Amelia Drake
Dr. Diana Cochran wants to know if farmers in Iowa can grow hops. If you take a drive out in the countryside you will see a lot of corn and soybeans, but you won’t see any hops. Only a few people have been brave enough to grow them here, so we don’t know very much about how successful they are. Dr. Cochran planted some hop plants in a field where she and her employees are taking care of them. They are going to watch them to see if they grow as tall as they would if they were planted in a warmer state like Oregon. They also want to see if the plants produce flowers. The flowers on hop plants look like small green pinecones. You can think of hop cones like ears of corn. A corn stalk grows and produces ears of corn that we harvest. Likewise, a vining hop plant grows very tall and we harvest the small cones from it. That’s the part of the plant that is valuable.
After we know how tall they grow and how many cones they produce, we want to know if the plant is a “good” plant. Are the cones good? When you go to the grocery store to buy a tomato you’re looking for a fresh summer tomato that is big, juicy, and flavorful, and if you take it home, cut into it and have a bite that is flavorless, you’re very disappointed. You’ve eaten a lot of food throughout your life where you’ve had a great version and a not so great one. Hops are no different. We want great cones because that’s what people who make beer want. There are a lot of different types of tests we can do to see if the cones are good. The test that I do if pretty simple. I dry the cones and grind them up in a blender. I put the ground cones in a glass beaker with some chemicals and shake it on a machine for a while. The chemicals make the plant break down into even tinier pieces. I set the beaker on a counter and leave it for an hour so all the plant pieces sink to the bottom. Then I take a syringe that sucks up liquid and take some of the clear liquid that is toward the top of the beaker. Finally, I put that liquid in a small vile that goes into a machine where several beams of light are shot through it. Dr. Cochran will use the information the machine gives her to see if the hops have the “good” things inside of them.
Duration: 05/03/2019
Principal Investigator(s): Diana Cochran