Brewski

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“I have met people over the years who behave like the beer is produced by their bodies. It’s not that big a deal. We’re just controlling the yeasts and with pressure and temperature, and then we hope for the best. If we can have a good communication with the yeast, then it will give us a good beer. I think it's the same with all living organisms. If we have good communication, it’s all going to be fine, but if you're trying to be someone you're not because you make great things, in the end, it will bite you in the tail.” 

It’s not everyday that you meet a character like Marcus Hjalmarsson. Bearded, booming, and hilarious yet humble, it’s easy to see how Brewski’s founder has made friends all over the world. Marcus claims to owe his success to luck, timing, and just trying to be a good, decent person in his interactions with all people, but that doesn’t say anything of his skill or philosophy, and how these have influenced beer culture in Sweden. 

Brewski was born in 2014, just a year after Marcus knocked on the door of a local microbrewery, having never brewed anything before, and asked if he could work at the brewery as a volunteer during the day, in exchange for use of the facilities at night. “At that time, Swedish beer had quite a bad reputation, even though we had a couple of good breweries,” says Marcus. “I thought that our beers were too good to be ignored by the European beer scene. So, I had the idea to brew great beers for an international audience, and decided to open a brewery.” 

For context, Sweden’s craft beer scene in 2014 was limited, which isn’t to say its centuries old tradition of homebrewing, or regional brewing wasn’t alive and well, just that brewing modern styles with American ingredients hadn’t been popularised. In hindsight, Marcus says two things were particularly characteristic of the pre-craft, or early craft days in Sweden; he would often be the only Nordic brewer at international festivals, particularly in the US, and it was almost impossible to find fresh, modern hops, as hop suppliers didn’t see much point in exporting to Sweden. 

Anyway, Marcus volunteered at his local brewery for eight months, during which time it became obvious he was a natural born brewer. Even his earliest batches caught people’s attention, and with some encouragement from the professionals he rubbed shoulders with, Marcus took his beer to Denmark — a beer capital of Europe — and began selling it in bars, restaurants and bottle shops. He garnered enough interest and support that by the end of the year, Marcus had opened a brewery back home in Helsingborg and brewed his first commercial beer. 

PHOTO: Marcus, the founder

His success would be sickening if Marcus wasn’t so gracious, and appreciative of all the help he received along the way. “I was like a kid in a candy shop at the beginning,” says Marcus. “I was so overwhelmed by the exposure we got, and just so happy that every brewer I met, I was like, ‘I love you. How do you like my beer so much? Because I'm new, I don't know what I'm doing’. I embraced everybody like brothers, and then stayed in contact with everybody across the world. When we started hosting festivals I just called them and asked ‘do you want to come over to my place, to my country, for a festival?’ and they all said yes.”

Again, this doesn’t say anything of all the work Marcus put into laying the table for an internationally renowned beer festival. He knew all too well, from attending festivals himself over the years, that participation is expensive. Brewers have to pay for flights and accommodation, then they’re either paying a pitch fee or selling the beer at a hefty discount. No one’s making any money, so Marcus figured that the least he could do to make attendance at Brewski’s festivals worthwhile, was ensure it promised business opportunities as well as the chance to connect with customers and other breweries. 

“The most important thing is to have a good relationship with people, but it’s helpful to be able to say ‘I will have 30 importers at the festival and you don’t have a contract with any one of those,’” says Marcus. “They might make four or five new connections. Then suddenly, some breweries that were hard to get involved see participation as a chance to increase their sales outside their country or outside their brewery. So it's through a number of different parameters that you have a good festival.”

At the time of our conversation, Marcus and sales manager Stefan Åbrodd have just wrapped up what they say will be Brewski’s final “Brewskival”, a festival it has run for several years now, and which attracted over 100 breweries in 2024. “I decided last year that I was going to cancel the festival, but since it was our 10 year anniversary we said we’d do one more but that would be the end,” says Marcus. “Before COVID we could spend €200,000 on this festival and it was fine, but since COVID we never know if we’re going to be ok. If one festival was a disaster, we would go bankrupt. It was stressing us out. To arrange a festival it has to be in combination with happiness, not worrying your ass off.” 

Marcus didn’t expect that when he announced 2024 would be the last year for Brewskival, the city of Helsingborg would get in touch to explore whether they could help support its continuation. Over the years, the four day festival is estimated to have filled between 10,000-15,000 hotel rooms across the city, with that custom filtering through to local bars and restaurants. Nothing is set in stone just yet, but Marcus says that it was only when the city made contact, did he realise what a loss the end of Brewskival would be for Helsingborg. 


One has to wonder whether the city’s acknowledgement of the positive impact a brewery can have on its community, is indicative of a slowly changing attitude to beer in Sweden. The looming presence of the state owned off-licence, the systembolaget, is such that “if one guy who lives next door to the brewery, wants my beer, the beer has to take a quite big journey to come back to the consumer” says Marcus, referring to the fact that beer has to be shipped to the systembolaget, then redistributed throughout the country via its network in order to reach consumers. 

“They're changing this slowly,” he continues. “We can't say for sure, but there is a suggestion on the table in government to actually allow breweries to sell beer directly to a customer for personal consumption. So potentially, you could come to our brewery, we can sell you, like, six bottles of beer. There will probably be a lot of regulations around it, and the brewery might have to have some sort of an educational moment with the customer, which is just stupid, but it's at least a step forward, and it's on the table. It’s going to be a completely different market for us if this happens. Before we were an export brewery, nowadays we’re looking more at becoming a local brewery. We love to export our beers, we will never stop doing this because it's a great honour to be a part of the international beer scene, but it would be amazing to be able to sell to the locals.”

There’s a lot that catering to a local audience is likely to change about Brewski, but Marcus says that fruit beers will always be a part of what the brewery does. Remember when he mentioned that in 2014, fresh hops were quite hard to come by? Real fruit is what Marcus used to create the tropical flavours and aromas characteristics of fresh, American hops, when such ingredients were unavailable to him. “We were more or less the first European breweries that could actually make a good fermented beer with the actual fruits,” says Marcus, adding that it was an act of desperation that landed Brewski with a reputation for brewing amazing fruited sours and fruited IPAs. 

Coincidence? I think not. What I do think is that the Brewski team are talented beyond what they’re willing to admit, and that innovation and camaraderie — not timing or luck — launched the brewery onto the international stage, and into a special place in people’s hearts.

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