Organic Hops (finally!)

So we just received our first shipment of organic hops [picture me jumping in the air and clicking my heels together]. It is enough to do two or three test batches before switching to full scale production. We’ve spent the last 3 + years trying to find a consistent source of certified organic hops of the variety and quality we require. If these test batches pan out our ingredients will go from 98% organic to 100% organic. I’m so excited about this…when we started off this was a really big decision for us.

There technically were organic hops on the market, but we didn’t particularly like them and we couldn’t receive assurances they would always be available. We decided that we would hold out until we could get what we wanted in terms of quality and variety, but I really didn’t expect it would take so flipping long.

The next step for us will be to go through the actual certification process, which I’m really looking forward to. At first I figured it wouldn’t be anything more than a pain-in-the-but, because I’m pretty sure they won’t find anything that we need to change (to be certified organic you only need 95% of the ingredients certified, and we don’t make any beer with less than that). But lately, I’ve been kind of hoping that they do find something we can change, to help us do better.

Either way, we’ll see what’s what when we start the process. In the meantime, I can’t wait until our tests on the hops are done.