To the beat of the *bop
Budapest’s B*BOP has made its name with delicious beers that are uncompromising in their weirdness
Robyn Gilmour
Photos:
B*BOP Fermentory
Saturday 15 November 2025
This article is from
Winter Wonderland
issue 124
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“I’m fucking tired man,” says Botond Cserniczky, the one man band behind Budapest’s B*BOP. He’s on his couch, pulling on a vape, but wearing a big smile. He has just returned from a beer festival in Nantes, a location that should be five hours away, but which took two days to get home from. His flight to Paris was cancelled, meaning he missed his connection to Budapest. The airline put him up for the night in a Disneyland Paris hotel. He didn’t get access to the parks.
At the time of our conversation, Boti is 26 years old, meaning it’s been 10 years since he started homebrewing. “Brewing came into my life, because it's similar to painting or playing music,” he says. “When you are creating something from nothing it creates a sense of freedom. It’s not like making wine or champagne, which is strict about the grapes and the methods you use. Of course beer has some rules and methods but when it comes to ingredients you can use whatever you want, and create whatever flavours, or vibes you want.”
He started packaging his produce when he reached a more socially acceptable age to be brewing, and sold it under his own name. “I even did several collaborations with other breweries, but the thing was, a couple of my beers went across the borders to different countries, and my name is unpronounceable, even in Hungary,” he says. “I knew I had to think about creating a proper brand.”
Boti officially founded B*BOP Fermentary, an artisanal, nomadic brewing project, in 2020. “On that project, I made beers inspired by my art, by my music, by nature,” he begins. “They feel like modern, reincarnated, New Age takes on traditional styles, and on sour beers in particular. I even started making my own style of sour beer, which I call the Nu Sour. This doesn’t use any hops, and instead I brew with herbs and spices. So, for example, I might brew a beer with raspberries, but also use a herb and a spice that match with it.”
In case it isn’t obvious, Boti is a dynamic, multidirectional thinker with big ideas. He describes beer and music as his yin and yang, his brewing as having “culinary licence”, and beer itself as a blank canvas. He seems largely unencumbered by convention, but refreshingly, he doesn’t take himself too seriously. “At the end of the day, it’s a beer in a glass, you know? So it’s really important to me that the beer tells a story, has a soul, has its own universe. It’s hard to make sense of the beer scene nowadays, so for me, it is important that the beer has meaning.”
As an example of what he means by this, Boti refers to a beer he brewed when his grandma had a stroke earlier this year. Thankfully she’s making a great recovery, but at the time, brewing was an outlet for Boti’s worry. As a way to honour her, he made a beer he called Mukhallat, the Arabic word for a complex perfume, or layered fragrance. He says that he and his grandma used to listen to a lot of Kamasi Washington together, and so the beer’s artwork superimposed his grandma’s handwriting on a painting of Kamasi.
“We matched up this painting with my grandma's handwritten notes that she wrote after her incident. She had to re-learn how to write, and so needed to practice writing and drawing. So yeah, that's the story behind that beer, which I brewed with a lot of raspberries and, instead of hops, I used a Vietnamese Cumeo pepper, saffron, and a little bit of salt.”
Boti says he’d like to own a brewery of his own someday — “I think it’s every brewer’s dream to have their own playground” — but he’s not in a rush to quit the nomadic brewing life. “I don’t like the term contract brewing so much, because it implies that I just hand over a recipe and someone else makes the beer,” he says. “I go to brew the beer myself whenever I can. Of course, the brewery I’m working at will help me. But over the last ten years, nomadic brewing has given me a lot of knowledge and a lot of opportunities to see how different breweries work.”
Boti brews most of his beer at Mad Scientist, one of the most prolific and best known breweries in Budapest. He says the scene in Hungary is relatively small — “not big enough to keep a decent sized brewery alive” — but that Budapest has five or six really notable players. As such, Boti exports a little over half of B*BOP's beers, into ten different markets.
Interestingly he says beer brewed with local fruits are more appealing to drinkers in other countries who are curious about the flavours of Hungary, than to locals. Hungary grows an abundance of exceptional plums and apricots, and Boti tries to work with them when he can, though properly cleaning the fruit — so it doesn’t introduce wild yeasts into his host brewery — can be a challenge for just one person.
For now, Boti is easing into the UK market with a pale ale and a porter — not B*BOP's signature style, but ones which Boti has brewed with a lot of other breweries over the years, and which he’d long been hoping to introduce into B*BOP's repertoire. “B*BOP beers have always been complex but also, in a way, simple,” says Boti, referring to how the brand’s beers strive to never be overcomplicated. “I always want to brew more easy beers too, not just the crazy ones, so this pale ale should be really easy drinking. It will have layers, of course, but my goal was to have just a beer that you don't have to think about, and can just enjoy drinking.”
The thing about this beer that will be more recognisably B*BOP is its name, Kop That, after Kop That Shit, by Aystar. In this sense, it’s a perfect balance of Boti’s yin and yang.
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