Hops

Family

Cannabidaceae

Habit

Climber

Height

5.5 m

Spread

7 m

Growth

medium

Lifespan

30 years

First yield

after 3 years

Yield in cultivation

up to 1.5 t/ha

Hardiness

zone 5–8

Shade tolerance

partial shade

Soil

Sand, Silt, Loam, Clay

Soil moisture

semi-dry – very wet

pH

6 – 8

Times apply to the northern hemisphere in a temperate climate and shift with altitude and cultivar.

Edible: Junge Blätter und junge Triebe – gekocht. Der Geschmack ist einzigartig und für viele Geschmäcker köstlich. Junge Blätter können in Salaten gegessen werden. Vor Ende Mai verbrauchen. Die Blätter enthalten Rutin. Die fleischigen Rhizome werden manchmal gegessen. Aus den Blättern und Zapfen wird ein Tee zubereitet. Er hat eine sanfte, beruhigende Wirkung. Die getrockneten Blütenköpfe der weiblichen Pflanzen werden als Aroma- und Konservierungsmittel in Bier verwendet. Sie haben auch eine medizinische Wirkung. Die Blütenköpfe sind mit bitter schmeckenden, gelben, durchscheinenden Drüsen bedeckt, die wie eine körnige Substanz erscheinen. Diese Substanz verhindert das Wachstum gramnegativer Bakterien im Bier oder in der Würze. Die Verwendung des Hopfens als Aroma- und Heilpflanze hängt zu einem großen Teil vom Vorkommen dieser pulverförmigen Substanz ab. Die Samen enthalten Gamma-Linolensäure, eine essentielle Fettsäure, der viele wichtige Funktionen im menschlichen Körper zugeschrieben werden und die in pflanzlichen Quellen selten vorkommt. Das ätherische Öl in den Blütenköpfen wird als Aromastoff in Getreidegetränken und Mineralwasser verwendet. Extrakte aus der Pflanze und dem Öl werden als Aromastoffe in alkoholfreien Getränken, gefrorenen Milchdesserts, Süßigkeiten, Backwaren und Puddings verwendet, wobei die höchste durchschnittliche maximale Verwendungsmenge von 0,072 % für einen Extrakt in Backwaren angegeben wurde.

Medicinal: Hops have a long and proven history in herbal medicine, primarily known for its beneficial, calming, strengthening, and relaxing effects on the body and mind. Its strong bitter taste is crucial for its ability to strengthen and stimulate digestion, increase stomach and other secretions. The female cone acts as an analgesic, antiseptic, antispasmodic, diuretic, fever-reducing, hypnotic, nerve-strengthening, calming, stomach-strengthening, and tonic. Hops are commonly used as a folk remedy to treat a wide range of ailments, including boils, bruises, tartar, cancer, cramps, coughs, cystitis, weakness, delirium, diarrhea, dyspepsia, fever, convulsions, hysteria, inflammations, insomnia, jaundice, neuralgia, rheumatism, and worms. The hairs of the fruits contain lupulin, a sedative and hypnotic. Administered to nursing mothers, lupulin promotes milk flow - recent research has shown that it contains a related hormone that could be responsible for this effect. An infusion of the flower is said to relieve swellings and hardenings of the uterus. Hop flowers are often used as an infusion or to fill pillows, releasing essential oils when the weight of the head presses on them. The fruit is also applied externally as a poultice on ulcers, boils, painful swellings, etc., and is said to heal painful tumors. The female flower heads are harvested in autumn and can be used fresh or dried. Alcoholic hop extracts in various dosage forms have been clinically used to treat various forms of leprosy, pulmonary tuberculosis, and acute bacterial dysentery, with varying success in China. The female cone contains humulone and lupulone, which are strongly bacteriostatic against gram-positive and acid-fast bacteria. A leaf poultice is said to heal cold tumors. The German Commission E "Monographs," a therapeutic guide to herbal medicine, approves Humulus lupulus for the treatment of nervousness and insomnia.

Other uses: A fine brown dye is extracted from the leaves and flower heads. The essential oil from the female fruit heads is utilized in perfumery. The average yield is 0.4 - 0.5%. Plant extracts are used in Europe for their purported skin-softening properties in skin creams and lotions. A fiber is obtained from the stems, resembling hemp (Cannabis sativa) but less potent, used in the production of a coarse fabric. It is sometimes employed as filler in corrugated cardboard but is unsuitable for high-quality pulp production due to low pulp yield and high chemical requirements. The fiber is durable but challenging to separate; the stems need to be soaked for an entire winter beforehand. Paper can also be made from the fibers. The stems are harvested in autumn, stripped of leaves, steamed to extract the fibers, boiled in alkali for two hours, then crushed by hand or in a ball mill for two and a half hours. The resulting paper is dyed brown.

Site: Hops needs one thing above all: a permanent, tall support. A clockwise twiner, it winds around its support without tendrils and manages four to eight metres in a single season — best up a vertically strung coir or sisal cord that is taken down with the bine in autumn. Wire cuts in and is unsuitable. It wants deep, nutrient-rich, evenly moist soil in sun to partial shade and a position sheltered from wind, because the bines tear off in exposed places. Two things belong in the plan: the rootstock throws runners and wanders, so a root barrier or annual severing is needed, and it lives twenty years and more, so the space is committed for good. Because the species is dioecious, only female plants carry cones. The stems are covered in hooked climbing hairs that abrade skin — do not set it right beside a narrow passage. Care: In spring, choose the three strongest of the many new shoots per plant and train them clockwise up the cord, removing all the rest; without this selection you get a tangle and little yield. Strip the lowest eighty centimetres of leaves in summer, which opens the stand up and deprives downy mildew of its footing. Hops is a hungry feeder and takes ripe compost or rotted manure in spring. Even watering matters, since drought favours two-spotted spider mite; the other regular visitor is the damson-hop aphid, and ladybirds and lacewings usually keep both in check. Harvest in August and September, once the lupulin in the cones glows yellow and the cones smell resinous when rubbed. Cut the bines down to the ground in autumn, leaving a few hollow stem sections standing as winter quarters for insects. Voles go for the rootstock.

The simplest route is division: in early spring, as the first buds swell on the rootstock, cut off a piece bearing several shoots and replant it at once. The root runners that hops pushes out in all directions serve just as well — a piece of rhizome with two or three buds is enough. The classic method is rhizome cuttings: sections of root about twenty centimetres long with at least two buds, laid horizontally five centimetres deep in March. Tip cuttings can be taken from young shoots in May and June and root quickly under polythene. Sowing is left to breeders: the seed needs cold and a winter outdoors, the sex shows only in the second or third year, and about half the seedlings are male and so worthless for a cone harvest. Named varieties are propagated vegetatively only.

Hops is wind-pollinated and supplies neither appreciable nectar nor pollen for bees — its value lies elsewhere. As a native species it is a larval food plant for around ten moth species, three of which depend on it exclusively: the hop pug, the buttoned snout and the beautiful snout. Beyond these come the ghost moth, the comma butterfly, the small magpie and several noctuid moths. In riparian thickets the bines form dense green curtains in which wren, blackcap and robin find cover and nest sites. The aphids on the young shoots are not pure damage but food for ladybirds, lacewings and tits in early summer. If a few hollow stem sections are left standing in autumn, wild bees and parasitic wasps overwinter inside them.

Special notes: Perennial rootstock, annual bines - resprouts from the ground every spring; clockwise twiner, climbs without tendrils using hooked hairs use cord as support (not wire); grows up to 10cm/day, 4-8m per season; dioecious - only female plants carry cones; seed set from male neighbours lowers brewing quality; harvest Aug/Sept when lupulin turns yellow; young shoots in April as hop shoots; root runners root barrier; stands 20 years and more;

The temperate northern hemisphere: Europe, western and central Asia, and North America. In Central Europe hops is present almost everywhere, with smaller gaps in the Alpine foreland; in the Allgäu Alps it climbs to about 1,036 metres. The European wild form counts as native, very common and not endangered, with its centre of distribution in the river and stream valleys of the lowlands and hill country. North America holds its own varieties of the species. Through hop growing, practised in Central Europe since the early Middle Ages, it has additionally reached every brewing region in the world, North America, Australia and New Zealand included, and regularly escapes from cultivation there.

Hops is a liana of moist, nitrogen-rich margins. Its natural place is floodplain woodland — it occurs in alder-ash and elm floodplain communities and is a character species of blackthorn scrub — along with woodland edges, riparian thickets, hedges and scrub along ditches and streams. It demands deep soils rich in nutrients and bases with high, consistent moisture, and tolerates brief flooding. It needs light to flower but copes well in partial shade, because it hauls its bines up into the crowns of riverside trees and only unfolds its leaf mass there. It avoids dry, poor and strongly acid sites.