100% homegrown

[drummstikk]

[spiderwrangler]

That's a fine jumper you've got in your last photo !

[drummstikk]

I recently stumbled upon the blog of Jean-Francois Dyment, who has already pulled off making beer with 100% homegrown malt. I've learned a lot from his malting techniques; check out his blog!

Well, harvest is just one week away on Monday May 21, and the field is indeed cooperating,



for the most part. Some patches of green remain.



Those green guys have one last week to get their act together.

The slow end of the field has even more unripe plants, though they're all in at least the hard dough stage. Maturity comes right after hard dough, and maturity is what I really care about. The hallmark of maturity is no green color in the glumes (small spiky hairs on the head -- see prev. post) or the peduncle (the 'stem' of the grain head). You can see from the photos that some heads aren't there yet. But, about half the plants on the slow side are past maturity and in the kernel hard stage. Kernel hard arrives when the mature grain is dry enough that it is difficult to divide with your fingernail.

All the plants on the faster side of the field, except the very edges, are at kernel hard or later. They're ready to go any day. The last developmental stage that follows kernel hard is harvest ripe. Harvest ripe stage comes when you cannot dent the grain with your fingernail. These last two stages (kernel hard and harvest ripe) are funny to me, because the plant is dead at this point. It's straw. So it doesn't matter if you go through these stages with the plant in the ground or in a cut swath. They are there to help you count down the waiting time until you can reliably thresh. It's looking like I'll need to let my grains do some drying in swaths after harvesting, but before I thresh. There's no way the slow end will make it to harvest ripe before Monday!

Of course, I found something to worry about:



What is going on with exposed grains like this one? The exposed grains tend to be smaller as well.

And what is up with deformed heads like this one,



These deformed heads seem to be more likely to have exposed grains in them. Also, the deformed heads contain weird fused seeds, like the triplet above, and the twins here:



I'm looking through common diseases to see if one matches these heads. Any guesses?

In other news, 2nd year hops are doing well, between 3 and 6 feet tall. Crowns from Great Lakes Hops are off to a slow start still, but they had a nasty transition to full sun, so they may take longer to take off. I tested out a thresher made by Almaco. It breaks and skins a few kernels out of each handfull, which isn't perfect, but I think it is going to be a lifesaver when it comes time to thresh the field in bulk!

* * *

Finally, I'm pretty excited to say that Jesse Friedman and Damian Fagan from Almanac will come to help out with the harvest on Monday! Each of their beers contains a locally-farmed ingredient, and if the crop turns out (hey, a lot could still go wrong), they want me to malt the whole field as a crystal malt for a draft-only wet hop beer, to be released this Fall.

As Jesse describes it, the plan is to brew an all-California beer. Great Western makes a California-grown base malt, and there are more than a few hop farms in Northern California. But, there are no California-grown commercial specialty malts, so that's where the field comes in. I don't know how the yield will turn out, but Almanac does things on the scale of 25 barrels. I only need to produce 5-10% of the grist for a batch that size... so what I'm saying is, there's a chance!

Anyway, before that can happen, I need to know what's going on with those weirdo heads. Any thoughts?

[drummstikk]

Hop flowers are already forming on the last 3-4 nodes of the 2nd year Columbus plant's longest bine! Didn't expect them so early. Does anybody know (or know another thread with the answer) how to change the nutrients you add to hops as they begin flowering? Switch from nitrogen to potassium maybe? I hit each plant with 2.5 g of 15-5-15 water-soluble fertilizer yesterday. Let's hope it just encourages growth but doesn't discourage cone production. I think because it's early in the season it will be fine.

Because I only have a six foot high fence to grow the hops on, I am planning to pinch the tip of any future bines that have reached the top but don't have any flowering nodes. The idea here is that the axillary shoots are more likely to flower than the main shoot, and because the main shoot typically wants to grow higher than six feet, you just want to stop it when it gets to the top, allowing all future resource to go to the side shoots. Is this crazy?

In other news, I practiced harvesting yesterday on one row, mainly to figure out a good technique. I used some barley at the very end of the field that I planted late, that has hardly had a mention on this thread. It's so far behind, I thought it would just be a long-shot bet to get maltable grains, and as you can see, it's still green in the photos below. Most of these plants are in soft/hard dough.

I ended up first cutting the plants and laying them down on the ground in a line:





Then I gathered the plants into groups, made sure they were all pointed the same direction, and removed weeds:



Finally, I combined these little bundles into a big stack, and tied jute cord around the middle. With a little finagling, I was able to prop up the bundle:



The idea here is to allow the plants to dry in the sun and the breeze for a week or two before threshing. The bundle keeps the grains off the ground, away from moisture and mice.

In an hour my buddy and I will harvest the four rows of bere barley. I'll use this for seed next year, so I want to harvest it early and make sure it doesn't get mixed up with any other parts of the crop. Bere is a six row, so if it does get contaminated with Conlon seeds, no big deal -- they will be obvious and easy to remove next year.

Anybody have any thoughts about the deformed heads and conjoined seeds (see prev post). If not, I will just have to make the Papazian decision to RDWHAHB.

[skibikejunkie]

Finally, I'm pretty excited to say that Jesse Friedman and Damian Fagan from Almanac will come to help out with the harvest on Monday! Each of their beers contains a locally-farmed ingredient, and if the crop turns out (hey, a lot could still go wrong), they want me to malt the whole field as a crystal malt for a draft-only wet hop beer, to be released this Fall.

This is a pretty cool development, but if you malt the whole field as crystal for Almanac, what happens to your stated objective of brewing a 100% homegrown beer?

[spiderwrangler]

While I haven't tried it with hops, removing the apical meristem of the plant will cause it to send out side shoots from the nodes (meristem produces auxin hormones that prevent other shoots from developing). However, it may send shoots out of the next node down and still end up up getting tall.

[EagleDude]

Anybody have any thoughts about the deformed heads and conjoined seeds (see prev post). If not, I will just have to make the Papazian decision to RDWHAHB.

Are the deformed heads perhaps just a genetic abnormality or mutation?

[drummstikk]

Are the deformed heads perhaps just a genetic abnormality or mutation?

I would have to grow the seeds from these heads a few more years before I knew if the trait was heritable. So I have no idea if the head phenotype has a genetic basis. My guess is that the allelic diversity in seed stocks that are prepared by breeding programs is very low, and remember that most of the plants look normal. If there is a genetic basis, it would have to be partially penetrant -- but that isn't so crazy to consider. The plants were grown in conditions very different from those they were bred in. Perhaps the California winter exposed some partially-penetrant deformed head trait.

But my guess is that there's an environmental cause.