Icelandic Craft Beer: What Thirty-Five Years Of Legal Brewing Built

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.

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.

Spanish Beer: What To Order At The Bar And What To Take Home

Spanish beer is really two different purchases, and most of the disappointment visitors feel comes from expecting one and being handed the other. At a bar, the default is a small glass of pale lager poured from a tap and finished while it is still cold, usually alongside something the whole table is sharing. Away from the taps, in bottle shops and the better supermarket aisles, there is a much smaller craft scene making hoppy pale ales and fruit-driven saison-style bottles that have almost nothing in common with the caña you had with lunch, and knowing which of those two you are after is what lets you order well.

What To Order On Your First Evening

• Start with two small glasses of different lager brands rather than one large beer, since the caña is sized to be finished before it warms.
• Name the glass you want, because a tubo, a tercio and a quinto are the same lager in different sizes and the choice depends on the table.
• Save the curiosity for the craft bottles, since the big lager brands are built for consistency rather than for character.
• Find these beers in British Columbia by asking an independent bottle shop to source a specific name, because the shelf stock is rarely there.

What You Are Ordering When You Ask For A Beer

A caña is the standard unit of Spanish beer drinking: a small glass of lager, a couple of hundred millilitres at most, poured to be drunk standing up. Ask for a tubo and the same beer arrives in a tall glass that will last longer, and at a table where everyone wants their own drink you will be handed a tercio, a third-of-a-litre bottle, or a quinto, which is the smaller bottle of the same beer for anyone who would rather have two different ones over the meal. A jarra is the opposite idea, a large shared jug of lager close to a litre, ordered so the group is not calling the barman back every few minutes.

The reason the small glass dominates is temperature rather than thrift. Lager loses what little definition it has as soon as it warms in the glass and starts to taste only of alcohol, the room is often hot, and a caña is sized so that the beer is finished before that happens. That is also why the bottle arrives sweating from the fridge and why nobody thinks twice about ordering a second small one instead of a large one: the whole system is built around the beer still being cold when you take the last sip.

The Lager Names You Will Be Handed

Most beer drunk in Spain is lager from a handful of large breweries, and the brands are regional in a way that surprises people used to a national shelf. Estrella Galicia comes from A Coruña in the northwest and is the name associated with Galicia. Estrella Damm is Barcelona's lager, Mahou is what you are most likely to be poured in Madrid, Cruzcampo belongs to Seville, Ambar is the Zaragoza brewery, and San Miguel turns up everywhere as well. If you are working through the country, these are the bottles that arrive when you do not specify, and they are dry, lightly hopped and clean.

None of them are trying to be interesting, and treating that as a badly made beer is the commonest mistake visitors make. Holding a pale lager stable, cold and carbonated through a hot summer and a long distribution chain is a real technical job, and the reason the big names taste the same in every town is that the breweries are chasing consistency rather than flavour. The regional names are the point of that consistency rather than a failure of it: Estrella Galicia in A Coruña and Cruzcampo in Seville are not one beer pretending to be two, they are the same standard built in two different places. Once you stop hoping a caña will do something it was never built to do, it becomes a very good accompaniment to fried food, and you can save the curiosity for the bottles below.

Three Craft Bottles Worth Knowing By Name

The craft side is small enough that a short list is genuinely useful, and these three are the bottles most worth recognizing. Two of the three come from the green north rather than the coast you fly into, which tells you where to look.

• Cervezas Dougall's is a brewery in Liérganes, Cantabria on the northern coast, and the 942 American Pale Ale it released in 2012 is its best-known bottling.
• Naparbier works in Navarra, and its Crimson Bird is a fruit saison of around 6.1 percent brewed with raspberries or strawberries. It is a saison rather than an IPA whatever the colour suggests, and the difference matters if you are reaching for hops and getting fruit instead.
• Garage Beer Co started in Barcelona in 2015 and cans a wide, hop-forward range, of which Soup is the New England style pale ale most people begin with.

If you want to drink one of these at home, ask an independent bottle shop that already orders unusual imports to put one in for you, and expect the price to reflect the freight rather than the rarity. In Spain itself, the way to drink them is a bar with a rotating set of craft taps rather than the restaurant round the corner from your hotel, since the bottled stuff moves through the places that bother to keep it cold.

Eating With Spanish Beer

Spanish food and beer work together for the same reasons they work anywhere else: carbonation scrubs fat off the tongue, salt makes bitterness taste cleaner, and a dry finish keeps a rich dish from coating the palate. What follows is the local answer, which is almost always cold lager, and a craft answer for the evening you would rather drink something with a personality.

Dish	Where you eat it	Local answer	Craft answer
Patatas bravas	Madrid, and every town	A caña, because the potatoes are oily and the sauce is hot	Garage Beer Soup, whose soft bitterness cuts through the alioli
Pulpo a feira	Galicia	Estrella Galicia, poured beside the pimentón	A pale ale with enough body to survive the smoked paprika
Pintxos	Basque Country	A jarra shared down the length of the bar	Naparbier Crimson Bird with the sweeter skewers
Fabada asturiana	Asturias	The coldest lager the bar has	Dougall's 942, if you want a clean American pale ale against the north's heaviest bean stew
Salmorejo	Andalusia	A quinto, small enough to stay cold	A saison, whose peppery yeast note does not fight the tomato

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Spanish beer only lager?

By volume, yes, and on the shelf, no. Lager is close to everything poured in an ordinary bar, which is why the beer you are handed without asking is nearly always a lager brand. The craft breweries work in hoppy pale ales, fruit-driven saison-style bottles and a wide middle ground that rarely reaches the taps at a hotel. Spain drinks lager and makes a great deal more than it drinks.

Do I get a free tapa with my drink?

Sometimes, and it is worth going in expecting nothing. In parts of the country a small plate still arrives with your first drink, while in Madrid or Barcelona the habit has thinned out enough that the food on the counter is frequently something you order and pay for. If a plate does appear without being asked for, treat it as a courtesy and order another drink before deciding you are entitled to the next one.

Why does the same lager taste better in Spain than at home?

Mostly because of the glass and the speed. A caña is poured into a small, very cold glass from a line that is used constantly, so the beer is fresh in the line, cold in the glass and finished before it warms, which is a better set of conditions than a warm glass and a tap line that has been sitting since closing time.

Can I find these bottles in British Columbia?

Occasionally, and mostly by asking. The practical approach is to name a specific bottle to a shop that already orders unusual imports and let them source it, rather than hoping to find one sitting in a case, and to expect to pay for the freight that brought it. If you are going to Spain, bring back the bottles you could not find here, because that is how most people's cellar collection of them began.

Start With The Small Glass And Work Out From There

The most useful thing you can do on the first evening is order two cañas of different lager brands rather than one large beer, drink them with whatever the bar is putting on the counter, and decide which one you actually preferred. Once you can tell Estrella Galicia from Estrella Damm across a small glass, the craft bottles become a much easier sell, because you are no longer comparing them against a vague idea of Spanish beer but against a specific one you have already chosen.

Brazilian Beer: A Lager Country And The Brewers Using Native Fruit

Brazil is the third-largest beer market in the world (Beer in Brazil), and almost everything poured there is a pale, clean lager, so a Brazilian beer that tastes of passion fruit is a deliberate exception rather than the national default. The phrase tropical Brazilian ale does not name a style with a recipe, a fermentation method or a competition category. It is a loose label for what a handful of craft brewers do with fruit and timber that grow in Brazil, which is a more interesting story than the exotic-paradise version usually told around it.

What A Brazilian Beer Expects

• Read tropical Brazilian ale as a description of what went into the tank, because no style guide or competition category uses the term.
• Serve the ordinary lagers very cold, since they are built for heat and their job is to be clean and refreshing between bites.
• Pour a fruit beer a little warmer and more lightly chilled than a lager, because cold suppresses the aroma that makes it worth drinking.
• Treat cachaça barrel ageing as one producer's project rather than a national tradition, because the evidence that it is common practice is thin.

The Beer Brazilians Actually Drink

Lager arrived with 19th-century European immigration and took root in the southern states, where German and Italian communities built the breweries that still shape how the country drinks. Blumenau, in Santa Catarina, has run its own Oktoberfest for decades and draws visitors from across South America, and the brewing families of Rio Grande do Sul and Paraná came out of the same settlement wave.

The market later consolidated around a few enormous producers. Ambev was formed in 1999 from the merger of the Brahma and Antarctica brands, was bought by InBev in 2004 and is now part of Anheuser-Busch InBev, which means most Brazilian beer volume sits behind a single company. That is the context any small Brazilian brewery has to be judged against, at home and abroad.

What you order at a boteco is a long-neck bottle of light, corn-adjunct lager served so cold that condensation freezes on the glass, and the standard request asks for it estupidamente gelada, stupidly cold. The low bitterness and brisk carbonation are not an accident of cheap brewing. Those lagers are built for heat and for a table of food, and they are drunk with fried cod croquettes, grilled picanha and warm cheese bread.

What Tropical Brazilian Ale Refers To

No style guide used by homebrewers or competition judges lists a Brazilian ale, so the phrase describes an ingredient habit rather than a brewing method. You will find Brazilian brewers making wheat beer, pale ale, stout and lager in the ordinary ways and then putting something local into the finished beer, most often fruit.

Cupuaçu, açaí, jabuticaba, camu camu, guava, mango and passion fruit are all Brazilian fruit, and they appear in juices, desserts, liqueurs and ice cream across the country. Craft brewers use them too, usually as purée or juice added to beer rather than as a base ingredient, and the fruit-forward examples tend to come from breweries in the Amazon basin and in the south.

The part that does not hold up is the history. Brazilian brewing is a lager history, and fruit beer is a recent craft development rather than a tradition inherited from colonial kitchens, so a bottle sold as a centuries-old Brazilian ale is being sold a story. A name with no style guide behind it also tells you almost nothing when it is on the bottle, which cuts both ways: the phrase tropical Brazilian ale will not tell you whether the beer is good, and it will not be used to hide a bad one either. The genuine interest is in what current brewers are doing with ingredients that are cheap and familiar at home and rare everywhere else.

Breweries Worth Knowing By Name

Cervejaria Colorado, in Ribeirão Preto in the state of São Paulo, is the name most often raised when Brazilian craft beer is discussed, and it has spent years building a list around local ingredients. Amazon Beer works with fruit and botanicals from the Amazon basin, and Bodebrown, in Curitiba, carries one of the better-known names in the south.

None of those breweries has much of a presence in Canada, which changes how useful the name is to you. Brazilian craft beer is rarely exported, so the realistic routes to it are a trip to São Paulo, Curitiba or Manaus, or a specialty shop that happens to carry one or two bottles. The large Brazilian lagers are easier to find than the small ones, and they tell you about the market rather than about the scene.

How To Drink Brazilian Beer

Serve Brazilian lagers very cold, in a glass if you care about what they taste like and in the bottle if you are standing in a kitchen, and do not go looking for complexity in them. Their job is to be clean and refreshing between bites, and they do that job well. A fruit beer from a Brazilian craft brewery is the opposite case, and it wants the treatment you would give a lambic: lightly chilled, in a stemmed glass, and finished the day you open it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there an official style called a tropical Brazilian ale?

There is no such category. The families listed in style guides and competitions are German, Czech, Belgian, British and American, and Brazilian breweries enter those with their own ingredients rather than defining a new one. Treat the phrase as a description of what went into the tank, not as a recipe anybody is following.

Why is beer in Brazil served so cold?

Because much of the country is warm and the dominant beers are brewed to stay clean at low temperature, chilling them close to freezing costs very little in flavour. Cold suppresses aroma, which matters far more in a hop-forward beer than in a lightly bitter lager, and an ice bucket on the table is the standard solution at a barbecue. If you are drinking a Brazilian fruit beer, pour it a little warmer and you will find more in the glass.

What food goes with Brazilian beer?

The ordinary answers are the ones that work. Pão de queijo, the baked cheese bread made with tapioca starch, matches a cold lager the way a pretzel matches a helles. Fried cod croquettes, grilled picanha with coarse salt, and the coconut-milk fish stew moqueca from Bahia all want something crisp and carbonated to cut the fat, which is exactly what the local lagers are.

Is beer aged in cachaça barrels a Brazilian tradition?

Cachaça, the Brazilian spirit distilled from sugarcane juice, is aged in barrels made from several native woods, so the country does have a real barrel culture. Whether breweries routinely put beer into old cachaça barrels is a separate claim, and the evidence that it is common practice is thin. If you find a Brazilian beer aged that way, treat it as one producer's project rather than a national style.

Can I find Brazilian craft beer in British Columbia?

Expect the large commercial labels before you expect the small ones, and expect both to arrive intermittently. Brazil exports very little of its craft output, so the reliable way to drink it is in Brazil, where taprooms and beer bars in São Paulo, Curitiba and Belo Horizonte carry far more than will ever cross the Pacific.