Brewski

His success would be sickening if Marcus wasn’t so gracious, and appreciative of all the help he received along the way. “I was like a kid in a candy shop at the beginning,” says Marcus. “I was so overwhelmed by the exposure we got, and just so happy that every brewer I met, I was like, ‘I love you. How do you like my beer so much? Because I'm new, I don't know what I'm doing’. I embraced everybody like brothers, and then stayed in contact with everybody across the world. When we started hosting festivals I just called them and asked ‘do you want to come over to my place, to my country, for a festival?’ and they all said yes.”

Again, this doesn’t say anything of all the work Marcus put into laying the table for an internationally renowned beer festival. He knew all too well, from attending festivals himself over the years, that participation is expensive. Brewers have to pay for flights and accommodation, then they’re either paying a pitch fee or selling the beer at a hefty discount. No one’s making any money, so Marcus figured that the least he could do to make attendance at Brewski’s festivals worthwhile, was ensure it promised business opportunities as well as the chance to connect with customers and other breweries. 

“The most important thing is to have a good relationship with people, but it’s helpful to be able to say ‘I will have 30 importers at the festival and you don’t have a contract with any one of those,’” says Marcus. “They might make four or five new connections. Then suddenly, some breweries that were hard to get involved see participation as a chance to increase their sales outside their country or outside their brewery. So it's through a number of different parameters that you have a good festival.”

At the time of our conversation, Marcus and sales manager Stefan Åbrodd have just wrapped up what they say will be Brewski’s final “Brewskival”, a festival it has run for several years now, and which attracted over 100 breweries in 2024. “I decided last year that I was going to cancel the festival, but since it was our 10 year anniversary we said we’d do one more but that would be the end,” says Marcus. “Before COVID we could spend €200,000 on this festival and it was fine, but since COVID we never know if we’re going to be ok. If one festival was a disaster, we would go bankrupt. It was stressing us out. To arrange a festival it has to be in combination with happiness, not worrying your ass off.” 

Marcus didn’t expect that when he announced 2024 would be the last year for Brewskival, the city of Helsingborg would get in touch to explore whether they could help support its continuation. Over the years, the four day festival is estimated to have filled between 10,000-15,000 hotel rooms across the city, with that custom filtering through to local bars and restaurants. Nothing is set in stone just yet, but Marcus says that it was only when the city made contact, did he realise what a loss the end of Brewskival would be for Helsingborg. 

One has to wonder whether the city’s acknowledgement of the positive impact a brewery can have on its community, is indicative of a slowly changing attitude to beer in Sweden. The looming presence of the state owned off-licence, the systembolaget, is such that “if one guy who lives next door to the brewery, wants my beer, the beer has to take a quite big journey to come back to the consumer” says Marcus, referring to the fact that beer has to be shipped to the systembolaget, then redistributed throughout the country via its network in order to reach consumers. 

“They're changing this slowly,” he continues. “We can't say for sure, but there is a suggestion on the table in government to actually allow breweries to sell beer directly to a customer for personal consumption. So potentially, you could come to our brewery, we can sell you, like, six bottles of beer. There will probably be a lot of regulations around it, and the brewery might have to have some sort of an educational moment with the customer, which is just stupid, but it's at least a step forward, and it's on the table. It’s going to be a completely different market for us if this happens. Before we were an export brewery, nowadays we’re looking more at becoming a local brewery. We love to export our beers, we will never stop doing this because it's a great honour to be a part of the international beer scene, but it would be amazing to be able to sell to the locals.”

There’s a lot that catering to a local audience is likely to change about Brewski, but Marcus says that fruit beers will always be a part of what the brewery does. Remember when he mentioned that in 2014, fresh hops were quite hard to come by? Real fruit is what Marcus used to create the tropical flavours and aromas characteristics of fresh, American hops, when such ingredients were unavailable to him. “We were more or less the first European breweries that could actually make a good fermented beer with the actual fruits,” says Marcus, adding that it was an act of desperation that landed Brewski with a reputation for brewing amazing fruited sours and fruited IPAs. 

Coincidence? I think not. What I do think is that the Brewski team are talented beyond what they’re willing to admit, and that innovation and camaraderie — not timing or luck — launched the brewery onto the international stage, and into a special place in people’s hearts.