Searching for the line between "hobby" and "obsession"

Hop pickin'

Not sure I ever mentioned this, but back in June after we got back from Europe, I got myself a promotion for the 4th time in 6 years working at this company that produces websites for law firms. I’ve been a content writer, project manager, senior writer on a team of bloggers, and am now a team lead (essentially a manager) of a group of 11 web developers. The formal move into management has been really exciting but also a lot of work. Consequently my free time during the week has diminished quite severely, and in looking at the number of posts on here as of late, it shows.

Don’t think that this inactivity in blog land has a direct  correlation to the amount of beer-related activities I have going on. It certainly does not. I just haven’t had much time to sit down and write about them. I’ll try and catch up here over the next week or so.

FOR EXAMPLE… I posted near the beginning of September that I had started to harvest the hops I’d grown in my backyard this past summer. I only took about a third of the hops off at that point, as the rest were too young for harvest. Well, since then I’ve actually harvested on two more weekends (9/24 and 9/30-10/1) for a total 2011 1st year yield of roughly 80 oz. wet, or roughly 13 oz. dried.

Below are pics from hop harvests on 9/24 and 10/1:

10 oz. Centennial picked on 10/1 and used to wet hop a batch same day

More pics here:

Nearly 8 oz. Cascade picked 10/1 and used to wet hop a batch same day

Northern Brewer/Hallertau, Cascade and Centennial picked 9/24 and packaged 9/27. Also, the grain bills for my pale ale and chocolate stout recipes are in the background.

The three varieties picked 9/24 drying out on the back porch

The Food Saver I used to package everything is seen in the background. That cost me about $85 and came with enough packaging for probably 12-15 one ounce packages. Also, the digital scale used for weighing ran me about $30. Both purchased at Target.

Comments are closed.