Or rather: the HOPS was on Air Charter Service – almost as soon as ACS Mexico received the urgent request from a key alcoholic beverage manufacturer in Mexico. They were calling to book a charter to ensure the quick delivery of half a ton of beer hops within the next 24 hours, otherwise the brewery would grind to a halt. No beer, no cheer – ACS Mexico understood the assignment perfectly and dashed in to prevent a national depression. All 561 kg of the precious cargo were loaded into a Dassault Falcon 20 in Washington State, USA, and flown 2,500+ miles to Mexico City.
It’s not the first time that ACS has proven to be the beer angel of the air – last summer, it carried out a similar, slightly larger hops mission for a Mexican brewery [same one?] at risk of running out of hops: that time from Liège to Mexico City – a shipment of 100 tons of hops on board of a Boeing 747-400BCF (sourced within 4 hours of the urgent charter request coming in!). And temperature-controlled too, at 0-7°C throughout.
Though a smaller consignment this time, the urgency was the same. Marco Circosta, ACS Mexico’s CEO, commented: “We were contacted by our freight forwarder customer in Mexico whose client’s brewery urgently needed a delivery of hops to avoid a production line shut down. The hops needed to be in Mexico within 24 hours of the customer first contacting us, so we quickly got to work sourcing an aircraft and found a Falcon 20, that was available nearby and was easily loadable, as it had a side cargo door that could fit the 561-kilogram load in on just one pallet. A complication was that, as the cargo was not traveling under refrigeration, we needed to coordinate with all relevant parties in order to minimize exposure to external conditions, by expediting the customs, loading and offloading processes. From initial phone call to completion of the charter was just under 20 hours, ensuring the production line could keep on running.”
