About us ...
It is impossible to start an online shop without an introduction,
and we cannot allow ourselves not to talk about hops in this introduction,
and at the end - it is not possible to talk about hops and omit the talk about homebrewing.
This site is entirely dedicated to the Tribe of Homebrewers, and with it, we will try our best to be not only a reliable supplier of fresh and good hops, malt, yeast and easy-to-use and easy-to-clean homebrewing equipment, but also be helpful with additional practical and useful theoretical information.
Our Mission is:
YOU, the homebrewers – beginners and advanced,
to stay enthusiastic about this wonderful hobby for many years to come…
Homebrewing is a fascinating hobby, which combines in a unique way one's interests in engineering and chemistry with the culinary art and the pleasure of tasting the ultimate result. How to brew at home is a topic, on which many wrote, and they wrote a lot - also there is a vast number of online sources of equipment and consumables, so practically one can buy online almost everything.
My experience in homebrewing, however, taught me that at least half of the things, that one would buy, will probably not work as intended, or described, and most probably - it will be necessary to buy at least as many other things in order to finally get a result that is somewhere near to what was expected.
Our idea to grow hops, which to be offered exclusively to local homebrewers, was born some time ago, when we discovered that from all consumables for homebrewing that we ever wanted to buy - it was most difficult to find whole hop cones of the variety that we wanted….
On 1 1/2 acres in Trudovets (Botevgrad municipality, Bulgaria) we are growing 600+ hops plants of several varieties and at different age.
It took us a whole lot of time to create our small hop farm, to get the first real hops crop, to learn how to dry it ... before we came to the understanding that it will not be easy at all…
... and we still believe that it is worth it…
Luckily for us - the soil and climate conditions of the Botevgrad valley turned to be favourable for growing German noble varieties, and also suitable for many US Oregon varieties.
We are already sucessfully growing Mittelfruher, Perle, Fuggle, Willamette, Chinook, Cascade and Northern Brewer. We have some initial sucess with Tettnanger, and are still waiting to see the results of our experiment with Kent Golding and Tradition.
We are picking the hop cones by hand, dry it in laboratory type of oven dryer with the minimum of handling operations and pack it in small vacuum packages without pre-pressing, in order to minimise the loss of lupulin.
At this stage - we are not BIO-certified, however, we are very careful about how we grow our hops, what fertilizers we use, and what system for pest control we implement. After all - we use this same hops for our own home brewed beer ...
In industrial breweries, it is already obsolete to use whole hop cones in the brewing process - the reasons beeing mainly the specificity of the brewing equipment and the higher expenses related to transport and storage of the raw material.
With a traditional home brewing set up - things are entirely different ... and the best way to understand the difference between breweing with hop pellets and whole cones would be to taste the beer that you brewed with each of these, and relate that taste to the "quality time" you spent on cleaning your brewing and fermenting equipment after each of the two hopping methods.
...I do not think that it would be necessary to explain much about what "quality time" means in the particular case…
There is nothing wrong about kitchen and equipment cleaning, but I beleieve that probably only few people in the world really like it, and probably even less would have chosen it as a hobby ...
Regardless of your level of experience in homebrewing - it would be very usefull to know from the beginning that depending on the type of equipment that you use for brewing, bottling and fermenting, you may end up on spending more than half of the time you dedicated to your hobby, in washing different things...
And since our mission is for You - the enthusiastic homebrewers, to practice your hobby for many years to come - we will make our best to try and offer materials and solutions that would make this possible, so that, instead of washing things, you can relax, not worry, and have a homebrew *…
...as somebody once said :
“Relax, Don’t Worry, Have a Homebrew “
... well, this is not our hops, it's the hops at the farm next to the Hopfenmuseum in Tettnang, but we hope that soon our own Tettnager will grow equal in height !
© Hops Shop BG, 2024