Australian’s largest hop grower, Hop Products Australia (HPA) has partnered with Beer Cartel, challenging a dozen Australian breweries to craft limited edition beers using their new enriched lupin pellet, Lupomax.
While Hop Nation’s Lead Production Brewer, Paul Clarke said, “This experience proved to us that Lupomax offers brewers heaps of flexibility, and we can imagine it playing a key role in both our big dry hopped IPAs and other more subtle styles in the future.”
Lupomax is produced via the trademarked HAAS Sensory Plus process, designed to deliver optimised flavour and reliable brewing performance. HPA say that the pellet has less vegetative matter than the traditional T90 hop pellets, and is more concentrated so brewers can use fewer pellets to make more beer.
The partnership follows HPA and Beer Cartel’s successful Eclipse Mixed 12-Pack partnership from 2020. Owen Johnston, Head of Sales and Marketing at HPA says that the success of last year’s partnership demonstrated that these innovative projects have value for HPA and craft brewers.
“The Lupomax Mixed 12-Pack will help us demonstrate how the product performs in a range of beer styles, which is mission critical when it comes to new hops and innovation products. Plus, we got to collaborate with the participating breweries which is something we love doing, and particularly invaluable for our relationship in times like these. We’re stoked all of the breweries were keen to be involved. We certainly couldn’t have done it without them,” said Mr Johnston.
Lupomax is available now in the following trademarked and registered varieties: Amarillo VGXP01 c.v., Ariana, BRU-1, Callista, Cashmere, Citra HBC 394 c.v., Columbus, Ekuanot HBC 366 c.v., El Dorado, Huell Melon, Idaho 7, Mosaic HBC 369 c.v., Saaz and Sabro HBC 438 c.v. with more hop varieties to follow.
Stone & Wood’s Counter Culture has also experimented with the new pellet and created Bloom Springs which they say is made from “beds of Lupomax and Incognito hops…a vibrant, new age IPA with lush tropical hop notes and an ABV of 6.4 per cent”.
Head Brewer, Caolan Vaughan said, “We used them to showcase the latest in hop innovation and what better way of doing this is highly hop IPA. Dry hopped beer are notoriously inefficient beers to make as you lose so much beer from the large hopping rates.
“The benefit of using Lupomax is it is more highly concentrated than regular type 90 hop pallets that we usually use for dry hopping, which means we waste less beer and more happy people are able to enjoy it. We loved using it for the flavour and aroma it gives beer.”
