We stick our head into the brewery to ask Adam five questions after a brew day, plus next week you can rate one of our new beers – Weekly Update

This week I’ve made my way back from Scotland, where I sat in numerous pubs and pondered the future of the craft beer market.

What I learned after interviewing more people than I should’ve, being on holiday and all, is that they’ve been drinking beer for a very long time. I heard hundreds of years, so it felt like their beer drinking pattern was set. Another point of interest was that the pubs sell most beer between 4-5,0%.

“We don’t have beer on tap over 5,0%” said one pub owner I spoke to in Portpatrick. I did find beer over 5,0% at some pubs but most were round about the 5,0% mark. That’s maybe why they seem to be able sit at the pub all day drinking pint after pint after pint?

They also seem have a lot of the new “BrewDog style” pubs that sell anything and everything from 2,0% all the way to 12,0% plus. But it didn’t feel as if the people were there to stay the whole day drinking pint after pint after pint.

In Sweden you can see the low alcohol beer trends starting with shops opening that only sell low ABV beers (folköl) of 3,5% and lower. We do have different laws here, but that seems to help create a new craft beer market segment that seems very popular indeed. And the quality of the beers in that segment only seem to get better and better over time.

In my personal opinion, I prefer lower alcohol beers and smaller glasses, but everyone’s different, that’s why, here at Beerbliotek, we have just released our 162nd different beer 🙂

During this week I also ventured into the brewery to interview Adam for our brewery update. He and Axel was just busy finishing up a brew day. Hip Hops as I recall.

Adam and Axel cleaning the brew-kit after a brew day.

Now if you don’t know Adam Norman, he’s our head of brewery operations and one of the co-founders of Beerbliotek. He’s an Australian, and the person who introduced me to Craft beer. I’m from South Africa you see, and love wine, but that has changed, cause now I love craft beer and wine 🙂

Without wasting amy time, let’s start with question one.

What was the fist craft beer you ever had?

Let’s talk about the environment. How is Beerbliotek facing that challenge and what are we doing about it?

AN. We always try and do as much as we can. We use cans, which lowers transport costs. It means we don’t transport air, or weight unnecessarily. It allows us to use a more widely recycled material and it means we have less wastage.

We try to re-use as much water as we can, such as re-using the water from the cooling of our wort. We try to use chemicals for cleaning that are as passive on the environment as possible.

And then of course our one way kegs. There’s an argument whether they are more environmentally friendly or not, but they don’t have to be cleaned with aggressive chemicals, they don’t have to be driven around empty in the same way. As long as the customer who buys them from us recycles them they’re put back into the system.

Adam checking on a beer during a brew day in winter time.

Is owning a brewery very different from what you thought it would be?

AN. No… I guess the only thing that changes as you grow is that you don’t get to brew as much beer as you want. Instead you have to take care of everything else, and making sure the people who are brewing the beer is doing it as you want.

What is your biggest challenge as a brewer? What is your personal philosophy on the beer that you want to release?

AN. Well i guess the main thing is to be self critical. Every single beer you make you should understand what’s wrong with it, before you start looking at what’s right with it. And every single beer that is made there’s something wrong with… just ask raters.

DD. Is that why our latest beer is called “Raters gonna rate”?

AN. We did “Raters gonna rate”, because… well it’s a challenge right? It will stir up some raters and it will be interesting to see what the ones that think rating is important in the context of beer development thinks in the rating of the beer, compared to people trying it for their own sake and publicizing how much they know about beer. Of course it’s tongue in cheek, but half a finger up, from my point of view. I don’t speak on behalf of the whole brewery (laughs).

You were a home-brewer for three and a half years, and now you’ve been brewing here at Beerbliotek for the same amount of time.

Do you have some tips for better brewing at home?

And that brings us on to our latest new beer, number 162, “Raters gonna rate”. It’s an IPA on 7,0% and we hope you’re going to like it, it will start showing up in the coming weeks, so get it while it’s fresh.

That is it from us for this week. I hope you enjoyed the interview with Adam. There’s more interviews on the way as I move around our brewery to keep you up to date with what’s going on.

A last reminder to tag your photos of our cans with #FreshestCanInTheLand, to stand a chance to win tickets to the All in Beer Festival.

And speaking of festivals, we’ve added three more to our list this year, Brekeriet Bar with Friends, Brewskival and Fermentoren’s Flying Circus, so get your tickets now so you don’t lose out.

Then one more note about the Aluminium discussion we had last week, Wired magazine has a great article on cans, which is worth a read. It’s called The secret life of the Aluminium can, a feat of engineering.

If you’re on holiday then enjoy, but if you’re working, then you can always look forward to the weekends.

Keep well. Till next week.

Cheers.

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