First Harvest of Viemosevej Hops

I hadn’t planned on harvesting any hops this year as my own hop plants were only a couple of months old and still too young to produce anything resembling a cone. However as my brother in law Peter called me and asked if we should give it a try with his plants it didn’t take long to say yes. This was late August and the cones were not really ripe yet. Over the next couple of weeks we had frequent calls to decide on the optimal moment for harvesting.

Over a period of less than a month the hops went from tiny, over big and green, to ripe with a hint of too ripe. On September 18th the decision was made to harvest the following Saturday as the Lupulin glands were getting nice and sticky while many of the cones were starting to turn slightly brown.

Fortunately the weather was nice and about an hour and a half later we were all done with the 2019 harvest of the Viemosevej Hops. In case you wonder if Viemosevej is a new hops variety you have never heard of, then we have just named it after the streetname because we don’t know exactly which variety it is.
Now only the final drying and packaging remains.

The hops were dried (or dehydrated) for 5 1/2 hours at 55 °C and then sealed in vacuum bags for storing in the freezer. We had hoped for a bigger yield than mere 70 grams but at least it should be enough for one batch of the forthcoming Viemosevej Experimental Pale Ale.

The plan is to use a neutral bittering hops like Magnum and then try out the Viemosevej Hops as aroma and flavour hops. I’ll cover the recipe and results in a later post.

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