The last of the hops have now been picked, unfortunately the Challenger & Redsell's Eastwell Goldings have grown into one another, so that means I'll have a mixed bag of hops on this batch. Good job the Challenger hop is a duel purpose hop.
After six hours of picking the hops from the bines in the sunshine, I ended up with a rather large harvest of my mixed hops, in fact it came in at 6.5kg in four large carrier bags.
When I got all the hops home they where starting to sweat a bit in the bags so to prevent them going bad I dumped the lot onto the floor of the Cabin Brewery to air them out. Then into the dehydrator to dry them out before storing them in vac-packed bags. To do the 6.5kg of mixed hops took a total of 4 days with the dehydrator and that gave me 1.481kg of hops in total.
So the end result of the 2014 hop harvest was 329g of Target, 269g of Fuggle, and 1481g of Challenger & Goldings Mixed. Giving me just over 2kg of dried hops to make beer with. That equates to around about 20 forty pint brewdays or about 800 pints.
With dried hops going for around £5 per 100g that is a bounty of around £70 as long as it makes a good beer. So it'll soon be time to test them out with a mega hopped IPA
