All that glitters isn't gold
At Slovenia’s Clef Brewery, cultures, traditions, and families combine
Robyn Gilmour
Saturday 05 April 2025
This article is from
Balkans
issue 116
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“My father and I probably have different stories about how we started,” begins Matevz Gobec, brewer and self-described ‘head handshaker’ at Clef Brewery, in Petrovče, Slovenia. There’s no need for him to glance over at Jure, who’s sitting next to him, for approval; father and son are already in agreement about their differing perspective on events. Matevz says their story is unusual in the sense that it didn’t start with homebrewing; the pair bought and opened a brewery knowing little about how to make beer, even though Matevz adored drinking it. They weren’t going in completely blind, however.
Jure has had, and still has, many overlapping careers. By training, he’s a robotics engineer, and designs automation systems and equipment, a job that has historically seen him work closely with manufacturers in China. While importing materials needed for the production of electronics, Jure ended up in conversation with his Chinese partners, as one does, about what Slovenia exports. Wine was the obvious answer. One thing led to another, and Jure and his brother ended up opening an export business that would become the biggest supplier of Slovenian wine to China.
Of course, as Jure grew the company, he acquired a detailed understanding of wine, how and where various grape varieties grow best, and of course how the beverage is produced. He thought about opening a winery of his own, but his son was more interested in beer, and Petrovče is right in the middle of hop-growing country — an industry that has transformed the region, and catapulted Slovenia onto the global craft beer stage.
“Žalec, which is our nearest town, was nothing before hops,” says Matevz. “The region didn’t grow anything, not grapes, not barley. Two hundred years ago it was poor, but since the arrival of hops, it’s relatively rich. That’s why we call hops green gold.” Slovenia is now one of the largest hop-producing nations in the world by volume, and was outranked only by the US, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, and China in 2023/24, according to a BarthHaas report conducted for that period. For Jure, it felt only right to keep things local, build a business for his son, and open a brewery instead of a winery.
Clef began operating just months (June 2019) before COVID was announced which, in hindsight, Matevz doesn’t see as a bad thing. It gave him time to make mistakes, and start slow, growing production gradually as he became more confident. “I definitely threw my son into the pool and let him start to swim,” says Jure, making Matevz smile. It’s easy to see that Matevz feels a deep, heartfelt connection to the brewery, which is based in the family’s farmhouse, on land once owned by his maternal line but that was seized in communist times. When his grandfather — a fifth-generation hop farmer — lost the land, he decided to stop farming, but hops continue to be grown there, and have been since Matevz was a child.
“It's romantic in some ways,” he says. “We’re not in an industrial zone. It's like farmhouse brewing in some ways because we have a wooden barn which we use as a stock room and is also a tap room in the summer. We have many different Michelin-star chefs coming into this tap room to produce the food. And all of this is surrounded by hops, so it's quite a cool and unique story. Every year, tourists come and see the hops and think ‘wow, wow, wow’, whereas for us, every day we live we watch the hops grow. Now we just respect it more because we have a brewery’”.
Matevz points out that although the brewery is surrounded by farmland, it’s in a great and very easily accessed location. In 45 minutes, you can be in Ljubljana, in two hours you can be in Vienna, and in two and half hours you can be in Venice. Matevz says that tourists love the brewery, because most of the time it’s frequented by 99% locals, which allows them to get a feel for local life.
PHOTO: Mi2, Slovenian rock band
The only thing you won’t find at Clef, strictly speaking, is a regional beer style. Before he got into brewing, Matevz was in a band, and music became the inspiration for the kind of beer he wanted to drink and brew. As such, Clef now collaborates with local musicians and venues to brew beer that represents an album, celebrates a band’s identity or perfectly fits with the atmosphere of a gig or venue.
Of course, the brewery uses local hops as often as possible and Jure’s interests in the use of barrels brings a hyperlocal aspect to operations. Being born not far away, in wine region close to to the Austrian border, coming from a family of winemakers, he of course infuses some of Clef’s beer with his knowledge of wine. The brewery enjoys wild and mixed fermentation from time to time, but more than that, Jure says that a knowledge of wine lends context to how you can use barrels, what kind of biotransformation is happening, how the beer should be stabilized, stored and served, and where glassware comes into play. It’s all relevant, and Jure says that when operations at Clef got going, he was surprised to find how much of his wine knowledge could be applied to beer.
Matevz is grateful both for his father’s knowledge and insight, and to be brewing in a country with such a healthy wine industry. “Wine in Slovenia is 2000 years old, craft beer is 15,” he says. “They (winemakers) know a lot more than us, and are a few steps ahead. So, if they’re doing something and it goes good, we’ll probably be able to do something similar in the future.” Beyond the technicalities of production, Clef has aspirations to follow wine into the fine dining setting, and is already stocked in several Michelin star restaurants in Slovenia. For now though, Clef is sitting tight and learning fast from hard-won experience, and the expertise of others.
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