But you’re not a commercial grower! If you go to Hop and Brew School and ask one of the growers about Centennial, get ready for a tirade!
Is the tirade included in the Hop and Brew school tuition? 
No extra charge!
Yep, that’s it. To me, it combines with the citrus and giving an almost liliac/fresh grape note. Still my favorite.
Ha! 8)
This all makes me wonder besides weather and location what type of soil amendments could radically affect the hop smells and flavor profile?
From what I’m coming to find is that most of the legacy growers (PNW) know what the hops need during the reproductive growth phase in the way of nutrients to coax the best oil profile to develop, but there are other factors that play a much bigger role in the quality of the final oil composition. Growing temperatures throughout the season have a huge impact on the quality of the oil package as does harvest timing as the plants push a ton of energy into making the oils/resins within like the last week or so leading up to harvest. Now, if you have so much acreage of one variety that it takes you an entire week to harvest, the oil composition of the early harvested vs the late harvested can be quite different, so the lots are generally blended to homogenize things a bit. It’s easy to grow hops, but not so easy to grow high quality hops year in and year out.
This is interesting to me, because my cascades are my worst growers followed by CTZ. My centennials grow really well. My best grower is chinook. It’s like gang busters! I live in NE Ohio.
I’m interested in this too. Hopefully someone less lazy than me does the research and posts. 
I’m in Sandusky OH and centennial were my best out of cascade, ctz, and crystal. For the amount of effort, I did not care for hop growing. Aphids, weeds, oh my!
Yeah, I grew Cascade for about 12-14 years before deciding it was more trouble than it was worth and tore them out.
I actually find them trouble free once established. I mulch, prune, and feed in spring and feed a couple times over the summer and harvest when ready. I would think ripping them out and dismantling the trellises would be more work than its worth given that they are attractive plants even if you didn’t bother harvesting.
Yeah, growing them is easy. It was the processing and packaging I hated. I’d get up to 25 lb. from a single plant and it was just to much hassle. And I didn’t trellis…just grew them up a deer fence and across the top.
I actually like this part. There is nothing like a fine September day, coming home tired from grouse hunting, to go snip and take down the vines, then sit back in a lawn chair, pouring myself a homebrew, and sit there mindlessly picking hops. Hey, I am sitting around outside drinking beer and doing something!
Processing is easy. I just put the plastic tub with the hops into my garage, turn them over by hand for a couple of days, then vacuum seal them up.
What I dislike are all the people I know who grow hops, who don’t brew, and want to give me their hops. People will give me ziplocs full of old yellow hops past their prime, that I know spent a good deal of time picking them. No! I don’t want your hops, the hops you don’t even know what variety they are! I grow all the hops I need, and order the rest!
My situation was different. Since I grew them on a deer fence, they intertwined and I couldn’t take the whole bine down. I had to pick them cone by cone. Also, both by experience and by education, I found they needed to be dried as soon as possible. So I’d pick as many as I could fit into my food dehydrator, dry them, package them the next day, then pick, dry and package more and keep repeating the process.
If you’re interested in soil amendments only, home research will probably be the only way you’ll find out. Farmers certainly understand that soil health is at the top of the list when it comes to producing a healthy crop, but serious soil amendment at production scale is an enormous task that generally doesn’t happen on a grand scale.
Larger growers generally reserve their best land to high value crops like apples, wine grapes and hops and work with what they have.
Here is an article that concurs with what was posted earlier: http://msue.anr.msu.edu/uploads/234/78934/7._Post-Harvest_Quality_Control_Zac_German.pdf
Maybe it’s time for us to stop kidding ourselves and grow hops hydro indoors. Hint: halide for vegetative and HPS for flowering ;D
You kid, but the thought has crossed my mind in the past. Imagine a bar/brewpub/tasting room that managed to grow hops indoors under grow lights - especially if they found a way to trellis them across the ceiling. That would be one hell of a cool decor.
Could make for some interesting house character/terroir. Maybe. The place would smell great !
There’s more than a few folks trying it and are finding quite a few issues. I’ve never had anyone get back to me about vernalization so I know that’s a big one. I guess they’ll keep trying as long as it’s other peoples $$ they’re using, haha. CSU professor pioneers fast-growing hops