Human Flower Project
Hops a Relative of Cannabis? You Don’t Say!
Hops flowers, used in brewing beer, once were a profitable New England crop. A few die-hards in Vermont keep at it, just to see this rangy plant grow.
Warren Johnston of The Concord (N.H.) Monitor has a fine story today about hops growers in the Northeast U.S.
Hops are the unpretentious flowers that, dried, add that delightful bitter taste and je ne sais quoi mais j’ai bu beaucoup to beer. For some reason, I never considered there might be flowers floating in all that Stroh’s.
Here’s a photo taken by Henriette Kress of a hops plant in Europe (they brew beer there too).
“Brewers are interested only in the flowers from the female hop plant, which is in the same family as cannabis. The cones are 1 to 2 inches long, with papery green scale-like petals. The cone turns yellow when ripe.” In the 19th century, the hops harvest was a big social event—that being because you needed as many hands as possible plucking off those little yellow cones.
“Up until the 1920s, New England and New York were the leading areas of hop production in this country, but when blight wiped out the crops, the western United States took the lead.”
California, Idaho, Washington and Oregon grow most of the U.S. hops now, producing “about 6 million pounds of the feather-weight flowers.” Germany and Great Britain are also major hops florists.