The solstice may have passed, but those of us who live in New England are still begging for the light to return here in the dead of winter. Enter Sixpoint’s Diesel.

Name: West Coast IPA
Brewery: Green Flash Brewing Co. (San Diego, Calif.)
Style: American IPA
Price: $8.99 for 4-pack
ABV: 7.3%
IBU: 95
Final Grade: A
Score: 44

On my first and only visit to San Diego, I missed out on the chance to visit two breweries — Stone and Green Flash. Damned if I don’t wish I could do that trip over again.

They are both thoroughly West Coast breweries, crafting beers that are intensely hop forward and featuring local ingredients. Green Flash’s West Coast IPA is a great example of the regional approach.

The brewers at Green Flash clearly believe that IPAs should be designed to feature hops, and you’ll find no argument here. The West Coast IPA is highly bitter, but the hops also dominate the flavor and aromas — they are layered equally throughout the beer. There’s a light caramel flavor in the malt, which keeps it interesting, and though the astringency comes close to being overpowering, the beer still works.

Name: Yule Smith Holiday Ale (Summer version)
Brewery: Alesmith Brewing Company (San Diego, Calif.)
Style: Imperial IPA
ABV: 8.5 (website says 9.5%, but my bottle says 8.5)
IBU: ??
Final Grade: A-minus
Score: 42

It’s the second week of November, we’re tumbling toward the holidays and damned if I didn’t forget that I’ve got a Yule Smith Holiday Ale in the cabinet.

The “holiday,” however, was July 4. A generous gift from Emily Sauter, author of the PintsandPanels.com blog, this beer from Alesmith Brewing is part of a twice-annual holiday offering. Imperial IPA for the summer and, around Christmastime, they’ll release an Imperial Red Ale.

Since the winter offering will be served up soon, I figured it was time to taste this one.

You hear the word “Czech,” and it evokes all kinds of sensations, depending on your world view.

This is where the whole beer judge thing is starting to F– with me.

Your hands are sticky with the golden resin. There are shopping bags full of green cones in a spare room, waiting to be used or dried and stored for later.

It finally arrived — harvest week. Hop cones ready to be plucked, dried and refrigerated until I’d need them for a delicious IPA or Porter.

I’ve been picking other people’s hops for weeks, but this time, it would be my home-grown Willamettes.

It pains me to write that my harvest is woefully unimpressive.

All told, I’ll probably finish with 1 oz. of dried flowers, the cones of which are small and pathetic. It was strange, as if someone had flipped a switch that turned off their growth mid-development. Many were less than an inch long — almost not even worth picking.

What went wrong?

This week, a complete stranger invited me over to his house to harvest some Cascade hops that were climbing up a trellis on his back deck.

My neighbors down the street, Sarah and Bryan, have some glorious hops growing along an old wire fence.

Several weeks ago, frustrated by lame attempts to control the Japanese beetles that were chewing through the leaves on my hop plants, I gave in and resorted to pesticide.

It was an insecticidal soap, supposedly non-toxic and food-safe, but I still should have known better.

The leaves are now browning at the tips and some have turned yellow. I’ve read that there are all sorts of things that cause this to happen — including lack of watering (a distinct possibility) and nutrient deficiencies. But I’ve got some pretty healthy looking compost feeding them, and this same problem happened last year when I attempted to control the beetles with a pesticide. I’m beginning to think it’s not a coincidence.

Even worse, the beetles are still chomping away.

It reminded me of this poem by William Blake. If only the beetles had met the same fate as Blake’s “foe.”