Collaboration Vacation – Ninkasi Brewing In Iceland

When you picture a brewery, what do you see?

Towering metal fermentation tanks? Steam piping out of a metal brew kettle as hops get lovingly added to the wort? A metal mash mixer churning malted barley around and around? A (LOUD!) metal bottling line filling thousands of bottles with delicious beer?

Notice a theme here?

There’s a lot of metal in brewing, and we’re not talking about the inspiration behind one of our seasonal favorites.

Now imagine a brewery where nearly every piece of equipment is constructed from wood instead of sheets and sheets of metal.

And imagine this brewery is located on a dairy farm on the northern most tip of Iceland, with uninterrupted majestic views of the glacial valleys.

This sounds like something worth checking out, right?

Well, that’s exactly what two Ninkasi-ites decided to do for a little vacation trip out of Eugene earlier this month! Aidan and Simon, one of our brewers, ventured across the Atlantic to stay with with Jóhann and Steinn of Gædingur Brugghús on the Utvík Dairy Farm of Skagafjörður in Northern Iceland.The purpose of this trip, in addition to checking out this must-see brewery, was to brew a beer with these Icelandic brewers!

After sitting down to develop the recipe, the team decided to make a double IPA, which was an especially thrilling choice since it was Gædingur’s first time making this style of beer and their most expensive brew to date.Since Gædingur Brugghús is 22 degrees North of Ninkasi Brewery, the group decided to name the beer 22up.

When Simon and Aidan arrived at the farm and brewery, they showed up bearing gifts appropriate for this trip: hops! 44 pounds of Zythos Hops to be exact.

These hops were added to the day’s brew, in addition to Green Bullet, Pacifica, and Pacific Gem hops. In keeping with the 22 theme, they did a hop addition every 22 minutes for 110 minutes and projected a Gravity of 1.088 (since 88 is a multiple of 22!)

After 13 long and fun hours of brewing, the group hit that gravity, finished up the initial brew work, and had an absolute blast doing it.

Many rounds of thanks and cheers to our friends in Iceland for hosting two members of our Ninkasi family and for showing them such an incredible beer-filled time!
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