Small but mighty
Meet the sweetheart of the Faroe Islands
Robyn Gilmour
Photos:
OY Brewing
Saturday 07 February 2026
This article is from
Faroe Beer Adventure
issue 127
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For a small island, with an even smaller population, OY Brewery is a big operation. No expense has been spared on the wealth of stainless steel tanks, adjacent to which is a tasteful, modern, open-plan taproom perfect for every kind of gathering. It doesn’t surprise me to learn that the brewery often hosts DJs and concerts here; the best place to drink fresh beer for hundreds of miles around.
I assumed, given its location, that getting brewing materials to the Faroe Islands would be a challenge. “Not really,” says OY brewer Alessandro Ersettigh, setting me straight. “Ferries come from Denmark twice a week, and from Rotterdam once a week, so getting materials is pretty easy, though they do cost a little more.” Originally from Italy, Alessandro was working at a brewery near Oslo when Oy’s founder Petur Petersen reached out with a job offer, in 2021. At that time, Petur was part of a group of Faroese entrepreneurs interested in growing the craft beer market on the Islands by setting up a brewery of their own; all they needed was a brewer. “They basically said ‘if you want the job, it’s yours’, so I spoke to my boss and seven weeks later, I was in the Faroe Islands,” says Alessandro.
He simply laughs when I acknowledge that such a move must have been quite the culture shock. “I've always lived in big cities, or medium sized cities, so coming to the Faroe Islands was a little bit of a personal challenge to myself,” says Alessandro. “You know, let's experience how it is to live in the capital of a country with only 12,000 people.” Though the Faroe Islands has a small population, it experiences an incredible influx of tourists during the summer months every year, and so OY doesn’t struggle to shift volume. “We get a lot of tourists during the summer, from late spring to early autumn. I mean a lot of tourists. All bars and hotels are packed with visitors, who drink a lot. And there are many festivals and concerts during the summer, so it’s a busy time for us.”
In fact, the brewery is so focused on the domestic market that Alessandro reckons it only exports 1% of what it produces; just occasionally sending a couple of cases to neighbouring Greenland and Iceland, and Latvia and Poland more broadly. Today OY has a capacity of 10,000hl a year, but is still growing into that volume, leaving plenty of room for it to expand output. OY may well look to engage with the international craft beer market more in the future, but before that Alessandro hopes to see more experimentation at the brewery, and perhaps even the addition of a barrel program.
When OY released its first beer, in May 2022, the focus was on producing a mixture of accessible craft styles, and modern interpretations of traditional European beers. “Here on the island, a lot of people drank mainstream beer until very recently,” says Alessandro. “So when we started, many people didn’t even understand the concept of what a craft beer is, or at least they didn't differentiate between craft and not-craft. So the concept was to make mainstream styles like lagers and ales, while also inviting something modern into the Faroese market. By that I mean hazy IPA, strong styles — what everyone does in the craft movement. It has been really well accepted, actually so well accepted that actually the second beer we released — a session New England IPA — is now our second best seller, and 25% of our production.”
While many Faroese might be better acquainted with industrial lager than craft, an equal proportion are familiar with the category. “Many of our drinkers are young people with an open mind. Also, a lot of Faroese people — from teenagers to kind of middle age — have been living in Denmark, in Copenhagen, and have been studying or working there for five to ten years of their life. They’ve lived in big cities, they’ve seen it all, and then they come back here to the islands because they’re looking for what they missed in the big city, and on mainland Europe.”
Between younger people keen to try new things, and the generation of which Alessandro speaks, a significant portion of the Faroese market didn’t require a hard sell, when it came to craft beer. Still, OY is keen not to alienate any drinkers, every kind of which is welcome at its Tórshavn-based taproom. The result has been an outpouring of support from Faroese, who have welcomed the opportunity to rally around a local producer.
In fact, aside from its four founders, 20% of the brewery is owned by almost 100 shareholders, the majority of whom are local. “There's a lot of people here on the islands believing in this project,” says Alessandro. “The philosophy of OY is to try to open up the market little by little, and while it’s not easy, I think we’re getting there.”
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