Medicinal properties of hops

The Herbal Properties of Hops

HOPS Humulus lupulus. Cannabinaceae/Moraceae

Hops are native to Britain and relatives of stinging nettles and cannabis.

Botanical Description
The root is stout and perrenial and the stem (bine) that grows up from it every year twines round anything it can find reaching a great length. The bine is flexible and very tough, angled, prickly, and fibrous.
The leaves are dark green, heart-shaped, with finely toothed edgesand lobed, on short stalks, and usually grow opposite each other on the stem, though sometimes the upper leaves are alternate.

There are two types of hop plant: male plants and famale plants. The male flowers are in loose bunches or panicles, 3-5 ins long and no use for making beer or for medicinal purposes. The female flowers are in leafy cone-like catkins, called strobiles, about one and a quarter inches long, oblong with four sides, consisting of a number of overlapping, yellowish-green bracts, and they grow from the axils of the leaves. There is a small fruit (achene) at the base of each bract, covered with yellow translucent glands, which appear as a granular substance like pollen.  It contains 10% of Lupulin, a bitter principle.

Cultivation

Hops need deep, rich, well-drained soil, and prefer a south or south-west aspect with freely circulating air. But they don’t like high winds, which tend to blow them down. The ground should be well-dug and deeply manured. Hops in Kent were usually planted in October or November, 6 ft apart each way. The plants were taken from cuttings or suckers, from the healthiest old shoots, planted out in nursery lines a year before being planted permanently.

Hops don't grow very much the first year and they don’t really get going until the third year. They like a lot of manure - manure from stables, rags, fur waste, fish waste, wood waste and shoddy in the winter, and in the summer rape dust and guano. Each year the bines are cut down to ground level.

Hop farmers in Kent used to spray their crop with all sorts of toxic chemicals and indeed in most parts of the world they still do. But if you are growing one hop plant, just to use the hops as medicine, you might not have problems with pests and if you do Quassia and soft soap solutions will kill the aphids which attack the hops and infect them with numerous diseases. Give the hop bines something to grow up - a tall pole or a string - which needs to be about twenty feet high if you want the bines to flourish.

History and symbolism

Hops are first mentioned by Pliny, who speaks of them as a garden plant among the Romans, who ate the young shoots in spring, in much the same way as we eat asparagus. The young tops of Hops used to be sold as a vegetable in Britain in the past.
The origin of the name Humulus is uncertain, but Lupulus is derived from the Latin, lupus (wolf), because, as Pliny explains, when the hop plant grew among osiers, it strangled them by its light, climbing embraces, as the wolf does a sheep. The name Hop comes from the Anglo-Saxon hoppen - to climb. Hops were first used in Holland in the beginning of the fourteenth century. In England they were not used in beer until two centuries afterwards.
Henry VI passed a law against hop growing in this country. He didn't want his beer polluted by them. In Henry VIII's time the hop was seen as ‘a wicked weed that would spoil the taste of the drink and endanger the people’. Edward VI however, granted privileges to hop growers.
By the twentieth century farmers in Britain grew most of the hops that the British breweries needed and indeed there was close liason between brewers and hop-growers, different varieties being used to make different types of beer. Sixty percent of these hops were grown in Kent, the garden of England. The tannins in the strobiles cause precipitation of vegetable mucilage in beer, so they help to clear it. They also flavour it with an aromatic taste.

Parts Used

Strobile. Don’t use hops for brewing beer because they have been sulphured as well as having undergone one of the most intensive spraying programmes and are, consequently full of toxic chemicals.

Constituents

The volatile oils (0.3-1.0%) in hops are partly responsible for their characteristic smell. Scientists have identified more than a hundred different compounds in these volatile oils, some of which have names like humulene and myrcene. Since these compounds are volatile, they evaporate quickly, leaving the smell of the Oleo-resin (3-12%) (the sticky substance under the petals), which explains why fresh hops smell so different from old hops. Hops also contain flavonoids, chalcones and Tannins (2-4%). Various phenolic compounds including alpha-bitter acids (e.g. lupulone, colupulone, adlupulone) produce the bitter taste.
How to Use as a medicine

Hops are sedative, hypnotic, antispasmodic and sleep-inducing. They contain isovaleric acid (the compound in Valerian responsible for its sedative action) and will calm you when you are feeling restless, especially if this is associated with nervous tension headache and/or indigestion. They are a milder sedative than Valerian but will often cure insomnia. You can make a tea out of them, but it is very bitter, or you can take 2ml (half a teaspoon) of the tincture. Traditionally people used to make a hop pillow to lull them to sleep, but few people today would want to go out with hair smelling of old hops. Don't think that you will benefit from the sedative effect of hops in beer because the brewing process destroys most of the compounds which produce the sedative effect.

Hops have also been used to ease the pain caused by inflammation of the gall bladder, neuralgia, priapism and mucous colitis.
The bitter compounds in hops stimulate the gall bladder, which in turn stimulates the liver, appetite and digestion. This will help people who tend to suffer from indigestion.

Humulone and lupulone, which are bitter acids, break down the membrane of Gram-positive bacteria so hop tinctures have been used topically to treat crural ulcers.

Dose

Dried strobile 0.5-1.0g or by infusion; 1-2g as a hypnotic.

Liquid extract (1`:1 in 45% alcohol) 0.5-2.0 ml

tincture (1:5 in 60% alcohol) 1-2 ml


Contra-indications, Warnings

You shouldn't use hops if you are depressed. They can make it worse.

Hop Gardens

In the Hop Garden



They walk
between the bines
stretching up, green, leafy
high into the sky
tendrils brushing against their skin
leaving raw, red wheals
raised on their arms

The hop petals are soft
green, powdery with pollen
The smell surrounds them
intoxicating

They draw closer together
as dusk settles
drunk on the perfume of hops

Night falls
as they lie
in the grass
at the edge of the field
between the forest of hop bines
and the high protective hedge




Hop Training

Clouds move across the sky
earth clods underfoot
strings stretching up
from ground hooks
to sky hooks

Hops straggle out
snakelike
from their plants

Each hop plant
must be lifted
put on a string
clockwise
or it breaks

As she moves
from plant to plant
lifting, twisting

She begins to feel
the plants growing
around her
quietly

Day after day
she moves
along the lines of plants
between the earth
and the sky

Hop Gardens

I called this blog Celtic herbs, so I'd better start with a Celtic herb - the hop.
I grew up with hops, hop gardens, oasts, hoppicking, hop pressing.
But the hop gardens of Kent are long gone, barely remembered, part of a dim and distant past.
The hop pickers who came down from the Isle of Dogs on the train have all moved to the Medway towns, grown old. .

The hop gardens were tall, bare in the winter, showing the network of wires high up in the sky, held up by enormous wooden poles round the sides of the fields. In the spring a farm-worker would thread strings between hooks high up in the wire-work above and hooks planted in the ground. With his bag of string threaded through his long pole he carried the string from the ground to the sky, from the sky to the ground, looping it expertly around the hooks in the wire-work above and the hooks in the ground. He created a curtain of string along one side of the field, then another, then another, until string rose up on every side, from the ground to the sky, covering the whole field. At this point, if you stood in the field, you noticed that every hop plant, still invisible under the ground, had four strings to climb up. Later the strings would be tied together waist-high.

Then the hops began to sprout out of the ground, like green snakes, looking for something to climb up. The next job consisted in winding the fresh, new sap-green hop tendrils round the strings. One worker might spend all day, every day in the hop-garden, winding the plants up their strings, alone with the ground, the sky and the hop-plants. Soon they would be racing up their strings, sending out big scratchy leaves, reaching the top and curling over. Now the hop garden had become a dense forest of dark green leaves, towering above you as you walked between them, sending out shoots and tendrils and eventually the hops, small cone-shaped pale yellow-green flowers, each petal holding it’s pollen-covered seed.

Hops, when they were fully grown were like green palaces floating in the sky, surrounding me with their thick heady perfume. Rough tendrils scratched my skin as I passed, leaving a raised wheal, raw, inflamed and red. Great green fields surrounded our house, providing our every need and poisoning us with air-born toxic sprays for my father did not believe in organic agriculture. He believed in using chemicals, every sort and kind of chemical, the more poisonous the better. He had shares in ICI. The hops were sprayed twice a week, sometimes three times, with insecticides, fungicides and anti-viral poisons. The ground would be sprayed with weed-killer. Sometimes the spray drifted through the high hedge that separated our garden from the hop garden. We didn’t like the smell but were not particularly aware of any danger.

My father grew rare new varieties of hops in bright white tunnels of light. They were not so much a commercial proposition, as a scientific endeavour, a labour of love, like all scientific endeavours, tender little plants that had to be watered, tended and cared for.

Then in September hop-picking began.