Mikkeller Beer

Most people know the origin story of Mikkeller. Friends Mikkel Bjergsø and journalist Kristian Klarup Keller start homebrewing together, enter it into homebrew competitions, win a bunch of awards and are eventually invited to a major beer festival where they win an international trade deal. Faced with an opportunity they couldn’t immediately take advantage of, they turned their hand to contract brewing — essentially where a bigger, unbranded brewery produces beer on a brand’s behalf — which allowed them to scale volume up and down in line with demand. While working this way was, and remains to a certain extent, unusual, the strength of Mikkeller’s brand, in combination with its ability to reach audiences anywhere in the world, catapulted it into craft beer superstardom. 

There are a number of different ways one can contract brew. For example, if a brand is operated by a team of brewers who don’t have a brewery of their own, they might rent space at a contract brewing facility or a neighbouring brewery who just has some extra tank space. They might source their own ingredients, or use what’s available through the facility, but in either instance, the brewer is working on a borrowed brew kit, and personally oversees production. This kind of production is also known as gypsy or cuckoo brewing. 

Other models might take the collaborative nature of all contract brewing a step further by not sending a brewer to the facility, instead sharing a recipe with the contract brewery’s team to brew on their own without the immediate oversight of the contracting partner. Though this way of working sounds impersonal and less involved, more trust, more communication, and more collaboration is required to produce a well executed product. Emil says that for high calibre beer to be produced this way, extensive brewery knowledge and experience should be the common language of both contractor and contracting parties. Buying a beer and slapping your brand's label on it just won’t cut the mustard. 

“I'm of the belief that the owner or the main operator of a brewery knows the brewery the best,” says Emil. “You need to understand and respect that each brewery is different, so what works in your own brewery doesn't necessarily apply to somewhere else. Tank measurements are different, water profiles are different locally, transfer could take longer so cooling is different. There are so many variables. What I find works best is not to send your partner a draft recipe but an outline of the concept that is detailed enough for the brewer to work with, and give you feedback on. 

“They might come back and say, 'our runoff in a mash is different to what you’ve suggested, so we have to have a higher percentage of X instead of Y so the output is more what you would actually have wished for.' There’s also an element of playing to each brewery’s strengths. A producer might be really good at making, you know, the most crisp pilsner, or the haziest IPAs, so we try to make sure that the recipes that we would like to do with that production unit are optimal for what they can do.”

Currently, the bulk of Mikkeller’s beer is brewed at de Proefbrouwerij in Belgium, with an additional site in Canada serving Ontario province, and the early stages of a partnership is being formed in New Zealand. Emil says that with global sales driving production through a pre-sale model, the team can clearly see patterns of recurring demand in a given region, and it tends to be from there Mikkeller considers whether it would be worth looking for a contract partner in the region. With Mikkeller’s way of contracting requiring unwavering trust between brand and brewery, finding a partner is a very serious, and meticulous process. 

“The local market has to be such that craft beer is popular, and mature enough that we have a selection of local partners to choose from,” says Emil. “The market might be booming, but without the right partner, we wouldn’t establish a base there. Similarly, there would be no point in connecting with a fantastic brewery that makes our beer just the way we like it, if there’s no local demand for fresh beer.”

Where breweries like Stone — which has a brewery on both the east and west coast of the US — go to great lengths to ensure drinkers can’t taste any difference between the beer brewed at Richmond and Escondido, Mikkeller isn’t claiming that it’s beer will taste exactly the same no matter where in the world you drink it. It does promise that all Mikkeller beer conforms to a standard of excellence, and so in a way, Mikkeller’s beer can be defined by a quality more than a specific style or flavour. For all the last few years have been transformative for Mikkeller, and the brand has matured both in attitude and approach, an emphasis on play and experimentation remains and on which dust never settles.