Ølsmia
Brewing true Norwegian beer – and the ghost of a gift from Canada.
-I want to show people that a truly Norwegian beer is brewed with Norwegian ingredients. Norwegian malt, kveik, herbs and spices.
Ølmia – the Beer Smithy, had a blacksmith as one of its founders. But those days are long gone. Now brewer Lars runs the brewery in a basement in an office block in central Oslo. The address has a history.
An old office building has been transformed into new activities Rebel. The ground floor and basement is opened, with offices to rent, event and conference facilities and bars, cafes and restaurants.
The Furset group has a contract for running the restaurants, and they wanted a microbrewery in the mix. Ølsmia was ready to move in, and with a number of adjustments they have been up and running in the deep bowels of the building since 2022.
I am greeted by Lars, who has been in the business for quite some time, working in several Oslo breweries.
Being a part of the Furset group has obvious advantages, brewing house beers for big and small restaurants and delivering beer for huge events at Fornebu Arena and Holmenkollen.
But Lars is not content with brewing easy drinking pale ales for the mass market. He is experimenting with ingredients such as mussels and spruce shoots.
-I think we need a new definition of Norwegian beer, says Lars. His ambition is to brew exclusively with Norwegian raw materials. That means sourcing malt form the three commercial maltsters in Norway. The yeast is kveik.
All in all, Lars brews almost 30 different beers. He has some part-time help in logistics, but he even designs the beer cans, attends beer festivals and is generally everywhere.
That’s what you get for being generous
There is a side story here. Back in 2007, we were a handful of beer bloggers scattered across the globe. I had the pleasure of having frequent contact with Alan McLeod, who continues his beer writing to this day. I’m thought his blog posts from that golden age were long gone – but look what I found..
He had a bit of advertising on his blog, and decided to spend some of the money to buy a few bottles of Westvleteren 12 from a Dutch web shop to send to a few of his contributors. I was one of them.
To quote myself 19 years ago:
On the outskirts of Europe there lives a peculiar tribe of people. Like most other nations, they feel that they have the solution to every problem on the planet. Other small nations have had to bow to the necessity of adjusting to their surroundings, but Norway had the curse to find oil and gas in the 1970s, giving them the possibility of constructing their own reality.
Go ahead and read the blog post about our interaction with the Directorate of Health and Social Affairs - and don’t miss the comments below.
What is the relevance today? The Directorate of Health and Social Affairs was at the time located in the very same building where Ølsmia is today. Spending their days processing forms and worrying about substance abuse.
The legislation has changed in the meantime. It is now legal to import your own beer. But the paperwork is so cumbersome that the European web shops can’t be bothered to ship booze to Norway. But that doesn’t make for so hilarious stories.