A Lebensgefühl of its own

Chris’s journey to beer and brewing began some years earlier. In Austria, high school students can specialise their education from age 16, and begin studying towards practical qualifications if they so choose. A lot of students in Tirol choose to study tourism and gastronomy, as did Chris, which eventually landed him a job in a country club in the US for a year. In Lisa’s telling, he’d always drink at the same bar after work, religiously ordering whatever German or Austrian beer was available.

“Then one day, the bartender asked him why he always ordered the imported beers, to which Chris replied ‘because you don’t have any good ones, it’s all just yellow water’. The bartender said ‘wait one moment, I have something for you’, and that was Chris’s first IPA. He fell in love from the first sip. But when he came back to Europe after this year in the US, he wondered ‘where do I get that stuff here?’, and found it was really hard to find good local or even regional craft. In 2013, most IPAs you found in Austria were really old and oxidised, so he decided to brew his own.”

Meanwhile, Lisa was forging her own path in the beer world. Her journey began in Augsburg, Bavaria, where she was working as a journalist for the local newspaper. She enjoyed drinking beer, but it was her interest in reporting that got her involved in a documentary about beer in Bamberg. “I will never, ever forget the day that I became interested in beer,” she says. 

Though 20 years ago now, Lisa talks about her first sip of rauchbier like it was yesterday. Inspired, she threw herself into this documentary, which the small team worked on outside of their day jobs for two-and-a-half years, resulting in a 90-minute movie which made it to cinemas and even had a US tour. When the dust settled in wake of the documentary, Lisa wasn’t ready to part ways to Bamburg, and so she moved there, getting a job with the marketing team at Weyermann Speciality Malts. 

“I got my sommelier there and just had a really good time,” says Lisa. “I met so many brewers from all over the world and it made me think that, you know, beer cultures can be so different but in the end we're sitting together and having this one glass that has everything inside. That’s what we’re all talking about and working towards, and everything is included in that.” After a year at Weyermann’s, Lisa quit to start her own company doing media and PR for breweries. 

It was this work that took her to a beer festival in the north of Italy. At the booth next to one of her customers, a young Austrian brewer was stationed. He asked her if she wanted “to try a good beer”. Lisa rolled her eyes and told him “I mean, I’m living in Bamberg so I’m familiar with what good beer is, but sure.” She concedes that it was a good beer; another instance of love at the first sip. IPA was new to her too. She moved to Tirol a year later to be closer to Chris. 

“So you see, Bierol has had its roots in Tirolean culture from the first step. Even though we are not like these breweries with 100 years of tradition, we have deep roots, we just work in a modern way. When Chris and his two friends started the brewery, they started very progressive, and absolutely anti-mainstream, so the customers of Bierol were not the people who lived here in Tirol, in this really small village. We exported to Italy, to the Netherlands, to France, but that was because ‘craft’ was a new thing. We don’t talk about craft so much anymore, but think of ourselves as a modern brewery.”

COVID played a big part in this shift in perspective. Like everyone, everywhere, the Bierol team had time to reflect, to think about what was working and what wasn’t. “You know, we were here, surrounded by all these fields, and by nature, and it occurred to us; why aren’t we working with this?” says Lisa. It was like a flick had switched; Bierol’s focus was no longer representing modern American craft in Tirol, but producing something intrinsically linked with their surroundings, something of and for Tirol, using their experience in modern breweries. 

She and Chris connected with a local agronomist who helped them plant cereals for malting, and also cultivated a small but beautiful orchard. The fields don’t yet yield enough grain for Bierol to be self-sufficient, but year-on-year, the practice of farming is guiding the brewery towards a future where most of the ingredients used are grown in Tirol, if not on their own farm. 

Lisa has recently really gone back to school, and is studying circular economies, while still steering the ship alongside Chris at Bierol. “Being circular is very important for us, because we have these wonderful mountains and woods around us. We even have our own spring that's just 100 metres away. So every day now, that’s what we’re working on; finding new partners, exploring new ways to collaborate.”

One of Bierol’s first forays into circular production was a collaboration with a local cheese maker. Lisa says her and Chris first took notes of this particular business because the two brothers running it specialised in making camembert — cheese is famous in Tirol, but camembert? Not so much. The four of them hit it off and naturally began mulling on ways to collaborate. 

“At the beginning we thought about maybe doing a beer cheese, but no, a lot of people were doing this already,” Lisa begins. “Then Chris found this old story from the war times, when people brewed beer with whey because grain was prioritised for the bread and for food and things like that. So we started thinking, we have access to so much of this, and so much is thrown away, why not replace a percentage of our brewing water with whey when mashing in, to make a kind of upcycling beer?”

Lisa says their first few attempts were dreadful, but after pivoting their approach, and brewing more in the style of Belgian wit, with additions of orange and coriander, the beer started to taste really, really good. “About three months later, we won a regional food and innovation award for this upcycling beer,” says Lisa, citing the project as the kind of success that Bierol strives to see more of. 

Though coming from a confluence of cultures, with a myriad of influences informing its journey to date, talking to Lisa makes me think that Bierol's story is only just beginning.