Of beer and Belgrade
Though still finding firm footing in the Serbian craft beer market, Mehanika is making a splash, as the new kids on the block
Robyn Gilmour
Saturday 05 April 2025
This article is from
Balkans
issue 116
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Mehanika co-founders Dejan Marinkovic and Nikola Ciric are sitting close together, connected by the wire running between two shared earbuds, pints in hand. ABBA plays loudly in the background. They’re calling from Mehanika’s pub in Belgrade. It’s obviously busy, and the pair seem well loved — though I can only see the wall they’re sitting against, it’s evident that they’re constantly catching the eye of people passing behind the camera. Dejan and Nikola take turns giving them the ‘I’m on the phone, I’ll talk to you in a minute!’ wink.
‘Rudimentary’ doesn’t do justice to the beginnings of Mehanika. Dejan says that when he first started homebrewing, in 2019, he would use a rolling pin to crack grain to grist, and brewed in a stovetop pot. “We figured out that you need to have perfect hygiene. That was a big moment for me as a homebrewer,” Dejan laughs. Nikola adds that Dejan started out by just brewing beer for special occasions, when their group of friends would get together; every time, the beer would be a little bit better than the last.
From there, operations graduated to a contract brewery, and more recently have migrated to a fixed location in Belgrade that Mehanika is renting, but one day hopes to own. For now, the team is brewing, and keeping their taproom and new Belgrade-based pub well stocked.
“Craft has been around in Serbia for the last 10 years, so it is growing up, but in very small steps,” says Nikola. “I remember, a decade ago, trying my first IPA in a pub in Belgrade and I fell in love with it immediately, because it was a totally different experience to the lager that was popular then. So we’ve known about craft since then, but for a long time there weren’t too many places here to try it.
“This is a craft-only bar, and the only place of its kind for miles. There are not too many craft bars where we are, so when we first opened, it was mainly locals who visited, but we’ve since succeeded to attract people from across the river and on the other edge of the town. They come to us because we can always give them something new, some beers, not mostly ours, but we try to always have something different.”
Dejan says that a major aim of Mehanika is always to make beer that’s memorable. There’s a lot the young brewery is still working out — they have no idea what they’ll brew next month, a way of working that’s both charming and alarming — but their aspirations are guided by the ambition to be different, and constantly offer drinkers something new. For Mehanika, that looks like using Yakima hops as often as possible, an assertion that surprises me given that nearer by Balkan countries are some of the biggest hop producers in the world.
“We are trying to make the best beer we can, we’re not trying to make something that’s local,” says Dejan. “That means sourcing the best ingredients that are out there. I’m sure you could make great beer using more local ingredients, but that’s not the kind of beer we’re making. We want to make beer that as soon as you finish, you say ‘give me another one’. That’s our goal, to make beer that’s remembered.”
We want to make beer that as soon as you finish, you say ‘give me another one’. That’s our goal, to make beer that’s remembered
While taking operations from hobby to business is challenging, Dejan and Nikola are holding tight to signs that Mehanika is moving in the right direction. “It started as a hobby, and it’s still a hobby, but it has also developed into a huge responsibility,” says Dejan, to which Nikola adds that “it’s still fun, but we’re now aware we need to invest a huge amount of money in achieving our goal”. They don’t take that responsibility lightly, nor do they take for granted the support they’ve been shown.
They say that when they first started out, they connected with the owner of Gunners Pub, a famous craft beer pub in Belgrade, who encouraged them to keep brewing, and growing the business. “He said, ‘ok, we’ve tried your beers. Brew whatever you want and it will have a place in our pub’,” Nikola recalls.
“That was a great thing for us, because we knew we’d always have somewhere to sell our beer, and have been pouring there ever since. More recently they said to us ‘at first, this was a friendship, but now we wouldn’t sell your beer if it wasn’t good’, which was a great sign to us that we’re going in the right direction.”
Before we hang up, the guys give me a virtual tour of the pub, pointing the camera over the partition behind them so I can see the bar; it’s heaving with happy drinkers, the bartender busily pulling pints from a line of shiny taps. Mehanika might not have finetuned everything about its operations, but there’s plenty to suggest that the brewery is heading in the right direction.
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