Helping More People Brew Beer

“Allt för hembryggaren – Här köper man allt som rör hembryggning – från humle, malt och jäst till kapsyler och kärl. Vi har maskiner på plats för att mala malt (du får ett presentkort, se nedan) och personalen bakom kassan är duktiga hembryggare som gärna bidrar med tips och råd.” – Monks Café Press Release

Besides my daily job as brewmaster I am also head of development. That can mean all sorts of things. The last half year I have focused on improving the situation for homebrewers.

I have developed and launched a physical homebrewing shop right next to the Central Station in Stockholm (Wallingatan 38) with affiliated online webshop . It opened 25th of August. The reason for this was that I felt Stockholm lacked a serious and proper store every time I wanted to brew at home with family and friends. With the large amount of people brewing beer at home nowadays this was just something that had to be done. Now that it’s been launched I will focus on brewing beer at Monk’s Brewery and develop other projects. Stay tuned.

Premiere Opening at the Physical Homebrewing Store in Stockholm

Homebrewing Starter Kit

Another dear project of mine was to try and realise a proper but basic kit for the first homebrew. This took a lot of trial and error and was much more difficult than one would ever expect after having forgotten how to brew with just about nothing and being used to brewing within a professional environment.

It had to be accessible to anyone no matter how small an apartment you live in or how small a kitchen you have, while still be a serious malt driven experience including all proper steps of brewing. Mashing, sparging, lautering, boiling and so on.

Measuring temperatures and gravity is also essential. It had to result in a proper strong beer, even when the homebrewer ends up with poor efficiency. I discovered a lot of brewkits do not really produce anything near, say, a 5-6% abv beer. I guess that’s why they don’t supply measuring tools. I wrote a detailed homebrewing manual that is included in the kit. Maybe one day I will turn it into a book.

Homebrewing Classes

In order to fully support the homebrewing kit I am doing brewing classes at our brewery where we brew in parallell using the large brewhouse as well as the ten liter homebrewing starter kit. This is all happening simultaneously and will help educate future homebrewers by correlating the same process on both large and small scale. As far as I know this is the first time a parallell brewing class is being offered on a regular basis.

Probably because handling multiple brews at the same time while talking to a bunch of people is a brain melting experience to say the least. But hey, that’s how you develop yourself in the long run.

Link to Monks Homebrewing Store Online
Link to Monks Homebrewing Starter Kit
Link to Homebrewing Classes