Bevog: Garden Dormouse
When you say Craft Beer in Austria, you say Bevog. Near the border with Slovenia, Bevog founder and brewer Vasja Golar started brewing flavourful beers in 2013. Blaz, the grower of our Slovenian hop farm, has known Vasja since the founding year of Bevog and that's how we came up with the plan together to brew a single-hop beer at Bevog with the hops from our fields in Slovenia, processed into N10 pellets.
Blaz at his hop field, summer 2022.
4th Generation hop farmer
As a 4th-generation hop farmer, the knowledge of hop growing has been passed onto Blaz at a young age. He initially chose a career in civil engineering, but the call to go fully for hops was too strong.
When you talk to Blaz about hops, you are automatically infected by the hop virus. His passion and admiration for the plant is enormous and completely focused on achieving top-quality results: "The best time of the year is right before harvest. The last round along the fields, when the plants are full of hop cones, feeling and assessing whether they are ripe for harvesting. It's a nice calm moment before the storm called hop harvest, the moment when all the efforts of the past year come together."
Together with Blaz, we are constantly working throughout the year to keep the hop farm future-proof, for example by turning to organic growing and making the hop fields more resistant to changing weather conditions.
Slovenian hop fields, summer 2022
Cardinal
The choice of hops for the beer with Bevog is Cardinal, a hop variety that has already proven itself on several occasions, including in the first beer in the Hop Trophy. It was developed specifically with a fruity aroma in mind, and it succeeded quite well. Citrus is the main part of the aroma, with notes of peach, guava and gooseberry.
N10: Lupulin
The essence of N10 is in lupulin: the resin beads inside the hop bubble that turn golden-yellow when the hops are ripe for harvesting. Lupulin contains the oils that give unique aromas. These sticky little balls contain exactly the substances a brewer needs from hops, as the alpha acids are also in the lupulin.
Here you can see a short video in which you can clearly see where the lupulin is in the hop cone.
N10 pellets can be seen as a concentrated form of hops, with all the lupulin and much less leaf material, this form of hop is similar to cryo hops. The result are thick pellets that are perfect for giving a beer a lot of hop aroma in dry-hoping, for example. During dry-hoping, relatively fewer N10 pellets are needed than T90 to achieve the same aroma. And pellets absorb beer -much dry-hop means beer loss- which is reduced with N10 pellets.
Left regular T90 pellets, at the right N10 pellets.
Bevog Extinction is Forever: Garden Dormouse White IPA
This beer comes from Bevog's Extinction is Forever series: one-off beers brewed with extra attention to animals threatened with extinction. We were allowed to choose the animal and ended up with the Garden Dormouse. In the Netherlands, this small rodent has almost disappeared and its survival is also under serious threat in Europe. Not for nothing has the Dutch Mammal Society declared 2022 the Year of the Garden Dormouse and also Swiss environmental organisation Pro Natura has named the Garden Dormouse “Animal of the Year 2022”.
The beer is a White IPA with a double dose of Cardinal N10 as dry-hop. So a full European IPA with lots of wheat and hop aroma, packed with hoppy citrus flavours!
Wanna taste?
When you are in Austria or Slovenia, you can order yours at Bevog's online shop. Next to that Bevog exports their beers to several countries, the list would be too long to publish here, so use your favourite search engine to find it or visit your local beer shop.