewhere in this (Alexandria) house, I have a book titled "The Homebrewer's Bible" - I bought it a few years ago with good intentions. On that occasion, we'd visited a Marine Colonel who was retiring. He regaled us with stories of the service and we had a great dinner, followed by apertifs and cigars...but one of the highlights leading up to dinner and during it was the two or three varieites of homebrew he hap on hand to share.

I'm a fan - we often receive a bottle or two from friends who make a special batch for the holidays. Then there is Stan, one of my USAF/Berlin buddies here in Northern Virginia, who makes a batch a week, often trading recipes with the local brew pubs, who taps a couple of bottles whenever I manage to get by his house.

So I've harbored this long time thought that I might like to try it - and if I got into it, I might like to grow some of the sacred ingredients. My thoughts are focused on hops, the flowering vine that imparts a special flavor to beer; it is a thought that traces back to visiting Hop Kiln Vineyard in Sonoma in the early 90's.

We visited a neighbor in the Hawksbill Pines neighborhood last week, enjoying a glass of wine and some fresh strawberries from his organic garden. He also grows a variety of vegetables and fruits - they have about 7 acres total, although not all of it, and not even the majority of it, is cultivated. Everything is grown organically and they supplement their grocery bill with cabbage (here), corn, strawberries and blueberries.

The best surprise was when he told me he had put in six hop vines - to Northwestern varieties, I believe both from Willamette. There is an organic commitment in this garden, so the plot is tilled with compost, and the vines had already grown to the line and were beginning to climb out. Not long now they will begin to bud and flower, yielding this noble ingredient of a favorite pastime - beer.

Here's the obligatory wikipedia link to Hops: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hops