Iceland has been brewing beer commercially for about as long as Canada has had legal homebrewing, because strong beer there was illegal until 1 March 1989, and every Icelandic brewery you can visit is a product of the thirty-five years since. That single fact explains more about the country's beer than any amount of talk about glaciers and volcanoes. It explains why the scene is small, why the domestic beers run strong, why the state shop rather than the corner store sells them, and why a traveller expecting an ancient brewing culture should instead expect a young one that had to catch up fast.
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How To Read Icelandic Beer
- Judge the scene as a young one, because every brewery you can visit started after the ban lifted and none of them is old.
- Set aside the claims about geothermal brewing and stone brewing, since cheap clean energy changes a producer's costs rather than the flavour in your glass.
- Start with a domestic lager and then move to a porter, because high-gravity lager is what a state shop system pushes brewers toward.
- Check the current listing before you build a trip around a beer event, because the dates move and some of the written ones do not exist.
Beer Was The Last Thing Legalized
Iceland voted in prohibition in a referendum in 1908 and it took effect in 1915, and it came back in stages rather than all at once. Wine was allowed again in 1922 and spirits in 1935, along with beer up to 2.25 percent, but stronger beer stayed prohibited, so for most of the twentieth century the country was the odd case of a nation that sold whisky and would not sell strong beer. The ban on strong beer was lifted on 1 March 1989, a gap of seventy-four years, and the date is marked in Iceland as Beer Day, which tells you how a ban that long was actually experienced by the people living through it.
The practical legacy is that Iceland has no continuous modern brewing tradition to draw on. Belgian, German, British and Czech brewers inherit recipes and techniques from their great-grandparents' trade, and Icelandic brewers inherited a blank period, so the country's beer is built from imported technique, which mostly means German and Czech lager-making plus a strong dose of American craft influence arriving in the 2000s.
Three Breweries That Are Actually There
- Einstök brews in Akureyri in the far north and is the Icelandic beer most likely to turn up in a Canadian bottle shop, with an exported range that includes Toasted Porter, a Baltic-porter-style beer brewed with roasted Icelandic coffee.
- Borg Brugghús brews in Reykjavík and is the name most associated with hoppy American-style ales and barrel aging in the country, which makes it the clearest counterexample to the idea that Icelandic beer is only lager.
- Kaldi brews near Árskógssandur on the shores of Eyjafjörður, a long way from any capital, and is usually described as one of the earliest small Icelandic breweries, which is worth knowing before you assume the scene started in Reykjavík.
None of these breweries is old. All of them started after 1989, and that is the interesting thing rather than a drawback, because it means a visitor is looking at a live argument about what Icelandic beer is for rather than at a museum of a regional tradition.
What Is Real And What Was Written For A Brochure
Three claims show up in almost every description of Icelandic beer and do not survive contact with the country. The first is that geothermal brewing gives the beer a special taste. Iceland does run much of its heating and a large share of its electricity on geothermal and hydro power, and a brewery can use that heat in the process, but cheap clean energy changes a producer's costs and emissions rather than the flavour in your glass. The second is stone brewing, or steinbier, which appears in Icelandic write-ups as an old local practice and is in fact a German and Austrian term for dropping hot rocks into wort, with nothing to do with Iceland at all. The third is a list of Arctic botanicals served up as the traditional Icelandic ingredient kit, where juniper belongs to Finnish farmhouse ale and birch sap belongs to a handful of novelty beers rather than to a national tradition.
What is genuinely worth caring about is the water and the climate in a plainer sense. Iceland's public supply is groundwater filtered through volcanic rock, soft and low in minerals, which suits pale lager and is a real reason the domestic beers taste clean. The brewing season argument, that a cold climate lets a brewery ferment without expensive refrigeration, is true of BC as much as of Iceland, and is the most useful thing the two scenes actually have in common.
Buying It In A Country That Sells Beer At The State Store
Retail sales of beer stronger than 2.25 percent, along with all wine and spirits, go through the state-run Vínbúðin shops rather than through supermarkets or pubs, which will feel familiar to anyone who has queued at a BC public liquor store. Prices follow from that and from the cost of everything else on the island, so a pint in a Reykjavík bar is expensive by North American standards and a bottle from the state shop is expensive by any standard. The useful consequence is that Icelanders drink fewer but stronger beers, and the domestic range skews toward high-gravity lager for that reason rather than because of some national taste for heaviness.
Food That Works And Food That Is A Dare
Icelandic cooking is built on lamb, fish and dairy, and the beer scene grew up around the same three things. Roast lamb and a malty amber or a porter is an easy match, smoked trout and gravlax work well against a crisp lager, and plokkfiskur, the creamy mashed fish and potato dish that shows up on every pub menu, is better with a clean domestic pilsner than with anything hoppy, because the fat in the dish needs carbonation rather than bitterness.
The two foods a visitor gets told to try with beer are the wrong test. Hákarl, the fermented shark that appears on midwinter tables, is an acquired taste that Icelanders themselves treat as an occasion rather than a meal, and pairing it with a stout is advice nobody has actually tested. The one local food that genuinely belongs next to a beer is hverabrauð, the rye bread baked slowly in the ground using the heat of a hot spring, whose sweetness and dense crumb go well with a dark lager. And a puffin, if you are offered one, is best matched with whatever the person pouring it tells you to drink.
Festivals Without Making Them Up
Reykjavík's Kex hostel, in a former biscuit factory, has hosted an annual beer festival drawing breweries from around the country, and it is the event most of the online descriptions of Icelandic beer festivals are garbling when they invent names for it. Akureyri has its own summer beer event, and Einstök brews a winter seasonal that some write-ups have turned into a nonexistent November festival. The honest version of this section is that Icelandic beer events are real, seasonal and small, and that dates move, so check the current listing before you build a trip around one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Iceland ban beer for so long if it allowed spirits?
The short version is that the ban was written around temperance politics and then kept around practical ones. Beer was the drink of the working day and the cheapest alcohol to make at home, so it was the easiest one to keep prohibited, while the wine and spirits that came back earlier were more expensive and less central to daily life. There is also the long-running argument that keeping beer illegal made imported spirits and wine more profitable for the interests that sold them, which is a claim about motive rather than a documented decision, so treat it as an explanation people offer rather than a proven cause.
Is Icelandic beer stronger than Canadian beer?
The everyday domestic lagers are usually stronger than a standard Canadian macro lager, commonly sitting in the 5 to 7 percent range, and the reason is retail rather than taste. When the only place to buy beer is a state shop at a high price, a brewer's sales depend on giving the buyer more alcohol per króna, which is the same logic that pushed strength up in other expensive markets.
What should a first-time visitor order?
Start with a lager from whichever of the big domestic names the bar has on tap, because that is the beer Icelandic brewing actually makes at scale, and then try a porter or a brown ale from one of the small breweries to see how far the scene has travelled since the ban ended. Ordering an India pale ale in Reykjavík is fine and tells you very little about Iceland, in the same way that ordering one in Kelowna tells you nothing about the Okanagan.
Can you visit breweries in Iceland without a tour?
Yes for the ones in Reykjavík, where taprooms are walkable from the centre, and less easy for Kaldi and Einstök, which sit a long drive from the capital on either side of a road that is not worth rushing in winter. If you are going in the dark months, plan the drive as the trip's risk rather than its scenery, since a daylight-only itinerary is the version that survives an Icelandic February.
Judge It As A Young Scene Rather Than An Ancient One
The interesting question about Icelandic beer is not what Arctic mystery gives it a distinctive taste, because there is not one, but what a country with no legal brewing memory built in a generation once the ban lifted. It built good lager, a handful of small breweries far from the capital, and a craft scene that imports its ideas quickly and executes them expensively. That is worth a night in Reykjavík and one bottle of Einstök at home, and it is a better story than the invented festivals it is usually told alongside.
