It is not uncommon to confuse them and yet… A brief overview, to better understand these Slovenian gems.

STYRIAN GOLDING

The Styrian Golding was crossed with a Slovenian male to produce the Celeia .

STYRIAN GOLD

Styrian Gold was developed to replace Savinjski Golding (an ecotype of Fuggle , introduced to Slovenia in the 19th century). The goal was to preserve all the properties of this world-renowned Slovenian star, while improving its agronomic characteristics: better yield, better disease resistance, etc.

Styrian / Savinjski

Savinjski and Styrian therefore do not refer to the same things.

Savinjski means “from the Savinja valley” (Savinja being a river).

And Styria (or Styrie in proper English) is a larger region than just the Savinja Valley, encompassing many (but not all) hop-growing areas in Slovenia. For example, hops are also grown in the Koroska region.

A brief historical detour…

For your information, Styria straddles southeastern Austria and northeastern Slovenia: it was part of the Habsburg Empire. When the empire collapsed after World War I, Upper Styria became Austrian and Lower Styria became part of Yugoslavia – until the 1990s, when Yugoslavia was also divided and Slovenia gained its independence. Incidentally, and getting back to hops, Styrian hops are found in Austria (such as Aurora, which is also called “Super Styrian”), although they cannot have a protected designation of origin (PDO) in this case.

“STYRIAN” is ultimately the name, the designation for all Slovenian hops. In practice, all new varieties are named as follows: STYRIAN + an English name. For example: Styrian Gold, Styrian Fox, Styrian Wolf, Styrian Eagle , etc. So Styrian… means that it is a hop of Slovenian origin.

There you have it, you know everything!