Australia: Hop Products Australia completes 2024 harvest

Hop Products Australia (HPA) have completed this year’s hop harvest, and the 2024 hop crop looks a little different compared to previous years. Changes to global demand led HPA to idle 20% of their gardens, Craft Brewing Business reported on April 30.

HPA’s Head of Sales & Marketing Owen Johnston said “this production decrease was a necessary step towards rebalancing supply and demand, and an opportunity to get hyper focused on Aussie hop quality. We had greater flexibility to fine tune our standard operating procedures and harvest each variety at optimal maturity.”

HPA picked 670 hectares across Victoria and Tasmania, for a total of 1,340 tonnes of hops. This was a 177 hectare decrease and a 480 tonne decrease year-on-year across six proprietary varieties – Eclipse, Ella, Enigma, Galaxy, Topaz and Vic Secret – as well as Cascade.

Impact in beer is expected to remain strong, with this year’s average oil content coming in equal or above the 5-year average for all proprietary hops. Johnston said “Galaxy and Enigma were the star performers with both oils and alphas above the 5-year average, which should lead to a great year of true-to-type flavors and aromas in beer.”

Availability of Aussie hops is currently better than ever, but HPA still encourage brewers to consider their requirements, and communicate them early and often.

Hop Products Australia (HPA) is the country’s largest hop grower, backed by a team of experts in plant breeding, farm operations, customer service and brewing support.

As sole custodians of their Aussie hops, and regional representatives of the global BarthHaas group, they supply a huge range of consistently high-quality Aussie, international and innovative hop products so brewers can make consistently high quality beers.

HPA continue to invest in quality improvements. HPA’s Managing Director Tim Lord said “As is often the case with significant projects, our new Victorian pellet plant took longer than expected and wasn’t up and running in time to process crop 2024. Instead, we utilized our existing Victorian pellet plant which was kept in a state of readiness for this exact outcome.”

Lord said “We are in awe of the resilience over industry has shown over the past few years. HPA is fully focused on a sustainable future of quality beer, and has continued to invest in technology, infrastructure and process improvements that will ultimately benefit our brewing customers.”

30 April, 2024