The world's largest hop processing plant currently goes into operation. “We will be slowly ‘start up’ the system in these days,” announced hop trading and processing company BarthHaas during the presenting of its newest market report today. The plant is a 60/40 joint venture of BarthHaas and the hop processing cooperative HVG which jointly invested more than EUR 60 million.
Up to now, Hopfenveredlung St. Johann (Hop refinement St.Johann) operated only a hop pelletising plant at the St. Johann location and a CO2 extraction plant, formerly known as Nateco2, in nearby Wolnzach. With the start of the new extraction plant, hop extraction is to be completely relocated to St. Johann. However, the old plant in Wolnzach will not be shut down but instead used entirely for the extraction of other goods like coffee, algae or vegetable proteins.
The groundbreaking ceremony of the new St. Johann plant which symbolized the beginning of the construction work, took place exactly two years ago in October 2018. In the past two years, a modern production center for hop products has emerged in St. Johann, where around a quarter of the world's hops will be soon processed. “This enables us to effectively implement our vision of processing everything from raw hops to hop pellets and extract at one location,” says Regine Barth, managing director at Barth Haas, who is leading the company in the 8th generation together with her cousins Stephan J. Barth and Alexander W. Barth.
