Create your own beer garden – hops are easy to grow and will keep you in tasty ale

My partner’s childhood home had a collection of beer barrels, each at a different stage of the brewing process, with one always ready to taste. When we moved out of our tiny flat and into a house, a brewing kit arrived in the post as a housewarming gift from his parents, soon followed by a small hop plant from an old friend, which now takes up more room than anything else in the veg patch.

This perennial has proved easy to grow. Once established, you can expect a flush of bines (similar to vines) to emerge every spring, bearing hop flowers, or “cones”, which are ready to be picked about now.

While our plant was grown by a professional, you can grow your own hop from rhizome cuttings taken from a healthy parent plant in spring. Having cleared a section of soil around the plant’s crown, use a clean, sharp knife to remove a 15cm section of the rhizome. If you’re not able to plant this cutting in its final position fairly swiftly, wrap it in damp kitchen paper and store somewhere cool, or pot up into a compost-filled container.

It’s also possible to propagate hops from stem cuttings taken in spring and summer, by selecting a healthy section of bine, stripping away all but a couple of top leaves, and placing it in some gritty potting compost.

Hops aren’t routinely started from seed because they’re dioecious, producing separate male pollen-bearing and female fruit-bearing plants, so you can’t guarantee which kind you’ll get if you sow seeds. Only female plants produce the hop cones used to make beer. Hops need full sun, and should be planted into fertile soil with good drainage. Be very mindful of where you position your plant. If you’re fortunate, your bine will be rampant and take up a lot of space – swamping your raspberry bed, in my case.

If you’re eager for a plentiful crop, training your bines on to a support structure is worth the effort. Wear gloves and long sleeves when handling bines: they’re covered in short, hooked hairs that can cause painful grazes.

Our hop romps away in multiple directions, partly grasping at a trellis, partly crawling along the ground, yet it still provides plenty of hops for home brewing. The flowers are ready to harvest when they’re turning from green to yellow and becoming papery, filled with yellow lupulin powder (which imparts flavour to beer), and exuding a heady fragrance. After harvesting, leave them to dry out completely before you start the brewing process, or store them in the freezer. Hops can also be steeped in hot water to make a (very bitter) tea that is said to help you sleep.