Hello everyone, welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast.

We've got a really cool week set ahead for you.

I have Bo Bromley on for the week.

He is the hops technician at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company up in Chico, California.

It's a brewery that I have an interesting history with because I used to go up to Chico

every single year until I was about 17 to do a bit of a family vacation.

We would go to a family camp and then we'd go up and hang out in Chico at my great uncle's

house.

Obviously, when I was 15, I wasn't going to Sierra Nevada, but as I've gotten older, I've

gone back up there and checked out the brewery up there.

It's really amazing.

It's great to have you on, Bo.

Kevin, nice to be with you.

I think it makes sense to start out with probably one of the critical ingredients, the most

critical ingredient, at least in your guys' beer, which would be, of course, the hops.

I think for gardeners, we don't think of it as a crop that most people would grow at home,

so maybe we could just start out by explaining what makes hops so unique and the basics

of how they grow.

Well, what I think makes hops unique is they're a perennial and that they live more than

one year, but above ground, they're an annual, so they're vines or they're called bines.

At the end of winter, they die back at ground level, so you kind of have a, it's nice in

some ways you have an annual plant, but it's a perennial, so it's a long-lived, in every

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