Last year's ripening hops

Four days from our wedding and I find myself sitting in the dirt of a mostly unplanted garden, wishing I could turn the hose on myself. Ben and I have just finished uprooting an entire row of hops plants from his parents’ old home and replanting them at my family’s place out in the countryside of central Ohio. Bill, my parents’ orange cat, is rolling around in the dust next to me, but knew enough to not get too close. It is so hot and sticky and dirty and we haven’t even set up the trellis yet. But if we want to make beer right ourselves, we have to do it right. Ourselves.

Hops on a trellis

Hops are a climbing perennial plant, much like grapes, only taller. They grow in rows on trellises about 12 feet high. They are said to have originated in China, but apparently no one there thought, “Hm, I wonder what would happen if I threw this in water and drank it after several weeks!” There are records of the Dutch processing hops as early as the 1400s, which is how it got some fun-to-say phrases attached to it like “oast house” (drying barn) and “scuppet” (flat spade for turning drying hops).

We knew the plants were pretty tenacious and spread easily, but we did not fully grasp how hard they’d be to move. First, I have to admit here that I’m not exactly the most experienced of gardeners. So when I was handed a shovel I eyed it warily before pushing at it ineffectively with one tennis shoe. Fortunately Ben’s father saw I was struggling (as much as you can call not trying “struggling”) and took the tool from me — clearly this was not a two-person job for these particular two people.

This is not exactly the ideal time to transplant anything, but it had to be done this week. The plants were well on their way to flourishing and already stretched six feet up the trellis. The roots were thick and had to be hacked at with a hatchet. And they were long, some I tugged on just kept popping up out of the dirt yards away. We tried to dig them up in batches of a few plants a piece to cut as few roots as possible. After they were free from the dirt, Ben and his father wrestled each batch — along with accompanying wire fence we cut free with wire cutters — and stuffed them into huge black plastic bags that were then shoved into my cavernous trunk. I felt like a mobster with bodies in the back on my way to my folks’ place (how would I explain this to the police?).

Ben's arm post-hop transplant

Ben and I dug a new home for the plants in a sunny patch of my parents’ garden. We drug the wilting plants out of my trunk and tucked them into the dirt as neatly as possible — which, turns out, is not very neat. It was then, while soaking their poor tangled roots, that we discovered a nasty side-effect of being beer lovers. No, not that our beer bellies get in the way of shoveling, but that handling hops vines can earn you some vicious stripes. Our forearms and lower legs are criss-crossed with welts where the sticky vines clung to us. Poor things were probably just as terrified as we are, entering a whole new era in their life together. Tomorrow the trellis goes up; right now, it’s time for beer on the porch.