Let's call a spade a spade. The likes of Craftbrewer, Grain and Grape etc sell hops for a
lot more than you can get them from Hops Direct and a
little more expensive than from Ellerslie - by the time you have paid postage on your five pounds or your couple of kilos etc it works out that from HD or Nikohop you are getting your hops at the equivalent of $3.50 a "foil" and from Ellerslie around $5 a foil. Ellerslie list price looks great but again there's the eleven dollar post pack then the GST that takes a bit of the shine off, but still a good Australian company.
That's fine as long as you restrict yourself to the major hops such as Cascade, Goldings etc. Alternatively if you use a wide variety on a regular basis, are yourself prepared to carry up to 10 or 15 kilos in your freezer which could, with some varieties, take you up to 2 years to get through.
For example if you regularly make American Styles, UK Styles, Lagers and the odd stout and Sparkling you can easily need 12 - 15 varieties that you need to keep in stock as cooking hops, that's without all those hops you use for experimenting with. With just the US varieties you may well choose as "cooking" varieties Cascade, Chinook, Centennial, Willamette, Magnum / Galena...... know what I mean. Then someone gives you a bottle made on Simcoe or NB and you swoon...... B) - or you tweak a brew with Galaxy or Motueka and suddenly Centennial is just soooooo 2008
and your cheap but forgotten slab o' Centennial is suddenly 18 months old.
Now lets switch to the larger retailers such as CB an GnG and see what their situation is. AFAIK, for starters they deal through - and are understandably loyal to - the hop merchants, stock a huge variety that they have to pay guys to pack in the foils, run the inventory and pay floor rent and electricity to store them, so you have the luxury of being able to pick and choose for your next few brews. They are offering us a real service with a capital S and buffering us from shortages and price shocks, like the Hallertau disaster which I assume is now behind us.
I'll come clean, I bought a few main US "cookin" hops from HD - and made the mistake of getting a pound of reimported Hallertau MF which turned out about the same quality as Chinese Saaz. and will probably get binned. So that's bumped their useful hops up to $5 a foil, effectively. Also I have bought 500 of Challenger and 500 of Styrians from Ellerslie. The Challenger has an AA rating of only around 3.5 so they have done the right thing by labelling it accurately - maybe it's 2008 stock (don't say) but I really have to put 50g in to get the same effect as say 30g of Challenger from Craftbrewer. So again that saving has tended to evaporate.
So two sides - by all means buy a few cookers like Cascade or Magnum or Chinook from HD in a bulk buy, but if everyone did that we would risk losing the convenience and variety offered by our own home brew suppliers. If that happened then if you need say Amarillo for a comp brew and HD are out until they harvest then you are stuffed for the sake of $8.
There is a place for attempting deliberately to spread purchases between the bulk guys for varieties that you are going to use and not just sit there costing you money and AA% - and on the other hand to support the locals whenever you can. Personally I no longer get my Euro Hops in bulk - once bitten - but can see the point of getting Cascade or POR.
Scuse essay but I think there should be balance and not "we are being ripped off"... it's a lot more complex than that.
