If you are curious how the 2023 American hop harvest went, you are not alone.  We have some insights into what happened along with a very preliminary crystal ball forecast for the 2024 harvest. In a nutshell, the U.S. hop industry roughly doubled its production acreage in the 10 years starting in 2012 (actually a…

Montana has landed in Norway. The historic E.C. Dahls Bryggeri in Trondheim, Norway has launched its latest seasonal–Montana Cold IPA. Not only is it dry-hopped with 100% Montana-sourced hops, but that hop is none other than Ahhhroma™, a new proprietary variety from Glacier Hops Ranch in Whitefish that was launched just last year. The E.C. Dahls…

The biggest news coming out of the American Hop Convention at the end of January in Santa Rosa, CA was the necessary reduction of 10,000 acres (over 16%) of U.S. hop production. The difficult case for acreage reduction was clearly made that the pandemic hangover has stunted beer production, and the growing inventory of warehoused…

Okay, the dust has settled, everyone has returned home and caught their breath after a productive Craft Brewers Conference in May.  Allow me to reflect and perhaps pontificate a bit on what I saw and heard.  At a 30,000 foot level, the 2022 CBC in Minneapolis was as close as possible to a “normal” CBC as…

Question: What is one of the biggest disadvantages for breweries in Florida?    HINT:  It’s about 3,000 miles from Yakima to Tampa.  Wouldn’t it be great if there were a cold storage hop warehouse centrally located in Florida?  And better yet, wouldn’t it be great if a Florida brewery could get FREE SHIPPING from that warehouse? …

I remember when I first heard of this new virus…COVID-19?  It seemed like it was so distant, and like Ebola, SARS, the Avian flu and so many others…it was going to be much about nothing.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  It changed our life and everyone else around the world.  By mid-March 2020, we…

Craft brewers around the world are always in search of something new, something different, something to create the next fantastic beer. What’s going to be the next Citra? But where do these new varieties come from? Many of them come from highly sophisticated and methodologically-planned breeding programs, that can take up to ten years to…

When we first launched Hopzoil back in 2016, the concept seemed simple enough. Extract the oil from fresh hops via steam distillation and voila! Put it into beer and you have all the aroma and flavor without the pellets or biomass. It made sense to someone who had never done it before (yours truly) because…

Having just returned from the annual American Hop Convention, I must say it was nice to get back together in person after a year in virtual hell. Conventions are known for their formal presentations, but the whole reason that people “convene” is for the informal discussions that are often as important, or even more important…