Due to a hop shortage, the price of hops has gone way up, and a number of varieties that we use have been unavailable. We have a couple friends that grow hops, but since hops have been so inexpensive in the past, it didn't really seem worth the effort to harvest them (plus we would not necessary know what kind and aa% we would be getting). This year (2008) we decided to take at least one of our friends up on his offer and we harvested his hops. We picked just about the worst day we could to harvest them, it was rainy, cold and got dark before we could finish. He had two vines, we picked most of one and then decided to put the other one in the back of my truck so I could pull the hops off the next day in the car port where it is dry. After harvest hops need to be dried, so I rigged up what Marc dubbed "hop hammocks" in the basement and set up fans to blow past them for a few days. The "hop hammocks" were just bed sheets hung so air could flow freely around the evenly spread hops. The method worked pretty well and after about 4 days the hops were sufficiently dry to bag. They will be vacuum packed and put in the freezer until we are ready to use them. We ended up with about 3 pounds of hops from the two plants.