Life is the bubbles
Kampanjola Eko Bira is on a mission to wean Croatia off over-carbonated, ice-cold lager
Robyn Gilmour
Saturday 05 April 2025
This article is from
Balkans
issue 116
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Istria is Croatia’s heart-shaped peninsula, on the dazzling shores of the Adriatic. Sun-bleached limestone coastline and gorgeous pebble beaches aside, the interior of the region has a wealth of historic treats to discover. Like Kampanjola Eko Bira, a brewery with four owners in the small village of Svetvinčenat, just a short drive north of the ancient city of Pula. It is implausibly packed with everything you’d want from an historic Croatian village: a Benedictine monastery and fortress walls, Byzantine frescoes, a thriving café culture, and pretty town squares framed by picturesque buildings, their plastered walls crumbling with dignity under the Mediterranean sun. Known as the pearl of Istria, Svetvinčenat should be on your beer bucket list, because as well as scenery that’ll knock your socks off, Kampanjola Eko Bira is doing something rather special here.
Four friends with agricultural backgrounds joined forces after the pandemic to brew beer that felt more connected to the earth than the other lagers available to them were. As organic farmers, the team wanted to build something that mingled with their joint passion for ecological farming with brewing great beer.
“We’re the only ecological brewery in Croatia,” says Dino Grgorović, one of the four owners of Kampanjola Eko Bira. “Because we want everything to be ours from start to finish, we grow our own barley too. We’re organic farmers, so that matters a lot to us.”
Growing their own barley in Istria is unusual. It’s a land of olive groves and vineyards, where the traditional drink is wine, and has been for thousands of years. Beer isn’t a Croatian thing — lager is about the size of the general population’s understanding of what it can be. Dino and the rest of his team got sick of macro breweries and their lagers, and began making something of their own, taking inspiration from the land. Kampanjola Eko Bira’s core beer, its Blond Ale, is as close to lager as we’ll find from them. Accessibly bitter and refreshing, it’s crisp enough to slake a thirst, but has a distinct malty flavour that Dino says is key to all of its beers.
“The malt we use is very important to us,” he explains. “My friend is a pizzola and he is obsessed with spelt, maybe loves it more than his wife… he got us to make a beer from it and I was impressed by the flavour it provided.”
Spelt is an ancient grain, with a unique nutty flavour. “It makes a beer a little bit like a wheat beer,” says Dino. Since spelt isn’t grown in Croatia, they buy theirs from Weyermann in Germany, a country with a brewing history that really does pride the flavours and aromas of malt. Kampanjola Eko Bira also has their malt roasted in Germany, at Schwarzbräu, the smallest maltsters in the country. “We only have a small amount, so it took us a while to find a malthouse small enough to deal with,” he says. “I was really interested in the history of its use — it was probably the grain they used to make the first beer. That’s what made me want to use it.”
His love for malt influences every beer that Kampanjola Eko Bira makes.
“We don’t make US styles,” he says, insisting that hop-forward beers aren’t what they got into the brewing business for. “Porter is my favourite beer to brew and drink. We make an ESB (English Special Bitter) that’s popular with locals, but we call it Organic Ale. We have to — otherwise everyone would be like ‘what the f*** is a Bitter?’” Served on keg, it’s reminiscent of the Spanish craft beer scene, where traditional English styles are made with local ingredients and served cold and carbonated. Just like the Spanish beer scene, Dino is having to sit within two spaces — a growing interest in craft beer, and a totally ambivalent population who would rather have a Fanta and a rakija.
In Croatia, beer isn’t as popular as elsewhere in Europe. An increasingly well-regarded wine-growing region, where it’s thought Zinfandel grapes originally came from, you’re far more likely to see a local with a glass of red wine topped up with sparkling water (a drink called bevanda) than a pint. As tourism built up in the country over the past 15 years, however, it’s more common than it used to be to see green bottles of Ožujsko or Pan Pivo lager on restaurant patio tables and beside beach towels. The drinking habits of visiting English, French and German tourists are starting to infiltrate.
“The beer people in Croatia are used to is over-carbonated, very fizzy lager served very cold, we don’t have a tradition or habit to drink beer here,” says Dino. “We serve our beer at a lower carbonation, which takes a little getting used to. We couldn’t serve cask, people wouldn’t know what it was!”
Guinness seems to be the only exception. “People here drink Guinness because of the name, but they don’t like how it tastes. It’s flat to them,” Dino explains. “We’re explaining to them that our beer is not flat, it is carbonated correctly.”
To gain popularity, the Kampanjola Eko Bira crew could brew their own take on a Croatian lager, but that’s not their style. After all, they’ve got home-grown malt to highlight, and organic ethics to uphold.
“I’ve looked into German lagers that are malty and bitter, that rely on the malt — like Helles or Marzen. We don’t make lager right now, but perhaps in the future if we find the right way to do it, we might.”
They only brew 100,000 litres of beer per year, and most of it is sold either in their own little bar in Svetvinčenat or in eco shops and independent bars around Croatia. “We don’t want to sell in supermarkets,” says Dino. “Everything we do, from growing the barley to selling our beer is done with ecological thoughts in mind. It’s full circle, and a supermarket doesn’t fit into that ethos.”
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