The Bamberg beer specialty retailer Bierothek® is taking over the Berlin beer magazine Hopfenhelden. The online medium in the beer sector with the highest reach is to be continued as an independent media brand and, as before, will report journalistically on the German beer scene.
The well-known beer magazine Hopfenhelden will continue to operate as an independent media brand under the umbrella of the Bierothek® Group from Bamberg. Hopfenhelden founder Nina Klotz sold her shares in Helden Publishing UG to the well-known Bamberg beer retailer. “Nina interviewed me in December last year for the BrauBeviale news portal, MyBeviale, and that’s how we started talking about Hopfenhelden,” says Bierothek® founder Christian Klemenz, explaining the origins of the now published takeover. “In conversation together, we both quickly realized that Hopfenhelden could develop better under our roof than it could as a stand-alone publication in the difficult media market.” Nina Klotz and other authors from the team will continue to publish with Hopfenhelden and the Bierothek® will continue to run the magazine in the usual way.
The idea for Hopfenhelden was, in a sense, born out of spite: after Nina Anika Klotz drank her first IPA while doing research in 2012, she decided to pursue the topic of beer further. She sees exciting stories in craft beer and its brewers and, as a freelance journalist, suggests them to various (business) media. But mostly there are men in the decisive positions who assume that they already know everything there is to know about beer, after all, they drink one every evening. They reject the topic suggestions. The journalist then decides to write down her beer stories anyway. In October 2013, Hopfenhelden, Germany's first craft beer magazine, goes online. “Apart from the fact that I really enjoyed my first IPA, I also found the guys behind these beers really good and exciting,” she says. “From a purely journalistic perspective, I saw a lot of potential there. I also just wanted to see how far you can go with a media product without a big publisher in the background.”
The timing is good: As the craft beer movement gains momentum in Germany, Hopfenhelden is one of the most important media for the young scene. When the 500th anniversary of the Purity Law was celebrated a little later, the new beers and their magazine received more and more attention. “We have grown with craft beer,” says the founder. And soon beyond: After the first exciting years, the Craft Beer Magazine becomes Germany's only online magazine about beer, in which not only the brewers are in the foreground, but above all in-depth knowledge about the topic of beer is conveyed in an entertaining and accessible way.
After almost nine years as a beer journalist, during which Klotz also published two books about good beer, she is very pleased that her former defiant project is continuing with a new team: “The good stories and the good beers themselves are simply coming closer together And to be honest, that makes perfect sense for everyone, brewers and beer drinkers alike,” says the forty-year-old. “The mission and basic idea of Hopfenhelden as an online magazine about good beer and the people who make it remains unchanged: those who know more, drink better.”
About hop heroes
The journalist Nina Anika Klotz founded the online magazine Hopfenhelden in Berlin in 2013. The first article was about the craft beer pioneer Thorsten Schoppe, who was still brewing at Südstern at the time. Over the course of almost a decade, Klotz and a team of freelance journalists accompanied the emergence of a German craft beer scene with numerous new breweries. She was at the laying of the foundation stone of the Stone Brewing brewery and at the hop harvest in the Yakima Valley, interviewed international beer greats and German brewing veterans. But she also imparted basic knowledge about beer and later homebrewing. With its website, social media and a newsletter, Hopfenhelden still reaches a large and loyal readership of beer enthusiasts who follow the magazine's motto: “Those who know more, drink better”.
