Last week I put out our first 6 of our Top 11 lessons building Black Hops and in today’s post I’ll go through the final 5 lessons and some thoughts on navigating the brewery valley of death. 6. Don’t Get Too Creative But Also Get Very Creative We’ve learned a few lessons when it comes to being creative with our …
Top 11 Lessons Building a Brewery and Navigating the Valley of Death (part 1 of 2)
Our book Operation Brewery details all of our various decisions before starting Black Hops. A lot has changed since we started and we’ve learned many valuable lessons. In this post I’ll go through 11 of the most important lessons we’ve learned in the last 6 years. We started with a home brew in 2014 and eventually our own small $400k …
Brewery software – Every app and software tool we use at Black Hops
In this article I’ll run through our brewery software and every other piece of software I can think of that we use at Black Hops.
Craft beer prices: how much does beer cost to make? 2.0
In 2016 we wrote the article Craft beer prices: how much does beer cost to make?. It’s the most popular post we’ve ever put on this blog, and I’ve been meaning to get around to updating it. So here is the updated post on how much it costs us to make beer. What’s changed The cost of beer for us …
AWOL barrel aged beer & taproom: coming soon
For the past few months we’ve been working on a new project here at Black Hops, building our very own barrel aged beer barrel room and taproom. Actually if you go back far enough, this project has been in the works for a few years. The AWOL Story Like Black Hops itself, AWOL started a little bit by accident. Back …
G.O.A.T. Hazy IPA Now Part Of Our Core Range Beers
G.O.A.T. is a Hazy IPA that has gotten a lot of love, ever since we brewed it for the 2018 AIBA Awards as a small batch beer (to coincide with the introduction of the ‘hazy’ beer category for the first time). We brewed it with high expectations and named it accordingly and the beer delivered, taking out a Gold Medal …
How Black Hops is Operating During The COVID-19 Crisis
The COVID-19 pandemic means that regular life as we know it won’t be the same for some time. New phrases such as ‘social distancing’ are now part of everyday lingo. Many people’s livelihoods and businesses have been put on hold. And everyday activities we once took for granted, like going to your favourite bar for a beer, are no longer …
2019 Black Hops Wrap Up
2019 has been an epic year for Black Hops and first up, we would like to thank all of our customers and friends for supporting us through what has been the most challenging and rewarding year for us to date. While it’s only been 3.5 years since we opened the doors to our own brewery in Burleigh, we passed our …
Canning and packaging our beer – here’s how we do it
Canning and packaging are two of the most important aspects of our beer production process here at Black Hops. Our two breweries operate under different set-ups, with Burleigh HQ running both automated and manual set ups in tandem, while BHII in Biggera Waters runs with a more automated set-up. In this post we cover what we use for our canning …
Equity Crowdfunding a Brewery in Australia
As you may have already heard, we have recently opened a second, even larger Black Hops brewery on the Gold Coast, Black Hops II. To get us over the line we used equity crowdfunding which has recently become approved in Australia for Pty Ltd companies. Running a brewery is an expensive game, and we’ve always been transparent in how we’ve …