You may know the hop from the bitter taste of beer.
It helps to make the beer calming to the nervous system.
Hop is a climbing plant that has female flowers looking like a little, green fir-cone. This females flowers are the parts that are used of the hop.
Where hop ist cultivated, the plants grow up to seven meters on special frames,
year by year because the parts above the earth die in wintertime
and grow again in the next year.
Medicinal Uses
- Antibacterial
- Calming
- Blood cleansing
- Inflammation-inhibitory
- Analgesic
- strengthening
- Fever
- Stomach convulsions
- Nervous stomach problems
- Intestinal convulsions
- Constipation
- Cystitis
- Bladder stones
- Nervous heartproblems
- Increased heart beat
- Nervous unrest
- Sleep disorder
- Migraine
- Menopause complaints
- Menstrual disorders
- Hair loss
- Wounds
- Furuncle
Information
| Used Parts: | Female Flowers |
| Substances: | Humulone, Humulene, Lupulone, Lupuline, Bitter essence |
| Time to collect: | Late summer |
Methods
Only the female fruits are used of the hop.
They work calming and the special bitter essences kill bacterias.
You can use the hop as a tea or as a tincture.
In drugstores you can maybe buy tablettes with hop-poweder.
Tea
To prepare a hop tea pour one cup of boiling water over one or two spoonful of dried hop flowers.Wait for five up to ten minutes, than filter the tea and drink it in a calm surroundings.
Calming abilities
The main use of hops is its calming abilities.It helps against nervous unrest and sleeplessness.
Digestive system
Because of its abilities to reduce spasm and its bitter essences hops is good against nervous problems of the digestive system.It relaxes the stomach and the intestine and strengthens the digestive functions.
Phytoestrogens against menopausal problems
The flowers of the hop contains substances that are similar to female hormon estrogen.Therefore it can help in the late period of menopause, when the estrogen gets low.
In the early menopausal stage it's more the progesterons that are low and the estrogen is relatively high. In this time hops is not such a good helper. Yarrow, ladys mantle and Chasteberry is better in the early stages of the menopause.
Because of its phytoestrogens the hops can trigger a thick belly. Therefore you should use the hops carefully if your belly likes to get thick.
Plant description
The hop is at home in Europe.
As a wild plant it prefers places with a lot of nitrogen and enough water. You can find it at the edges of forests.
At some places hop is cultivated in fields that have high frames to climb.
There are different plants for female and male hops.
Only the floewers of the female hops are used for medicinal uses an beerpreparation.
The stems and leaves are growing each year from the bottom up. The leaves are lobed.
In July and August the hop is flowering.