Mikkeller’s story is both an individual story of hops, endeavour and ambition, and the story of a broader trend in which the small Danish brewery became caught up at the start of the twenty-first century, namely the beer revolution that had started on the other side of the North Sea and also across the Atlantic as far back as the 1970s.

It all began with a consumer revolution in the British Isles. One day in March 1971, four young Englishmen were enjoying a beer at Kruger’s Bar in the Irish village of Dunquin. The economic slump in post-war England had given brewing giants such as Whitbread and Guinness far too much latitude, and the four friends were fed up with tasteless mass-produced beer. Keen to revitalize beer in their home country, they resolved to start up a consumer organization, and the Campaign for the Revitalisation of Real Ale was duly born.

In the following years, membership of this grass-roots movement steadily grew, and in 1973 it was renamed CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale). CAMRA purposefully set about promoting quality beer and protecting small breweries, pubs and consumer rights. In the subsequent decades, CAMRA’s message spread to other parts of the world, where local branches and similar organizations sprouted up.

At the start of the 1970s, craft brewers on the west coast of the USA also began stirring. One of them was John ‘Jack’ McAuliffe. Sent to Scotland with the US navy at the end of the 1960s, McAuliffe had acquired a taste for British pale ales and lagers that he took home with him to San Francisco. A few years previously, in 1965, Fritz Maytag, the wealthy heir to a washing machine empire, had sat down at a bar in San Francisco and ordered his favourite beer, an Anchor Steam. The bar owner had tipped him off about the Anchor Steam Brewery, which at that time was on the verge of bankruptcy. If San Francisco’s Bay Area was to avoid being dominated by Budweiser, something had to be done, so the next day Maytag bought a 51% shareholding in the small brewery, which he then purchased outright four years later. McAuliffe found inspiration in Maytag’s Anchor Steam Brewery to start up his own microbrewery, New Albion Brewing. This operation opened in Sonoma, California, in October 1976, and in the six and a bit years of its lifetime it succeeded in inspiring a plethora of imitators, including Ken Grossman.

As a child, Grossman had been taught home-brewing by a friend’s father, and in 1976 he opened a store in the Northern Californian town of Chico, selling home-brewing equipment. Under McAuliffe’s expert guidance, he then developed his own brewery together with his business partner Paul Camusi. He called it Sierra Nevada Brewing. At the time, American home-brewers found it difficult to obtain good-quality hops. Consequently, Grossman drove all the way from Chico to Yakima, Washington, to buy hops directly from local dealers. He returned with whole hop cones in his luggage, and in 1980 he and Camusi began brewing their world-famous well-hopped Sierra Nevada Pale Ale using home-built equipment and discarded German copper kettles. The beer acquired iconic status in American beer history and inspired a wealth of Grossman and Camusi imitators to make their own pale ales.

The three above-mentioned Californian breweries – Anchor Brewing Company, New Albion Brewing Company and Sierra Nevada Brewing – became the biggest pioneers of the American microbrewing movement that exploded in the following decades. In the 30 years from 1965, the number of American microbreweries multiplied five-fold, and American farmers began meeting the microbrewers’ need for high-quality hops by expanding cultivation of local varieties, such as Cascade, Amarillo and Chinook, and coming up with new varieties by crossing different varieties of older origin. All this helped make the Americans microbrewers’ interpretations of British pale ales and India Pale Ales more extreme and powerful in taste as they acquired the characteristic notes of citrus and grape.

Another country that played an important role in the evolution of microbrewing was Belgium. Long before the beer revolution started in Great Britain and the USA, small traditional Belgian Trappist breweries such as Chimay, Westvleteren and Orval had been brewing versatile top-fermented ales that differed significantly from the generally well-known bottom-fermented lagers. During the 1990s, the Trappist monks’ brewing began drawing attention outside the country’s borders and, together with CAMRA and the newly arisen Californian microbreweries, came to form the main arteries in the flow of microbrewed beer, which in the coming decades slowly spread to the rest of the world, inspiring countless home-brewers to challenge the beer giants and causing consumers to make increasing demands of beer quality.

PROBABLY THE BEST BEER IN THE WORLD

American pale ales, such as Sierra Nevada and Anchor, and Belgian Trappist beers finally found their way onto the Danish market at the end of the 1990s. This happened after the Danish counterpart to CAMRA, Danske Ølentusiaster (Danish Beer Enthusiasts), was founded in 1998 by a small group of beer lovers. Two of them, Anders Evald and Søren Houmøller, were actually members of a small wine club, but a series of work trips to Brussels made them aware of Trappist beer. They decided to found the beer club KØLIG (a Danish acronym for ’Club for Beer-Loving Folk’), and alongside the club started small-scale garage sales of exclusive imported beers. Through their website they made contact with Unibank’s beer club The Four Seasons and the craft brewer Ole Madsen, and together they started Danske Ølentusiaster.

Like the founders of CAMRA, these beer lovers were fed up with factory-made beer, which in Denmark is synonymous with Carlsberg and Tuborg. They wanted to put basic quality craft back into beer and challenge the Danish national consensus by questioning the Carlsberg slogan ‘Probably the best beer in the world’. With their, at the time, controversial message and their constructive criticism of Carlsberg’s and Tuborg’s ‘uninteresting’ beer, Danske Ølentusiaster succeeded in spreading the message in the Danish media. The association’s first beer festival, held at Remisen in Østerbro, Copenhagen, in 2001, raised interest in, and hence demand for, foreign microbrewed beer.

This whetted the appetite of Danish home-brewers. One of the first was IT consultant Allan Poulsen from Gribskov. Since 1995, Poulsen had been brewing at home in his cellar and had even built a 40-litre (10½-gallons) copper system with which he made beers including Brøckhouse IPA. This ale received the award of ‘New Beer of the Year’ at the 2002 Danske Ølentusiaster festival.

Another person tired of machine-made characterless beer was former Carlsberg brewer Anders Kissmeyer. In 2003, Kissmeyer opened the ambitious Nørrebro Brewery in Ryesgade. As well as a large open-brewing facility, the brewery houses a restaurant where the food is intended to accompany the beer and not vice versa. In Denmark, this helped to turn the focus onto beer as a more cultivated beverage that can be enjoyed with food other than breadsticks and hot dogs.

From 2005 to 2008, microbreweries popped up across the country. In all, 71 breweries opened as, paradoxically, beer sales in Denmark declined (partly explained by increasing beer purchases south of the border in Germany). But consumers were increasingly demanding quality rather than quantity, and the microbreweries provided authenticity and story-telling. Brewmasters, who previously had been anonymous, came into the foreground and helped profile their own brands.

The supermarket Irma, resturant Mad & Vin i Magasin plus department stores and a number of specialist stores began selling microbrewed beer, and beer became an integral part of the gourmet culture that arose during the economic upturn of the 2000s; it became something that people were happy to spend a lot of money on. At the same time, beer enthusiasts from all around the world established their own networks through social media and began hyping different beers and breweries, not least by reviewing them on ratebeer.com. In this way, new types of beer found their way into student culture, which began to replace boxes of discount beer with microbrewed beer presented in champagne bottles.

During 2007, a new brewery was opening every month, but many were aiming for mass appeal and brewing beers that were not particularly distinctive. This had consequences when the financial crisis hit. Allan Poulsen’s Brøckhouse, for example, which in that year brewed a full 600,000 litres (158,503 gallons) of beer, called time on the business just two years later along with a number of other Danish breweries that had invested millions in advanced stainless steel brewing equipment. Some 58% of the breweries that made it through the crisis unscathed had either secured good agreements with supermarket chains such as Coop and Irma (Bryggeriet Skands and Nørrebro Bryghus) or had good local support (Braunstein in Køge and Thisted Bryghus). Fortunately, Mikkeller had a firm foothold in the foreign market and chose to focus on exports. There were no other Danish microbreweries that made the breakthrough internationally in the same way.

In spite of economic adversity, the microbrewing revolution left the Danish and international beer scene changed forever and permanently altered the perception of the golden nectar. Today, beer is no longer drunk simply to quench thirst or induce drunkenness. It is a beverage that is treated with respect, care and no little reverence by beer lovers the world over.