-: Drock just talked about fire.
Now we can talk about drinking, I guess, at this point.
You'll find out how much of a plant geek I am,
is because I don't drink beer,
or alcohol, as Kim Todd can vouch for me.
But I think the plant is,
what's that?
Oh, Kim and Drock are my taste testers for this.
So, hops is a emerging crop
that you're probably hearing lots about.
And the reason you're hearing more and more about it
is most of the hops production in the United States
is in the Northwest, Washington, Oregon area,
28,000 acres of hops.
The problem they're having is lots of irrigation,
water concerns,
and we're seeing movement of hops production
over towards the Michigan area and the Northeast.
This crop actually grows quite well
through a lot of different types of conditions.
And we have an emerging group of people
that are interested in hops here.
Kind of a, it's really a small number.
There's about 14 growers,
regionally only about two or three acres,
but we have a grower over in Plattsmouth
that's put in now 12 acres of hops.
My concern with this is we don't have any baseline knowledge
of whether it's even worth the time.
So, this grant that we received is for us
to evaluate six key types of hops.
And let me see if I can figure out how to move on.
To look at six key different types of hops
that might have some value in the brewing industry.
Now, in the bottom you'll notice here it says
the desirable qualities that we're looking for.
The alpha hops, which is for your beer drinkers,
the ones that's gonna give you that flavor,
that's gonna counteract the sweetness
that occurs in beer.
But it also gives that foaming head that people like to see.
The beta acids is another component of hops
that's antimicrobial and has some medicinal purposes.
I believe in complex medicines,
rather than refined medicines,
so kind of a homeopathic direction.
So, this is the area of my interest.
Beer's where it's going to make the money initially,
but we see some future in the antimicrobial,
as well as the medicinal values.
Now, for those of you that like to take the beer
and take a sniff of it,
it's the essential oils in there, which are really complex.
There's about 300 different compounds involved in that,
so it's not well-known on that.
But we can actually monitor these alpha and beta content.
There's a hops cone there on the upper left
that you can see there,
and on the right, I just stole that from the internet,
but I did put the link there so you can see it.
We're looking for that yellow compound,
which is the lupulin product.
Now, I've been growing it on campus
for a couple years here, to dabble with,
and establish whether or not we could even grow them,
and yes we could.
So, we wanted to look at the qualitative,
as well as the quantitative analysis
of how much we could produce.
So, this is what we're looking for, specifically, on it.
We've identified these six key varieties
that we're thinking what we'll be doing.
There's about 185 different types of hops,
but I wanted to look at these six key ones,
because, actually there's a top 10,
but these six will give us those alpha and betas
a little bit of variety in there.
And it will give me some alpha and beta contents
that are well-researched in current production,
and will give me something to compare against.
We've identified four growers across the state,
so we'll have one just outside of Lincoln,
one near Norfolk,
one near Sutton, Nebraska,
and then out at Scott's Bluff.
They're giving us a variety of elevations,
different types of soil types, and temperatures,
in order to determine whether there'll be
some characteristic differences because of them.
Just for those of you that have never seen hops,
we do have some on east campus.
I'm developing a new trellis,
and it's designed for home owner production,
because not only am I looking at the commercial side,
but I see that I can fill a niche for these homebrewers
that would like to grow some hops in their own backyard.
So, we've got a plot of, it would be 24 plants,
with a trellis system for homeowners.
So, that's kind of an extension site that I'm doing on it.
This is what a hops yard looks like.
We're concerned about the over-wintering.
It's actually a rhizome, so it's an underground stem.
It over-winters down there.
And if you look over here where I have the yellow dot,
you can see, it looks like asparagus
coming up in the spring.
So, this is in late March.
Here you can see our planting there on campus.
I just took this picture the other day,
so we are in the process of building a new trellis system.
We're gonna use a V-system on the trellising.
We have the plants planted about three feet apart,
which is fairly tight.
So, this is what we've been piloting here.
Our main project goals for this whole thing is one,
to develop some sort of baseline information for hops.
So, like I said, we know what the alphas and betas
should be.
We want to see, given these different types of soils,
nutrient situations, and temperatures,
whether or not is the plants are gonna be hardy.
Will it be able to come up from year to year?
And then qualitatively, can we reach those alpha and betas.
A big deal for anybody, whether it's for pharmaceutical
purposes, or as well as brewers, is consistency.
So, the project starts out as a three-year project.
First year is establishment.
Second and third year will start giving us some data.
And then, pending the success of that,
perhaps we can continue on and maybe expand it.
So, all right, thank you.
(applause)