when to harvest hops

This is my first year growing hops ,how do you know when to harvest? ???

I dont know how far its gone at your place.... But here we harvest now. Sweden south.... When some of the flowers have tiny brown dots, its time to harvest. But i think its different to different hops too.....
Try to get in touch with a company that grow hops and ask them.... Maybe the alpha is less if u take them too soon or too late....

But some wait until just before the first frost. Im not sure if u even have frost there, but here some wait until end of september to beginning of october.

But a company here harvested last weekend. Now they are in the dryer. Its a small assosiation that grow old hops, like they did in the old days, and do it precise the same way as they did then. The same old dryer and all.

I harvested mine last week, the plant is in its second year from being a cigarette sized piece of root.  I'm up in Maine. 
The leaves were browning and rotting from the bottom up, I'm guessing due to all the rainy weather, so I harvested before everything went brown.
I kinda wish that there were some flowers close enough to the ground for me to examine but they were all ten plus feet in the air.  Turns out they were immature.  Better luck next year.
Once I put the stuff into a paper bag to dry I only ended up with 3/4 of an ounce so it's not a big fat hairy deal to me.
My next batch will have homegrown aroma.  Nothing to complain about.

I described when to harvest in an article here on the blog:
  http://www.beersmith.com/blog/2008/04/10/growing-hops-in-the-garden-how-to-grow-beer-hops/

Cheers,
Brad

Good post on when to harvest.

If you're really involved with growing your own hops, you can check out the Yahoo Group Grow-Hops. It has about 4,000 members, and a few professionals, too.

Don

http://brewery.org/brewery/library/HopGrow.html
some info