Beer: The Gypsy Brewer

What do you call a brewer without a brewery? It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but no-one is laughing at Mikkel Borg Bjergsø. In the space of less than six years, this wildly experimental 35-year-old Dane has become one of the world’s most respected beer-makers despite his lack of a bricks-and-mortar brewery. So what would you call him? He calls himself the Gypsy Brewer, and his homeless brewery is Mikkeller.

Fortunately his products are rather easier to pin down than his brewing habits. Visitors to the Great British Beer Festival this coming week will get a chance to try 15 of his beers on the foreign beer stand; not quite the most any brewer will have at the festival, but close. The key word is variety: Mikkeller’s offerings will range from a pilsner hopped like an IPA to a barrel-aged barley wine that tips the scales at almost 20 % abv.

Given the range and vision of his beers, it’s a surprise to learn that Bjergsø (above) only started brewing back in 2003, in the kitchen of his Copenhagen flat, with then partner Kristian Klarup Keller. “When people tasted our beers they told us that they really liked it,” he says. “In late 2005 we decided that it would be fun to get a bigger reaction.”

They approached another Danish brewery to see if they could rent their premises. “It was easier than I thought,” Bjergsø says. “I just called them up and I said ‘We are two brewers who want to make our own beer. Can we rent your equipment?’ They pretty much just agreed to that. Of course when we went there and did the first batch, they thought we were crazy because we used a lot of hops. I also think they thought it was exciting to see someone with a different approach to what they were doing.”

That first batch, an IPA called Stateside, was just 2000 bottles: “We thought, ‘if we can sell this, its fine, if we can’t, it’s not a big loss.’ They sold out pretty quick. It went from there.”

The reason the beers were so successful, Bjergsø says, is that they were unlike anything you could buy in Denmark back in 2006. The nation has undergone a dramatic microbrewery revolution since the end of the 1990s (there are now around 140 breweries in a country of 5.5m people) but the flavour of Mikkeller’s first brew was still new.  “At the time we had American-style IPAs in Denmark but none of them were the same as the ones you could get in the US,” he says.

With Mikkeller’s success since, however, this former part-time teacher could easily have built his own brewery. That he hasn’t explains much about his philosophy. “We were afraid [if we bought a brewery that] we would have to compromise on a lot of stuff, on taste, because we would be under pressure to sell a lot of beer,” he says. “You have to have big loans – we thought, we’ll just use equipment that is ready.”

Others share his approach: Sheffield’s Steel City Brewing, for example, is another brewery without a permanent home. Mikkeller, though, is perhaps the most well-travelled of Gypsy Brewers: he’s made beer in Norway, Belgium, the United States, the Netherlands and the UK.  His trips to Britain have included brewing at BrewDog in Fraserburgh, where co-founder James Watt is a long-term admirer. “The thing I love about him is the stylistic diversity of the beers he makes,” Watt says.

“You can get everything from a light but heavily hopped lager up to a huge imperial stout aged in Calvados casks. It’s not just the variety, either – it’s the quality as well. His beers are really well executed. He’s pushing the boundaries, he’s innovative, he’s exciting and different. He showcases so much of what is good about beer.”

New ideas motivate Bjergsø. “The fun part about brewing is creating new stuff,” he says. “The second time I create a beer I know what it is so it’s not exciting to taste it, but I always have so many ideas of things that I want to try out in the brewery.  I always have at least 20 recipes sitting there just waiting to be brewed. I love the excitement of making a recipe and then it takes half a year, and then you have the result, and you can see if you’ve got what you want.”

Bjergsø now has two breweries that make beer for him on a regular basis, in Norway and Belgium, which allows him to spend more time at home in Denmark. He has mixed feelings about beer in his native land. “I think [the beer scene in Denmark] is getting better and better,” he says, “but I do think that most of them [breweries] are not really doing a very good job. 95 per cent of the people in Denmark will not drink a very hoppy IPA. So these breweries have to compromise to sell enough beer. In my opinion, it’s a pity. We could have a lot more interesting stuff going on [but] it’s catching on and people get inspired and it’s getting better and better.”

Denmark’s increasingly open-minded brewing scene reflects a growing desire in the country for better food and drink. Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant voted the best in the world for the past two years, has its house beer brewed by Mikkeller. “The food scene in Denmark is going crazy right now,” says Bjergsø. “We work closely together with a lot of these restaurants.”

A similar spirit appears to be sweeping through the world of British brewing. Bjergsø says he sees increasing evidence of the innovative approach pioneered by American microbreweries in the UK. He says London’s The Kernel is perhaps the most interesting of Britain’s new generation. “There’s a lot of stuff going on in the UK right now,” he says. “Going a year back, we exported to one shop in the UK, now I think we export to ten different places, and we export quite a lot of beer. It seems like what they had in the US in the eighties, what we had in Scandinavia in the late nineties is happening right now in the UK.”

The rise of specialist beer venues, like the Craft Beer Co in London (for whom Mikkeller brew the house lager) attests to that. Mikkeller’s Clerkenwell Lager is quite unlike any you might have tried before – fruity does not cover it – but is not a surprise from a brewer who clearly has no desire to rest on his laurels. At the moment, for example, he is thrilled by Lambic beers (“We did quite a lot of those lately, a whole series, with different fruits and I’m really happy about those,” he says. “It’s really exciting to try different things”) and the possibility of opening beer bars around the world: the first is already operating in Copenhagen.

The future seems exciting, but Bjergsø is laidback. “If people like the beers today that’s great, if they don’t tomorrow, there’s nothing I can do about it,” he says. “We just do what we can to keep up and hope that it will grow.”

Follow @Will_Hawkes on Twitter

Recent Posts on Notebook - A selection of Independent views -

• Growing out of anorexia
• Top of the posts: Breastfeeding, vegetarians and photography
• The age old classic of a drunken rant - immortalised on the internet
• Beer: the mistake that beat the world
• Are you Mom Enough? Putting parenting choices under the microscope