Bellwoods Brewery

September 7, 2011

We’ve been surprised at how much media attention our humble hops gardening project has attracted. It’s been a great way to meet a huge range of people from locals, to home brewers, business owners, gardeners and environmental science types. We even heard from a microbrewery south of the border for roof gardening advice.

We’ve been happy with the first year growth of most of our plants. Some have done better than others. All of our plants are currently flowering. The Centennial, Chinook and Nugget hops at Parks&Rec above Parts&Labor are all flowering and some are ready to harvest. The plants at Ideal Coffee on Ossington, which have the most sun hours of any site, just started to produce flowers at the beginning of September. We would have trellised the Ideal hops to the roof’s edge if we’d known they would grow so much. We thought of this summer as just a chance to get the roots established in that location. We’ll definitely give them proper room to climb next year.

We transplanted a few Centennial plants from a residential location to The Stop at Wychwood Barns on August 22. We wanted to move those plants before the end of August to give the root systems a chance to get settled before winter. We expect those plants to overcome the moving shock (they looked pretty unhappy with us) and to come back strong in the spring of 2012. We look forward to using some of those hops late in the summer of 2012.

We’ve been given a great spot to grow hops at Evergreen Brickworks next summer, which we’re very excited about. We’ll be building a series of planter boxes and setting up a trellising system for up to 30 plants along the south border of the farmer’s market building. We’re working on a plan for the planter boxes now and we’ll likely get that set up later this month or in October so that we can get the new rhizomes into the soil as early as possible next spring. Interspersed with the hops will be a collection of plants to attract ladybugs, a natural predator of the aphid, as well as other plants such as bergamot, for potential use along with the Brickworks hops in a fall 2012 specialty ale.

We’ve had many kind offers from local home brewers offering us the opportunity to harvest some of their hops, and we’ve taken a couple people up on that. We’re running out of freezer space so we can’t take much more this year! Thanks to Stuart in the west end for giving us carte blanche to harvest from his Hallertau plant. We visited Greg in the Junction to check out his Willamette and Hallertau plants last week.

Finally, we’re working on a 100 Mile project, along side City Hops, in a fun attempt to create a range of hyperlocal experimental creations for the cafe. Producing a true 100 Mile Ale will be challenging, if not impossible, depending on how rigidly we set ingredient criteria. The issue has much more to do with sourcing local malt than local hops. More to come on this.