Tag Archives: hops for home brewers

hop twiddling stick, home brewing, english hops, in the hop gardens, seasonal hop work,hops for the home brewer

Choosing a Hop Twiddling Stick

Winter, is the best time choose your hop twiddling stick. The trees are still bare making it easier spot a good one and the sap has not yet risen.

hop twiddling stick, hop growers year

 

The Hazel is one of our native trees found growing in classic coppiced woodlands, it is a very useful tree. Its wood is used in many diverse ways from water divining sticks, traditional sheep hurdles, to the thick straight rods which have been used for generations of gardeners as runner bean sticks. Hazel provides all manner of riches but it is the tall straight rods of medium thickness which I am looking for,  I can select my new hop twiddling stick from amongst these.   These straight rods are called summer or sun shoots.

For the best hop twiddling stick ideally you need a straight rod with the right shaped fork, not too tight and not too wide, this fork will need to trap a hop bine head without pinching it thereby snapping the head off. The rod has to be the right thickness, too thin and it will not be up to the job and too thick it will be cumbersome and make your arms ache lifting it up to manoeuvre it above your head all day. So as Goldilocks said it has to be ‘just right’.

hop twiddling stick, handbill,So first find your perfect hop twiddling stick, then cut it out, trim both ends and debark it if you prefer. It does need to run smoothly in your hands so no untrimmed notches should be left. When I have cut a few I tie them to a length of wood to allow them to dry out and remain nice and straight. I actually like a fork with a kink one side like the one shown, I find this slight bend runs nicely up the strings.

Hop twiddling sticks are needed for ‘Heading’ which is the third and final stage of hop training every year. Each hop plant is trained by hand at least twice during their growing season but usually 3 times. By mid May the rapidly growing bines of most varieties are far out of reach for easy hand work. In order to put any heads back onto the strings it is then that we need our hop twiddling sticks.

hop twiddling sticks, growing hopsLike any personal hand tool you just get used to your own hop twiddling stick, It is just easier to use your own, but it is not something you can share easily either. You would always be waiting for the other person to finish using it. Whilst most people would not dream of sharing their special stick, if you are lucky they might offer to do your hop instead!

Another use for your hop twiddling stick is to mark your hop plant with it, it is now surprisingly easy to stray off course and loose exactly where you were in the hop garden. You can leave it in the plant you have got to at the end of the day or simply mark your hop when you go for lunch, as I said earlier it is very easy to loose your place once the hops are full size.

If you find a stick you like, look after it and keep it oiled between seasons. They can be found tied onto the beams in barns etc.  Someone moving into a cottage in this area found a twiddling stick which had been carefully tied above the stair well by its previous owner.

I have an assortment of three hop twiddling sticks. A short one, only 3 foot long for bines only just out of reach slightly above head height and then a longer one for the main heading work when the hops are much higher, this is about 8 foot long. The wirework can be up to 18 foot high. Again as with most jobs, there is a knack to heading hops but it is easy once you have got it, rather like learning to ride a bike. If you are right handed you hold the stick in your right hand. You don’t try to put the heads back onto the strings which seems logical, but rather twist the string and allow the hop to stay still. To do this you hold the string in your left hand and twist the string around towards you in a clockwise direction, then catch the head of the bine into the fork of the stick, place the ‘v’ of the stick with the head held in it against the string and untwist the string anti-clockwise. That way the head will normally seat itself back easily following its clockwise natural twist. If you get an awkward hop you sometimes feel like your head will fall off instead!!

Sun glasses are essential kit, not only to protect your eyes from the sun but they stop any small bits of plant debris from falling into your eyes as you move the plants.

Sometimes after summer storms and the hop bines have been off their strings for a while they can become long and heavy, then it is not so easy. I then find using two sticks which while it may look awkward, is the easiest way of dealing with the problem without damaging the bine or breaking the head off.  So holding the offending hop with one hop twiddling stick and putting the head back on with the other prevents this damage and is much easier than it looks. I have to admit it does looks downright plain awkward, so best solution don’t watch anyone else doing it.

The pictures below show the same stick before and after cutting, it is the one on the left of the group.

hop twiddling stick, hops for the home brewer

Once the hops are safely up and over the top wires, we all breathe a sigh of relief, that will be the last of heads coming off for this year. Traditionally bines should be over the top wires by Midsummer’s day but some varieties can be over the top long before then.

Vintage Hop Press Revamp

Whilst servicing goes on throughout the year on any farm, winter is the time for repairs or any major maintenance jobs. This year the hand hop press, which was a very special gift, needed repairing. This ancient J L Larkworthy from Worcestershire wasn’t exactly broken but when it was used last September for the first time since 1982, it had thrown up a problem that definitely needed fixing before next year.

vintage hop press

The hop press works by using the inherent weight of its stem combined with its gearing. The hop pocket is supported underneath by a sling below, the top being secured by a ring at floor level and when the empty pocket is filled up with loose dried hops, the press is put out of gear allowing the pan to fall utilising gravity and its own weight to do the initial stage of each pressing for you. You then put it back into gear and wind down the handle to apply the final pressure needed on each pressing before winding it back up to repeat the process all over again.

dried hops cooling on the floor

 

You simply repeat this sequence until the hop pocket is full of pressed hops. Each pocket will usually take 8 to 12 pressings to fill, depending on the variety of hops. The pocket is then sewn up and dropped out to the chamber below in a traditional oast and the next pocket put in. In a modern oast, pockets are often pressed into a hole in the concrete floor and then winched out. These days pockets are in fact fast being superseded by square bales which are smaller, easier to lift and move on pallets and more efficient to stack in a warehouse.

What’s to go wrong? Well nothing one would imagine with a hand winding mechanism, all that is needed is to keep the hop press well oiled. However, the out-of-gear initial ‘free fall’ is an important part of the process as hand winding throughout the whole process would make the work painfully slow and tedious, hence you want the press to do what it was designed to do, which is a good percentage of the work for you. The large wheel here weaved out of alignment by an inch, so naturally we thought the cast iron wheel itself was slightly warped. That in itself, though not perfect would have been fine.

However, when using it with hops underneath, it was the first time it was able to be put out of gear to free fall – omg what was that? there was a horrible noise as the cogs on the outside of the large wheel hit the edges of the cast iron casing which hold the gearing, then as the wheel weaved lopsidedly an inch to the other side it touched the main gear cog. Each of these contacts was by only a smidge, but a smidge would be just enough to cause the cast iron teeth to shear off eventually, hence it was top of the list of priority ‘get fixed this winter’ jobs. Oddly it did not hit the sides when it was wound throughout by hand.

The large wheel was removed along with the shaft but it was not the wheel that was bent as we had thought, it was only the very end of the shaft which protrudes from the main press body to hold the large drive wheel, it was barely noticeable at a quick glance.

hop press disassembled for repair

hop press wheel and key-way

This press was built as a hand press around 1900, converted to be used as an electrically operated press in 1970 it was used as such up until1982. The forces are much greater when powered by an electric motor, hence it is most likely that over this 12 year period with these extra forces, this was when the slight bend at the shaft end occurred. This did not show up until it was brought out of retirement and converted back to be used as a hand hop press 33 years later. I do not think there are many or indeed any hand presses being used nowadays, they would simply not be efficient on any large farm.

We took the large drive wheel and shaft to a local engineering firm to be straightened as much as possible and a new key-way was rebuilt.

hop press shaft after straightening and new key way cut

The wheel will always show a very slight weave but this is quite acceptable, the shaft is still original, it is part of its history now and it no longer hits other parts of the frame, so does not matter.

hop press not hitting edges now

Taking things off an old press is one thing but reassembly is quite another, it does not go exactly as you think it should and once the shaft had been straightened it had knock on effect on other bolts and alignment of the metal fixings.  With the wheel off my husband had put on the original handle that had to be cut off when the hop press was electrified.

vintage hop press new handle being welded on

Beautiful, now fully resorted it’s as good as new and rearing to go.

hop press final test to check alignment is all correct before tightening nuts

This wry extract is from a family poem from where the press came from, it was written in 1970 –  this same press gets a mention, as does the nightmare every grower dreads, of having a hop garden down ……

A second hand machine, was the next good buy

It will save us pounds up went the cry.

It came from Cranbrook, all complete

We built the shed and laid concrete.

 

They fitted new rollers and an electric press

whether it will work is any ones guess.

The next year we grew a tremendous crop

The bines went straight up and over the top.

 

One week before picking amidst heavy rain

The anchor wires snapped and down it all came!