We brewed this collaboration with Busa dei Briganti in July 2025 to pour on the BarthHaas collab bar at drinktec in Munich, where we were launching PRYSMA™. It was never meant to be a “one-off collab beer.” The intent was to put PRYSMA™ into a commercial brew, in a brewery that measures carefully, and let the process and data do the talking.
Busa is exactly that kind of brewery. They track performance closely, make changes carefully, and keep what works. That makes them a strong partner when the goal is to validate hop tools with real production data, not just good intentions. Head brewer Davide Salvalaio also wasn’t meeting PRYSMA™ for the first time. Through the BarthHaas Brewery Insight Forum, he worked alongside brewers from across Europe and the UK in early brewing trials and feedback rounds that helped shape PRYSMA™ ahead of release. He then became one of the first breweries in Europe to use PRYSMA™ in a commercial setting, bringing practical scrutiny to how it doses, integrates, and performs beyond pilot conditions.
The starting point for the work was straightforward: Davide had already pushed down hop-driven losses through process control, centrifugation, and earlier liquid hop trials. The remaining question is familiar to many breweries running hop-forward beers at scale: once you’ve “optimized,” is there still meaningful headroom left without trading away beer quality?
Why PRYSMA ™
PRYSMA™ is a flowable liquid hop flavor platform designed to deliver hop impact without adding unnecessary handling friction. In this collaboration it was treated as a production tool: direct dosing, predictable incorporation, and reduced physical hop load compared with pellet-heavy dry hopping regimes. The team dosed PRYSMA™ Eclipse® into the fermenter during fermentation/maturation in combination with an experimental variety from Australia, Luna® (HPA-033), using the brewery’s existing workflow, no new “special” process required.
The reference point was also chosen carefully. As Davide explained:
“Our flagship IPA Terremoto is a great benchmark for us in terms of quality and stability… we chose this beer because we have the most historical data from brewing nearly 100 batches so having a statistical comparison between the trials and this beer would be much easier.”
That matters because it keeps the comparison honest. A single batch can flatter almost anything; a benchmark built on repeat production is harder to fool.
What Busa found: measurable efficiency gains, not a marginal change
The case study documents what happened when Busa replaced a significant share of dry hop pellets with PRYSMA™. The key outcome is simple: higher substitution reduced beer losses and improved recoverable volume. The team translated the improvement into practical production terms. More packaged beer over the year and fewer brews needed to reach the same output. That’s the kind of efficiency improvement that affects planning, tank utilization and profitability.
Beyond yield, the collaboration highlighted operational benefits that brewers recognise immediately when hop matter is reduced: fewer process disruptions, smoother downstream separation, and less cleaning load. It’s not glamorous, but it’s real, less time dealing with hop-driven interruptions and more time running predictable production.
Sensory still had to hold
Efficiency gains only count if the beer stays where it needs to be. Busa compared the PRYSMA™-driven beer against their reference in blind tasting. The beers were close across core attributes, with hop intensity and quality holding in the glass. Davide’s summary was brewer-direct:
“Compared with the original Terremoto, we have a beer that is not so different from the previous one; the only difference is that it is very drinkable, and we perceive it as juicier and fuller in taste and flavor.”
That’s the target outcome for most breweries considering format changes: protect beer identity, improve the process. We asked Davide for his thought on Australia’s latest hop variety, Luna® (HPA-033) too.
“In beer, HPA-033 delivers exactly what you’d expect from the rub: a juicy, clear, well-defined aroma led by sweet citrus, orange, mandarin and marmalade, supported by mango and soft tropical fruit, with a subtle floral lift. On the palate it stays smooth and rounded with good persistence and no rough edges. Modern, expressive, and very drinkable, the citrus–mango combination is the core of the profile.”
What this means in practice
Busa’s experience reinforces a practical point: hop format can be part of your efficiency strategy, not just your flavor strategy. PRYSMA™ can help reduce the loss and disruption associated with heavy pellet loads, while still delivering the hop expression customers expect from modern IPA.
Davide framed the value in the way most production teams will recognise:
“For us, it was a win-win situation… simply by changing one raw material.”
Download the full case study
This post is the overview. The full case study includes the trial design, dosing approach, and complete performance data. Download the Busa dei Briganti × PRYSMA™ case study to review the numbers and process details in full.
