Growing Hop Rhizomes in dry enviroments - Need community feedback and recomendations

A

Arturo G

New Member
Premium Member
Joined
Jan 16, 2025
Messages
1
Reaction score
0
Points
1
I´m looking to start growing my own hops for home brewing. I´ll like to get some feedback from the community in regards the following doubts and questions:
  • What Hop Rhizomes are ideal for dry and heat environments? My city has the weather like Arizona or New Mexico areas.
  • Which hops Rhizomes are the most resilient to start with?
  • How much water is needed? Any kind of clue of total gallons or litter at day?
  • Any other recomendation to help hop rhizomes to grow?
 
Think about where hops are grown commercially: Pacific Northwest, and Northeast in the USA, and Germany and near by Europe. Cooler, wetter places.

I am only guessing, but I think hops don’t like heat.

Water is essential for any plant, but I bet hops can tolerate dry periods. They will wilt when it gets too dry.

Find someone selling rhizomes, and ask their experts.

Me, I’m no expert. I grow tomatoes.
 
Donoroto said:
Me, I’m no expert. I grow tomatoes.
Click to expand...
I'm no expert either. My hops will grow over a foot a day in hot dry weather as long as they have plenty of water and fertilizer. They are susceptible to powdery mildew and that is caused by damp conditions. So store up some water in barrels and grow some hops.
 
This I can actually provide some feedback on!

About ... circa 2010 or so, I started growing hops in Alexandria, VA. It was easy, TBH, I used nothing more than rotating sprinklers with a daily run about 30 minutes in the AM and PM. I had success with, let’s see: Centennial, Cascade, magnum, chinook & galena. I did not get good results from Kent Goldings. They grew, but never produced significant amounts of hops. I’d say in that mid-Atlantic climate my best results were from magnum and galena. I had 2 large trees I climbed and tied rope to, then dropped strands for the bines to climb. I wasn’t really taking it seriously, I just kind of had them and took them for granted until they produced.

in ’20 I moved to south Texas. After some reading I picked up Cascade rhizomes. They grew fine, but produced very little and died off before November, only 2 of 24 rhizomes survived next season. I did more reading and upped my watering, but we went into heavy drought conditions. Again I lost a large number of rhizomes before the growing season was over. After going basically 0 for 2 and tiring of watching my hops get sun murdered, I installed drip irrigation. I had about 16 cascade bines and got 24 ounces of hops week 1 of August. The drip irrigation was key, but some hops just simply will not thrive in this kind of dry heat.

I tried multi-head neo-mexicanus, they lived 2 seasons, grew, but would not climb, and produced nothing. They all died at the end of season 2. I replaced them with Triumph, they came up and grew, lost 1 of 6. No production, but they were alive at the end of growing season. The problem with neo-mexicanus is you’re blazing the trail trying to home grow them. There’s zero information on watering and care. I tried adjusting water to lower levels but then they would start to wither, so I added water back. I had one rhizome that was a small bush - maybe 15” wide, but that’s as far as it got.

Since I’m good with cascade I will probably stick with them. If the Triumph decide to grow this season, I’ll be glad, but if they turtle or otherwise don’t cooperate I’m thinking of trying a few chinook rhizomes.

Drip irrigation is a great way to take care of the hops. You can get a hose bib adapter, run some line underground to feed the area, and then drip lines to the rhizomes.

I don’t have trees nearby for this, so I basically made an 18’ tall clothes line from ‘rigid’ 1 1/4” pipe. I ran 4 strands of rope between the poles, and dropped rope from them. One side is on pulleys, so when the hops are ready, I untie the pulley side, drop the bines and pick hops.
 
I tried Centennial hops in Austin for a season. One of the problems is that by the time the rhyzomes are available, it's already late in the spring season in warmer climates. If they were available in mid February, it would be better so they could establish better roots before the heat. Mine grew very fast and very high then died back in the heat. The bines survived and leafed out again when it cooled slightly. Very late in the fall, they finally produced a little but not enough to do any good. They came on a second season but heat stress got to them. It gets plenty warm in hop regions of the PNW - triple digit temps are very common - but it cools off at night substantially and the soil temps don't get as high.
With enough water (likely more than is economically efficient), they'll survive but a big problem is day length. One of the biggest reasons that hops are grown almost exclusively above a certain lattitude is that the substantial difference between sunlight hours in summer in winter tells the plant exactly when it needs to grow vines and leaves vs growing flowers. The transition between long and short day length is fairly precipitous, unlike areas in the southern or southwestern US where the differential is far less.
 
id like to add a relevant question to the thread.

Does it take much space to grow hops? ive seen some pictures of the vines that trail up but its not a good gauge of size.
 
I stagger the rhizomes in rows, so they are about 1 pace or ~ 30 inches apart in the same row and about 15 inches between rows. I had several grow over 15’ up and several feet along the horizontal ropes. If you give them something easy to climb like a rope, they’ll happily climb several inches / day in the busy season.
 
Over The Cliff Brewing said:
Too much work! Buy them.
Click to expand...
We can all say the same thing about brewing, it’s not like there aren’t plenty of bottled and canned selections out there. Hops are perennials. You plant them, provide basic care and they produce. It would be awesome if my other beer ingredients would produce year after year ;-)
It would be even more awesome if I had enough hops to complain about harvesting.
 
Dave Y said:
We can all say the same thing about brewing, it’s not like there aren’t plenty of bottled and canned selections out there. Hops are perennials. You plant them, provide basic care and they produce. It would be awesome if my other beer ingredients would produce year after year ;-)
It would be even more awesome if I had enough hops to complain about harvesting.
Click to expand...
It only works if you're in an area and an environment that's hop-friendly. If you're anywhere other than hops' preferred latitudes, they just don't do particularly well. There's a relatively small percentage of earth's total land mass that falls within the 35th and 55th parallels where hops are well suited.
 
J A said:
It only works if you're in an area and an environment that's hop-friendly. If you're anywhere other than hops' preferred latitudes, they just don't do particularly well. There's a relatively small percentage of earth's total land mass that falls within the 35th and 55th parallels where hops are well suited.
Click to expand...
living in virginia, im actually within a good zone for it, so this is excellent info.
 
  • Like
Reactions: J A
KaijuSoul said:
living in virginia, im actually within a good zone for it, so this is excellent info.
Click to expand...
Yeah, in VA you should have a pretty traditional growing season; breaking ground about end of March-ish and harvest in August/Sept. time frame. If you set it up right and give the bines an easy vertical growth path, you can get a solid harvest on a relative few rhizomes. Mine were getting me enough to whirlpool & dry hop a batch for the harvest before I ran the rope system.

You can order rhizomes online and once they’re ready they’ll ship to you. If you have some at a local nursery, that can get you an earlier start. Here in south TX, I’ll see first ground breaking in February.

Oh - one other thing. In the ... 10? years I grew hops in VA, I never once lost a hop to a critter. But in 2023, I lost a majority of 3 hop bines to deer. We were in a pretty severe drought and very hot temperatures, so they ran out of their usual diet. Stinkers ate every leaf off the bine from ground to as high as they could reach. That sucked, but they were all back in 2024.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Copyright © 2007-2025 Brewer's Friend, Inc. - Send Feedback - Terms - RSS Feed - Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information

Back
Top