Beer Fraud?

Galaxy does not cost 3 times the price of centennial.

my base homebrew price cost of Galaxy for the 2022 crop is 1.5 an ounce.

For centennial it is 0.97 an ounce.

most breweries are on a wholesale account that reduces the price by up to 30 percent across the account not on the particular hop.

doing a fresh pitch of yeast though for a 10bbl system would be starting at 400 bucks a pitch minimum depending on gravity of the beer and cells per mL needed.

I would still say the main culprit would be the yeast not the hop. They maybe save 100 bucks switching from Galaxy to centennial if they do them at a 10bbl level. Even if you scale that up the savings versus reusing that yeast is too great. That 100 bucks only saved on ~2400 pints on the batch. So maybe 4 cents a pint was saved. I don’t think it is worth the risk but who knows, some breweries might see ~100 bucks saved as worth to their beer quality and reputation.

 

Galaxy is an Australian hop.

 

Maybe I’m being unreasonable, but couldn’t you just ask the brewer in a non-accusatory way? Could turn into a really cool conversation

 

I call that pure audacity and bravado that costs a lot of money. Nothing more.....

 

doh….

 

Sorry for being blunt, but you can’t tell. Firstly, there’s a huge variance in qualities of hops. Galaxy is one of the most inconsistent hop varieties I’ve seen year after year. Mosaic is a close second and there’s tons of bad Citra too. With how much acreage there is out there now for some of these modern hops and how many different growing regions and practices there are, it’s almost useless to disclose hop varieties because it offers little information to customers about what flavors and aromas to expect. Secondly, this happens all the time where people accuse breweries of stuff like this and more often than not, the brewers that see this stuff just laugh at the customers who are adamant about it when in fact they’re wrong about their proclamation. Sorry you don’t like whatever beer it is, but it’s far more likely that the brewery is inconsistent, the ingredients are inconsistent, or your tastes have changed than that the brewery just decided to use different hops than the ones they list in a description.