Hops Away...!

It would be nice to say I've been on holiday since the last posting. It would also be a lie, sadly. What's needed is more hours in the day, but I guess we'd only have to pay tax on them, so maybe we don't need any more.

Anyway, back to the real world. Today, we're going to talk about hops.

Hops are rather important to us - they might not add the alcohol or the colour to the beer, but they do have an important role in the flavour of each beer we produce. As you may of noticed, we had a pretty dismal summer, and one of the many crops affected was the UK hop harvest. Hops are a declining crop globally, mostly as a result of the big breweries ever-present drive to keep their costs down making hops an uneconomic proposition for farmers across the world. So harvests reduce each year. Throw in a bad UK harvest due to the weather, and things get a bit sticky. Add storms in the USA, damaging their hop yards, and even harder storms in Eastern Europe, and we have the makings of a problem.

And so, as I write this I am awaiting the prices for this seasons hops. At the moment it's looking like most varieties will double in price (if not more), and some varieties won't be available at all, others varying from plentiful to reduced in volume.

At the present time, only one of our beers is badly affected. Trouble is, it's Britannia - one of our top sellers. Now whilst we could change the hops, it willl either completely change the distinctive spicy blackberry character of the beer, or if we choose to get as close as possible, we'll be using imported hops - not a good thing in a beer called Britannia (the name's origins are in our long-lost industrial power). So we are trawling our archives for a suitable alternative, for inclusion in the range in January.

Other beers may well be OK, we hope....

The other problem is of course the cost. The sort of increases we are seeing will be impossible for us contain without passing them on. Add the large rise in malt prices (again, related to harvest conditions), and the frankly ridiculous increases in fuel costs, and all the other side costs that we have, and it gets a bit much. If we were to pass it all on, we'd lose sales. Now of course all breweries are in the same boat, so from a point of view of competitiveness maybe it's not a big problem. But will you, the drinker, want to pay another 30p overnight for your beer? So we'll end up having to 'swallow' some of the cost, like most breweries.

...Well, until March anyway. Then we have the risk of the Nanny State Health Lobby, bored now that they have waved their sticks at the smoker, having their alcohol duty demands met. And I'm darned if we'll pay anymore to this Wasteful Gubbinsment out of our own pockets....