BOHEMIA HOP was registered in the commercial register on March 25, 1991.
With its foundation in 1991, BOHEMIA HOP followed up on the activities in the international trade of Czech hops from previous decades when SAAZ hops were traded worldwide under the brand BOHEMIAHOP - CZECHOSLOVAKIA.
BOHEMIA HOP was set up after the 1989 Velvet Revolution as a sales arm of the Czech hop growers cooperative CHMELAŘSTVÍ. The first Chairman of the Board of Directors of BOHEMIA HOP and the Chairman of CHMELAŘSTVÍ, cooperative Žatec, concurrently was František Chvalovský, Sr. Jaroslav Kareš was elected to be the first director of the company.
The current Board of Directors consists of Zdeněk Rosa (Chairman of the Board), Jiří Mašek (Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors), Lubomír Vent, Pavel Řepík, Radek Gregor, Jaroslav Navrátil and Josef Fric. The commercial director of the company is Vladimir Šeretka.
According to the records of the Board of Directors, representatives of Kirin, Sapporo, Alken-Maes, Interbrew, Guiness or BRAU AG breweries arrived at BOHEMIA HOP for hops selection in the fall of 1991.
In 1991, the main markets, to where BOHEMIA HOP exported Czech hops, were Japan, U.S., Brazil, Belgium, Great Britain, Austria, Germany and Sweden. Over 64% of these exports went to Japan and the U.S. In the two decades since, China and Russia, along with the fore mentioned countries, have become the main markets for Czech hops. The total production of beer in the world approached 1.2 billion hl in 1991; in 2019, it was already at 1.9 billion hl.
Read more: Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of BOHEMIA HOP, a.s.
Žatec region brings a unique testimony to the tradition of hop growing and its processing in rural and urban buildings.
In January 18th, 2021, the Minister of Culture, Lubomír Zaorálek, signed the documentation for the nomination of Žatec and the landscape of Saaz hops to the UNESCO World Heritage List.
The nomination represents a completely unique cultural landscape, which is composed of two complementary and geographically close components, which demonstrate the impact of growing, processing and trade in hops on the rural and urban environment.
The Saaz hop-growing landscape contains the most valuable and fertile hop fields, on which the world-renowned Saaz hops have been grown and bred for centuries. This hop-growing landscape contains villages with facilities associated with the processing of harvested hops.
The landscape rural component is complemented by the territory of the historical core of the town of Žatec and its Prague suburbs, which are unique in the number of preserved technical monuments, especially from the 19th century, used for the processing and storage of hops.
Read more: Žatec and the Landscape of Saaz Hops to be inscribed on UNESCO World Heritage List
