THE BLACK HOPS STORY

3 mates set off down the road of gypsy brewing, making Eggnog Stout at a brewery in Mount Tamborine called Beard & Brau.

Following a successful first launch, they experienced a rapid three month rise, from the seeds of an idea to the birth of a commercial brewing company. But this was just the beginning...

Opening a brewery is an expensive business, so it was time for team Black Hops to bring some outside investors onboard.

In line with their manifesto of being “the least covert operation in brewing”, the boys recorded a podcast series, the Operation Brewery Podcast, which took listeners behind the scenes as they prepared for the opening of the brewery.

In January 2016 Black Hops launched their crowdfunding campaign via the Pozible platform, to help fund the brewery build. The campaign was a big hit, with the $10,000 minimum being achieved on the first day and $17,800 ultimately raised.

At the time, no other brewery had launched using crowdfunding and as usual the boys shared their experiences via the podcast and the blog, for the benefit of others looking to do the same as they were.

For the first year or so Black Hops was primarily brewing beers for the taproom, together with a few wholesale kegs. There was a small bottling machine for taproom takeaway stock, but there wasn’t much of a presence in bottle shops yet.

This would soon change with the arrival of a brand new flagship beer, Pale Ale, coinciding with the launch of Black Hops cans. The beer was an instant hit and the recipe hasn’t changed since.

Having the beer in cans, packaged efficiently via a mobile canning provider ensured that Black Hops could produce enough to supply local bottle shops.

The GABS Hottest 100 Aussie Craft Beers countdown is the biggest ‘people’s choice’ craft beer poll in the land.

1000’s of beers from all over Australia are entered, so team Black Hops were totally pumped when Hornet came in at a highly respectable #55 on the list. And then officially blown away when Pale Ale came it at #20 for favourite craft beer in Oz for 2017.

To put this into perspective, Black Hops achieved the highest position of any brewing company making their debut appearance in the Hottest 100!

By mid 2018, it was clear the original brewery location could no longer support Black Hops’ ever-rapid growth. A bigger brewery was needed.

A suitable location turned up at 671 Pine Ridge Road Biggera Waters, the original Riviera boat building sheds, which were built in the early 1980’s. It was love at first sight for the Black Hops brains trust.

This would become by far the biggest project yet, requiring multiple millions of dollars and taking out a 15 year lease in order to build one of Queensland’s biggest independent breweries.

So the lease was signed and work commenced..

To help fund the new brewery on the northern end of the Gold Coast, the equity crowdfunding revenue raising model, which recently became legal in Australia, was tapped into.

The second brewery was well on the way to opening and the funds were much needed to finalise the project.

The campaign was a resounding success, achieving a number of record breaking results.

As first time attendees to the RQFWS Awards, the team were pumped to come back with a total of 4 awards, including 2 gold medals and 2 ‘grand champion’ trophies.

The highlight was taking out the prestigious ‘RQFWS Champion Brewery’ award, which sits nicely alongside our AIBA Champion Small Brewery award from the previous May! The 4 awards were for: Champion Brewery, Champion Queensland Brewery, Champion Pale Ale (Hornet IPA): Gold Medal, Champion IPA (Code Red): Gold Medal

We joined our craft beer industry friends at the annual Australian International Beer Awards (AIBA’s). The AIBA’s have been going for over 25 years and is the largest annual draft and packaged beer competition in the world.

Winning a Champion Beer Trophy for Mid Range was a prestigious honour.

As you can see, we were pretty stoked with the result.

A Black Hops contingent headed down to Melbourne for the seventh annual BrewCon and Trade Expo, which culminated at The Independent Beer Awards (aka ‘The Indies’).
It was the first time attending and entering.

We knew it wasn't going to be easy with the judging panel assessing over a thousand beers and we were very proud to come away with a range of medals across all of our entries, including two Gold Medals, for Pink Mist (Raspberry Saison) and G.O.A.T. (Hazy IPA).

Our Gold Coast Taprooms were cranking as we celebrated the annual GABS Festival Hottest 100 Craft Beer Countdown.

We got the 5th most votes out of every brewery in the country and four of our beers made the top 100, with Pale Ale topping our results, finishing in 14th position for the second year in a row.

The placing were;
Pale Ale: 14, Hornet: 22, Super Hornet: 33, Caribbean Haze: 86

With COVID-19 keeping everyone bunkered down at home, we launched a Brew At Home competition, letting eager home brewers (aka The Black Hops Reserves) come up with the best versions of six of our core range beers; Hornet, Super Hornet, Lay Day, Send It, Mid Range and Pale Ale.

Who would win the title of Black Hops Reserves Grand Champion?

The inaugural GABS Can Design Awards were held in recognition of the fine art of designing a killer craft beer can.

With over 120 breweries entering, we were stoked to finish seventh for our winter limited release, Moondancer Hazy IPA.

For this can the designer, Troy, created a new character (now affectionately dubbed ‘Hop Man’) dancing around a campfire under a full moon. Apparently, the design was so popular it’s inspired more than a few Hop Man tattoos and fireside beers!

The Australian Craft Beer Survey by Beer Cartel is the largest study of Australian craft beer drinking trends.

In the 2020 survey, which took place between July and September Black Hops was awarded ‘Number 1 Craft Brewery In Australia’ and took out the top gong for ‘Queensland’s Favourite Craft Brewery Venue’.

It’s a massive honour to be recognised like this by craft beer lovers, both for our beers and for the shared camaraderie of the Black Hops taproom experience.

A Black Hops contingent attended the annual Royal Queensland Beer Awards, with top brewers from all over Australia coming together and competing for national recognition.

We were once again absolutely stoked to continue our winning tradition, with our beers and brewery saluting at the podium for two trophies and two gold medals.

We were super stoked to launch our newest brewing venture, the AWOL barrel-aging facility and dedicated barrel aged beer taproom in Burleigh Heads.

Since visiting some of the best barrel aged breweries in America in 2018, it was a dream of ours to open our own and after two years of planning and preparation we were extremely excited to throw open the doors to Queensland’s first dedicated barrel aged beer taproom.

The AIBA’s have been going for over 25 years and are the largest annual draft and packaged beer competition in the world, attracting around 2,600 entries from more than 400 breweries in 26 countries.

We’ve managed to walk away with gold medals for our beers at every AIBA awards ceremony we’ve entered since 2016 and this year we came away with another 5 gold medals.

Home Guard was officially launched, an exclusive beer club for lovers of fresh and limited release Black Hops Beers. The concept ties in with our bi-monthly limited release beers.

With our first Home Guard intake limited to only 250 spaces, to say that we were blown out of the water by the response would be an understatement! When we went live with subscriptions at 9:00am on 15 October our server was swamped due to the high volume of traffic from people wanting to sign up.

For the past 31 years respected business publication The Australian Financial Review (AFR) have published their Fast 100 and Fast Starters lists, in recognition of the fastest growing businesses and start ups in Australia over the previous 12 months.

This was our first year of being eligible for the Fast 100 list, so we were stoked to be recognised as #24 in this year’s honour roll of fastest growing Australian companies!