Friday, August 15, 2008

Hops Update - August

I started out the season growing five different kinds of hops. While all of them are sending out bines, the best of the bunch is definitely the Zeus. You may have seen some brewers using CTZ hops. CTZ stands for Columbus, Tomahawk, Zeus, since I guess they're all pretty much the same kind of hop with the same level of alpha acid. You can click on the photo there and see the hop cones, or flowers starting to form. They haven't become "papery" yet, so they still have a few weeks to go.

I was told not to expect much from the first year harvest, but I still thought that with the way these things are growing, I would get something from each one. Unless things start picking up these last couple of weeks, though, it looks as though I'll only have enough hops from the Zeus for a couple of batches of beer. The recipe I've created for the Magic Hat Jinx clone should only require half an ounce, total, of CTZ hops. They've got the bittering units (IBU) set at 20, which is pretty low for using such a high alpha acid hop.

Please leave your recipe suggestions for Zeus hops in the comments section.

2 comments:

kelsi said...

no recipe suggestions, but i may be more than a little jealous that you have room to grow hops.

chrisg22 said...

Holy Smokes, mine are 2 years old and don't even come close to that! Right On!