Above: Ninety-day hydroponic
hops project coordinator
Myles Lewis (L) with his
team, Sean McBride
and Kelsey Humber.
The folks at BeerAdvocate note that while hydroponic
growing techniques have been around since the early 17th
century, growing hops in a mineral-rich nutrient solution is
a recent endeavor, one they think will impact the beer indus-
try, especially the craft beer brewers.
“In the world of beer, one ingredient reigns supreme,” they
report, “and that’s hops.” Getting them fresh and frequently
from the field has been problematic, but the harvesting of
hydroponic hops, grown under species-specific horticulture
techniques, can be done in perpetual production according
to HydroHop Farms in Colorado.
“We have designed and developed methodology to over-
come the single hop harvest per annum in field-grown condi-
tions. Our Hoponics research model of perpetual production
allows the ability to grow three to five crop cycles per year.”
HydroHop harvests several varieties for wet-hop brewers
using fresh product, hops that have been harvested less than
24 hours before. One brewer lauded the indoor efforts, noting
the fresh hops were sticky and smelled great with no leaf
burn found on outdoor-grown hops.
Colorado State University (CSU) horticulture profes-
sor Dr. Bill Bauerele leads that university’s research
program focused on controlled environment hydroponic
hop production. “January 2016 was our first crop. Now
we’re doing five to six crops a year,” he says.
Housed in a 40x80-foot greenhouse, Bauerele
has some 3,200 square feet of growing space to
experiment with an initial six or seven species of
the 130 cultivars that are currently commercially
available. “There’s some funding for hops breeding,
but USDA has no federal grant monies for hops
production, and at one point in our set-up, we ran
out of money. As an army of one, we moved forward
slowly and after a year and a half, have built a nice
system with environmentally controlled watering and
individual plant nutrient injections.”
As an open-field farmer before becoming a researcher,
Bauerele says, “People don’t realize how much work is
involved here. Hops are a physically demanding plant
and I’ve never worked this hard in my life.”
grow cycle
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