Project Hop: Terroir Mixed Packs
Same hop + different farm = new drinking experience.
Really? Does where a hop is grown make a difference in how it tastes? Don’t take our work for it, see for yourself!
We’re brewing 20hl batches of beer with no hops, splitting these into four batches of 500L, then adding the same variety of hops but from different regions to produce identical beers, except for the fact the hops we use were grown on different farms. Learn more at our sister brewery’s page www.projecthop.beer
How did this all start?
This idea started a few years ago I went around to breweries with unmarked bags of hops and asked the brew teams to describe and rate them. Little did they know but they were smelling samples of the very same variety of hops, just grown in different regions. They were blown away at the differences terroir (growing conditions) makes in the final product and how good some of the products from independent farmers were.
Nearly all of the hops brewers use today come from big companies that blend each variety to make it taste consistent. All the delicious regional differences those brewers noticed are blended out and lost to beer.
*For the beer geeks and homebrewers out there: this isn’t just dry-hopping with different hops. We’re doing full 60-90 minute boils with all the usual hop additions, including whirlpool and dry-hop. We aren’t adding any bittering hops to the main batch. Each 1/3 of the 15hl batch is 100% terroir hops.