Holiday Cooking – Hops

I love this time of year, with all the Christmas traditions, decorations, and music. I especially like attending candlelight services, singing Christmas carols, and finding special gifts for people I love. Also high on the list is baking and cooking favorite recipes, and trying new ones. For the past several years I’ve reported on spices, herbs, and ingredients used in these holiday recipes, using The Lore of Spices, by Jan-Öjvind Swahn. This year, the series title should be "Holiday Drinking," since all of the plants are used to flavor beverages. This year I’m starting with a flavoring used in beer – hops!



Botanical illustration of Humulus lupulus from Koehler's Medicinal Plants.
Published before 1923 and public domain in the United States.

Humulus lupulus is in the Cannabaceae family, the hemp plants. Hops originated in the temperate regions of Eurasia and North America, and were first cultivated in Eastern Europe, and then across Europe. Beer making was invented in prehistoric times, and beer spicing dates back to early Egyptian and Roman cultures. Spices were added to flavor the beer, and enhance the feeling of drunkenness. In Europe, during the Middle Ages, hops were added to beer to enhance foaming, add a bitter taste, and preserve it. Hops were used medicinally by the Greeks and Romans for its mild narcotic effect, and by monks to flavor beers brewed in monasteries. Today hops are an important ingredient in beer (“Imperial” in the label indicates a hoppy beer).

Hops grow 19-22 feet (6-7 meters) tall. They grow clockwise around a pole or tree, clinging with small barbs. Hops are dioecious, with male and female flowers growing on separate plants. The male flowers are small, loose, axillary panicles, with five sepals, and five stamens; female flowers are short, solitary, bracted spikes, each with two flowers, which are cone-like at maturity. The fruit is an achene with one carpel, a single seed, and indehiscent. The fruit excretes a substance called lupulin, which contains the bitter flavor. Foliage is yellow-green; leaves are 3-5 lobed, palmate, as broad as long, coarsely toothed, and opposite. Stem is coarse. Reproduction is by seed or rhizomes. Hops favor loose, limy soil and moist environments. Hop cones are harvested in the fall, dried, and sent to the brewery.