The scent of hops
Just returned from my annual pilgrimage to the hops farm, 45 minutes from here, where I bought 20 vines that are now laid out on the attic floor to dry. Mine was the first sale of the season. The vines along the outer ends of the rows were farther along in flower than the ones in the center, so the guys and Kansas Hops Growers cut mine from the north end.
The rest of the hops at their farm will be processed into the standard pellet form and sold to brewers in Kansas City and Lawrence and nearby. The pelletization makes me a little sad, but I do appreciate good beer and understand the practicality of the pellet form for brewing. Bob and I don’t keep beer in the house. Neither of us ever could handle much and can’t even finish one shared glass. We love stout, though.
To me, hops vines are materials for making. My inventory of vines is for weddings and special projects. Hops is a perennial crop, the season for harvest is now, and it’s gotten to the point where I checkin with Ryan at the hops farm several times a year so I’ll know just when to make my visit.
Hops is a vastly underappreciated material here in the Midwest. You can search the web for “wedding hops” and get millions of images of them used as decoration (some looking pretty awful), but the idea seems uncommon here, though the area is thick with local craft breweries.
I’ve used hops in various ways for weddings—in large installations, in door hangings, as garland—and plan to use them again in at least one wedding this fall. They have a lot going for them.
They are appropriate in a range of styles—I suppose they could be used in a setting where pumpkins, straw bales and cowboy hats are the order of the day, but I think of them growing in German monastery gardens. To me, they are local, sustainable material that works as the backdrop in large installations with roses, peonies, zinnias or dahlias, and with berries and grasses and wildflowers.
If dried properly, they hold their light green color—This color is marvelously versatile spring through fall, with pastels or dark colors.
They are fragrant and remain fragrant in dried form—The fragrance is light, not overpowering, and softly earthy, bringing a sense of the outdoors inside.
You can do just about anything with them—They can be made into garland base for ceremonial space, for tables, for overhead decoration, for entrances. You can use them to cover things at your venue that you don’t want to see. You can add a cluster to anything, from the handrail of a long staircase to a little welcome sign. For a wedding next May, we’re planning to use clusters of them, along with small branches of native bur oak and cottonwood, and naturally dyed silk ribbon, to decorate the cinched tablecloths of the outdoor bar tables at a ranch in the Flint Hills.
Guys love them—I’ve found that many men like the idea of hops and like the way they look, as well as their scent. During the morning set-up for one wedding, I saw one of the wedding party members come in and kneel reverently at my piled rings of hops vines, and, without touching it, bow his head over it and inhale deeply. This is a generalization, but in my experience men tend to feel more included in the planning when we are talking about types of vegetation that mean something to them personally. Hops are great for boutonnieres, too.
Hops do take a lot of what florists call processing, that is, they have to be cleaned up quite a bit. A hops vine garland is not the same thing as the rough vine Ryan pulled down from the line for me today. To make garland, I need to lay several vines out to dry (this takes a lot of space) for at least two weeks, during which time the thousands of bugs that lived in them as they grew will depart and perish on the attic or barn floor. Then I will pull out the ropes, the ones the vines grew on, and cut off every single one of the hundreds of dried, unsightly leaves if I have to, leaving only the flowers. You could call this either tedious or meditative work. I also will cut off and discard the parts of the vines that are not full of flowers. I’ll coil up what remains to store in a dark, dry place. When I need to make garland, I’ll combine several of these processed vines into the length I need. Then stand back and marvel at their lushness.