Too many males in the Hop Garden!

A quick look around the hop garden shows a lot of male hop plants this year.

It’s the female plants which produce the familiar hop cones needed for brewing our beers...

.... but a few male plants - which are easily identified as the flowers grow loosely in a branching group - are needed for obvious reasons!

There’s normally about one male to every 1000 female plant. But our self-sown males seem to have multiplied again for some reason this year.

Contrary to the popular myth, hop plants don’t actually change their gender. But they can “move” around the hop garden, thanks to the seeds, which come off during harvesting and get scattered between the bines.  It’s here they can establish themselves by using the strings to climb and are often more vigorous than the female plants.

Unfortunately, short of digging up the male plants, we have to let nature take its course!

Did you know?

Hops are dioecious, which means that individual hop plants are either male or female.

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