Amundsen Brewery

I’m yet to encounter a soul who doesn’t love and respect Norway’s Amundsen Brygerri as masters of craft, generous collaborators, and impressive exporters. At a point in time, Amundsen was exporting 84% of its output to 20 markets around the world, and producing 70 new beers a year, all with just eight team members managing the 3500m² brewery. Founder Geoffrey Jansen Van Veuren will always be first in line to credit this success to the brewery’s tiny, yet incredibly efficient team. If that doesn’t make Amundsen a worldwide legend, I don’t know what does. 

Geoffrey says that at Amundsen, staff satisfaction is a top priority, and when he finds someone “who’s good, who’s passionate, they like what we do, then I do everything in my power to keep them”. He’s invested in technology that negates the physical strain of manual brewing, cross-trained all brewery staff across all areas of production — so everyone can do everything — and organised the team’s workflow so that it is stable and consistent as often as possible. 

Not only does this structure allow the team to consistently knock out some of the world’s best loved IPAs and stouts, it’s inspired countless collaborators to brew bigger, better, smarter, and crucially with the satisfaction of the brew team in mind. When we interviewed Geoff and five-time collaborator Lee Grabham, co-founder of Brew York, earlier this year, Lee said that “Since our trip to brew with Amundsen in Norway, we have begun to cross-skill the whole team... I think you get the best results out of people when they're experiencing variety, because they know a lot more about the end-to-end process.”

In a world where brewing is relentlessly challenging, inspiring others to be considerate and better connected to their peers feels like an antidote to despair that will carry us into brighter days.