So onto the 2nd installment of this little blog series. I even
have a logo now!
Hop contracts are by and large a very good
thing.
A hop contract is a piece of paper that
you sign that commits you to taking a certain volume
of hops over the course of the year. There are a number of hop merchants that
you can contract with and we
frequently use Charles Faram
as they tend to have the best range of available hops. It is vital for most
breweries to guarantee the supply of interesting American/New
Zealand/Australian hops that are so prevalent in current beer. It is also very
useful if you contract at least 500kg for the year... At that point Faram's
will store the hops for you allowing you to draw down from the contract without
having to either store the hops yourself or pay for all the contracted hops upfront. To put this into
perspective, our hop contract for this coming year is
in excess of £40,000 and is over two tonnes of hops, not something we have the money or space to deal with all at once.
However, the
availability of hops is always a hot and stressful topic at the brewery. Andy
Parker sums up some of my thoughts nicely in his blog here. We
in the UK only get the stuff that is left when the growing US craft scene has had its fill of the best of them.
Back before we started
the brewery we knew that some hops would be very difficult
to get hold of. Certain hops like Sorachi Ace and Nelson Sauvin are hoovered up in such large quantities by the bigger, more established breweries that they are almost impossible to get
hold of unless you have a record of using them. If you are a start up you can't have such a record so you are left
feeling that there is no way in. It took a lot of begging and buttering up
the guys at Faram’s to get the small amount of Sorachi we
did manage to get in the first year. We still can't get hold of any Nelson
for love nor money.
Even when you have a contract, this is no guarantee of supply. Hops are regularly shorted (a situation where the hop merchant gets only a percentage of their order and
they pass this shortfall onto the brewers). Even when the
hops arrive into the country can be a bit of an issue. Currently we are being told that there
are no Simcoe pellets available, even though we have them on contract, that
they have not arrived as yet. Not arrived! Hell, they
were harvested 9 or 10 months ago... how long does the boat take to get across
the Atlantic?
The biggest bugbear this year is the
availability of Citra. Citra is our biggest usage hop accounting for about 25%
of all the hops us we
have on contract and the
instrumental hop in Mariana Trench, our best
selling beer, and Faceless Spreadsheet Ninja. Unfortunately it is a very popular hop with
other breweries so the demand is large. This year for some reason, perhaps
there was a lower yield on the citra crop, or one of the big US brewers decided
they wanted a lot more but Charles Faram received only 70% of their expected
ration. As such, they passed this shortfall onto the
brewers so we only got 70% of the citra we were expecting.
So how does a ninja deal with this kind of
bump in the road?
Be Prepared:
As you may expect we were sensible enough
to order more Citra than we needed, particularly the pellets we use for dry
hopping. This got us through the start of the year.
Be Flexible:
Faceless Spreadsheet Ninja in concept was
a single hop Citra but as soon as we were shorted we changed to Magnum for
bittering, which also allowed us to keep the price down slightly.
All was going well until we started to
ramp up our production of Mariana Trench. We keep running out of Mariana so had
to brew it more regularly - twice as often as planned in fact. A
quick spreadsheet later and we realised that we had *just* enough Citra to brew Mariana at
this accelerated level for the rest of the year, so where did this leave this
Ninja's dearest beer...
Plan B:
We had to make a sacrifice, we had to
ninja the Ninja. We had to come up with the “Variations on a Ninja” series.
So what are the Variations on a Ninja
series?
First up is MAC
Spreadsheet Ninja, almost ready to release, perhaps a play on the Apple Mac where this Ninja first encountered spreadsheets.
It uses Mosaic, Amarillo and Centennial and is less
tropical than the Faceless version but its crisp hoppiness put a very big smile on my face.
The second variation is Traditional Spreadsheet Ninja, this is
lagering away in the fermenter at the moment. It uses the Saaz hop, which you all will of course
know is traditional in Czech Pilsners. Even if our brewery water treatment brews more German style
pilsners, it is currently tasting great from the fermenter, so expect to see it in a month or so.
We have other ideas, Experimental
Spreadsheet Ninja using Experimental 431 as the hop and Faceless Wordprocessor
Ninja with Aurora, Bobec, Celia and Dana hops. Whether these get brewed, this
ninja can't really say.