47Hops Filed for Bankruptcy

I'm having a hard time squaring this story with the articles about hop shortages due to weather, evil big beer no longer selling their hops to other brewers, and even that dick brewer in Atlanta who blamed his quality issues on things like hard to get hops.

Would anyone who has insider knowledge of how these things work like to offer some kind of illumination of the apparent conflict?

 

No insider knowledge but some things might need to be sorted here.

Which hop shortages and where are they? For example the Big Beer no longer selling hops brouhaha involved a crop short fall in South Africa (which is a net importer of hops) with side effects that have been blamed on ABInBev. (There have been at least two independent sources who confirmed a crop shortfall.)

As for the brewer in Atlanta I'd say from the stuff I've read they didn't know what they were doing and blamed things on difficulty finding the ingredients they wanted. (Especially when we have a successfull craft brewer, posting in that thread to out that any difficulty isn't a difficulty in sourcing if one knows what they are doing.)

 

re: hop shortages, 47Hops themselves in the blog posting just before the Chapter 11 posting discussed a heat wave causing a hop shortage in Europe on top of a market that was "teetering on the verge of shortage."

 

I am a firm believer that a lot of people when they have problems, it is actually someone else's fault. I know when it happens to me it is, so I figure the same for others. I actually have a hard time understanding if if you contract for something, that you can actually walk away from it. Maybe they don't want to pressure the particular brewer(s), but screw you once.. you know the rest. Also it sets a bad precedent for your dealings with others if you show that you are willing to let people walk away from their commitments. Raising kids taught me that lesson

 

They aren't a big one like YCH or Haas.

This explains some of the recent blog posts.

 

We should all be aware that a number of businesses and "people" stiff their vendors regardless of the business climate in general.

 

Well that blog post seems to be the prediction for this year's crop. (Harvest in the US doesn't start until the end of this month, if that soon, and without checking I assume it is much the same in Europe).

The unpaid bills seem to have for the 2016 crop and possiby earlier crops.

 

Interesting to not see any explicit discussion about proprietary hops versus traditional in this dilemma. I have a hunch it might be part of this.

Somehow I doubt there are Citra and Mosaic hops just sitting around, waiting. . . ? There was mention of aroma hops, but I dunno, dry hopped beers still seem very popular (the most popular?) in the craft % of market share. . .

Wondering the possibility that these contracts were years old, new hop varieties come out, making the contracts for non proprietary C or noble hops not seem as attractive these days? I dunno, juggernauts and massive hop users like Sierra Nevada are still cranking out world class C hopped stuff, so I could be way off base.

 

The harvest has started in MI. They are probably doing Centennial in WA now.

 

They supplied shitty hops, got big quickly, and people stopped buying because their product sucked. It's not really a surprise.

 

I was going to bring up the same question.

There are certainly hop varieties that are "hotter" than others.

 

Correction.

My earlier response was partly incorrect and definetly oversimplified and misleading. The possible Hop shortfall is for the 2017 crop in Europe and at that time it wasn't clear if the US crop could cover the shortage in certain kinds of hops.

Because of the US craft beer sales slowdown in 2016, some Brewers didn't use up all their 2016 hops and now dont want all the US hops from the 2017 contracts they made in 2016 for hops from the 2017 crop. Some are simply ignoring him.

Meanwhile he has to, or already had to, pay the farmers for the hops they have been grewing for 2017 at the price he contracted for with them in 2016, to help be sure the farmers would grow enough hops for him to be able to fulfill his 2017 contracts with Brewers, some of whom appear to be trying to stiff him because they don't need/want all the hops they contracted for with him from the 2017 crop.

(I think this is a bit closer to unraveling what is going on.)

 

The only positive side I see from all this is that if there is any effort made to not let all these extra hops go to waste, whether this means the brewers honouring and paying for their initial order or the supplier just giving then away before they go bad, it could potentially lead to some creative stuff in the brewing process. That could be kind of amazing in the eyes and tastebuds of a hop head like me. I'm all for these brewers using more hops in their process, cranking up IBUs on stuff or turning everything into a New England style with dry and late additions. I get that it might be tough to change established recipies or create entirely new stuff because there's no guarantee people would buy it, but these days it seems a lot of folks are pretty obsessed over hoppy stuff. All I know is it would be a shame to let those hops go to waste.

 

Long shelf life is especially true for extracts. Mostly used for bittering, Hop extracts are something of a buffer between bumper crops and poor crop years. They were just working through the stock pile from 2009-ish. It may spike up again.

 

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