There were eight or ten of us sitting on benches and chairs around the walls of the smokehouse on Jon Gjerde’s farm at Ringheim, mostly middle-aged Norwegians, drinking cool, citrussy, lightly conditioned farmhouse beer, telling jokes and stories, talking about brewing and the creating of ale, and the local district’s long line of skiing champions,… Read More Oppskåka: the true meaning of beer
Kveik: a word we’re likely to be seeing a lot more of in the beer world. But what is kveik? Here are a couple of things it’s not: Kveik is NOT a beer style. It’s the name given in parts of Western Norway to yeast used in the local tradition of farm brewing, it looks… Read More How to brew beer like a Norwegian farmer
In Hornindal, in beautiful remotest Western Norway, if you tried to explain to the locals the fuss being made about cloudy New England IPAs, they would laugh, or look bemused. There are around a hundred or so people in the area who make beer, in a tradition going back hundreds of years. All of it… Read More Fjord fiesta: the Norwegian farmhouse ales festival 2017
If there is a more international, more fascinating, more illuminating, more must-not-be-missed beer celebration on the planet right now than Carnivale Brettanomyces in Amsterdam, let me know immediately, because it must be marvellous. Carnivale Brettanomyces, now on its sixth year, calls itself a beer festival, but it’s more a three-day massively parallel series of dozens… Read More Going wild (yeast) in Amsterdam
