Ska Brewing, saddled with a five-year hops contract signed for a beer that flopped, brewed a new double IPA entirely from the leftover Galaxy and El Dorado hops and put the contract's own villain signing it on the label

the problem

Multi-year forward hops contract left brewery with unsellable surplus

background

the move

Ska Brewing turned an over-committed, multi-year hops contract for an underperforming beer into the recipe and origin story for a new double IPA, using the surplus Galaxy and El Dorado hops as the beer's core ingredients and putting the bad contract itself — literally, a skeleton hand signing it — on the label.

the payoff

BHC DIPA became one of Ska's year-round, permanent lineup releases, distributed in six-packs and cans across ten states; it also generated brewery-driven press coverage that framed the purchasing mistake as a punchline rather than a write-off. No public unit-sales or dollar-recovery figures were disclosed.

what came after

The beer became a running joke inside Ska itself — the brewery's CEO later described repeatedly signing 'bad hop contracts' as part of its M.O. — and BHC is still cited in craft-beer trade coverage as an example of a brewery mining its own supply-chain mistake for a permanent product rather than hiding it.

references

1. [1]Ska Brewing Uses Humor to Turn a Bad Hops Contract Into a BeerDenver Westword, 2017westword.com
2. [2]Ska Brewing Releases BHC DIPAThe Full Pint, 2017thefullpint.com

was it genius?

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