Going it alone, with friends

Managing the sales, marketing and social media for three brands within one team proved increasingly demanding over the years, and eventually proved untenable. So Hannes, Anders and Chad called it; the brands had become so distinct, and had grown so fully into the concepts behind them, that perhaps the molecule was ready to break apart, and allow its constituent elements to find new configurations. 

I speak to Chad just a week after the dissolution of Molecule. Nerdbrewing has just left Molecule as an independent brewery, while Chad Beer has married into Elmeleven, bringing mastery of IPA into a world of sour beer. Both remaining breweries will now brew all styles, broadening the range offered alongside their specialism. Chad believes the experience has given him a unique perspective of craft beer. 

“I feel like in the last few years, the market has become quite niched, or hyped to the level where you know a brewery for a style, where it used to be that you’d know of a brewery that was really skilled as a brewery,” says Chad. “I think the positive thing about that, especially in export markets, is that it’s a real strength to say, ‘Hey, this is our speciality. This is what we do’. There are lots of breweries that make really good IPAs and pilsners, but they don’t export the pilsners because they're not known for that. They're only known for their IPA.” 

For context, export markets are extremely important sales channels for craft breweries in Sweden, where it’s exceptionally challenging to operate as a beer producer. Tight restrictions around the sale of alcohol prohibit breweries from selling directly to customers. This means Swedish producers can’t operate an online shop, can’t sell beer over 3.5% through supermarkets, and are required to sell all off-trade products through government-run off licences, the Systembolaget and Local Assortment. Export has therefore been a lifeline for Swedish breweries. 

By releasing unexpected, experimental, adjunct-heavy beers into the world, Elmeleven has become a globally adored sour beer producer.

“What we've seen across a lot of different markets over the last number of years, is that a lot of people have gone from barely touching sour beer to, in some cases, filling up an order with only sour beers. It also seems like the kind of people drinking sour beer has changed a bit as well. It's not that long ago that it felt like a lot of beer enthusiasts and beer nerds were maybe mainly men in their 40s and 50s, but now it's moving to a younger crowd, and a more mixed gender crowd. That’s especially the case with sours, but also to a degree with hazy IPAs. Sours just don’t seem to have the same domination, gender wise.”

Elmeleven’s presence on a global stage has also helped it to find friends and peers. Given the effervescent, amorphous, playful brand it is, and the frankly batshit beers it produces, it’s no surprise that Elmeleven and Edinburgh’s own Vault City Brew Co gravitated towards each other. Chad says that while Vault City is probably the brewery Elmeleven has collaborated with the most over the last three years, ‘collaboration’ between the two means a lot more than just designing recipes and brewing beers together. 

“We will chat with them all the time,” says Chad. “Just whenever something comes up about processes or questions we have about ‘hey, how do you guys do this in that beer, because we want to be able to do it as well’. It's not just a one off, ‘hey, we're in the building. We'll talk for a few hours’. It's more of a friendship and a collegial sort of spirit. They have a mentality that drives you to develop, which we share. So, for example, we might develop a beer that we’re really happy with, but we’re rarely content to just say ‘alright, everything seems to work. Let's just leave it’. Our instinct is to say ‘let's tweak some stuff and see if we can make it even better’. That need to keep developing and keep improving is definitely fed by good collaborations. That's where you quite often get your next inspiration or your next idea. Or you can see what they're doing and think, ‘well, we want to be that good’.”

It goes without saying that the Vault City team is equally enamoured with Elmeleven. 

“We’re fans of Elmeleven beer, and that’s always the best reason to want a collaboration,” begins Vault City marketing manager, Richard Wardrop. “Their mix of imperial stouts and sours really resonates with what we do at Vault City and we’re so pleased to have so many different collaborations together at home and away. Last year they released Millionaire Space Race which was a fruited sour with caramel and chocolate, and we absolutely loved it. We knew we wanted to work on something equally as bonkers so we came up with a festive twist with gingerbread on our DDF [Double Deep Fried] series.”

This October, you can feel the love between these two breweries for yourself at Vault City’s Edinburgh-based festival, The Big Swally. Until then, keep an eye out for new releases from these two breweries, which have many more strings to their bow than just sour beers.