REYKJAVIK, ICELAND
Even rock-solid friendships can fracture. As the years disappear, careers, marriages, and kids consume ever-larger chunks of time, meaning fewer hours for crushing beers with buds.
“We needed to find a common hobby that would force us to get together,” anthropologist Pétur Waldorff says of his group of six friends. It was 2009, a sad moment for flavor and selection in Iceland.
“At that time, you could basically get only yellow lager,” says Halldór Halldórsson, a brand manager for Stella Artois.
Nearly 200 batches later, Plimmó (a nonsensical word that the friends made up nearly two decades ago for a drinking game), the sextet’s homebrew collective, has become one of Iceland’s most imaginative and resourceful. They brew IPAs, amber ales, and imperial stouts alike in a repurposed midcentury washing machine. “People come to where we brew and laugh at our equipment because it’s so old,” says Waldorff, who first encountered homebrewing while living in Montreal.
Quality has increased greatly from their inaugural batches. Like many, the friends began with prehopped liquid extract. The results were appalling rather than appealing. By their fifth or sixth batch, they talked a local pro into providing ingredients—a stopgap at best. No Icelandic homebrew shops existed then, so Plimmó created its own supply chain. In 2010, they traveled to Belgium’s Castle Malting and received the royal treatment. “We didn’t say we had a brewery, but we said we were brewers,” says Halldórsson. Plimmó signed a deal to import malted barley, hops, and yeast and sold raw materials to fellow brewers. “It wasn’t about making money but spreading homebrewing, making it easier for people to get ingredients,” Halldórsson says. (An Icelandic homebrew shop has opened since then, and Plimmó exited the distribution game.)
The friends meet regularly in their industrial space with the faintest inkling of what to make. “Someone starts milling the pale ale malt, and Pétur and I are working on the computer like, ‘OK, let’s do this, this, and this,’ ” says Halldórsson. “When someone gets an idea, we try to work with it.”
Plimmó plays it fast, loose, and fun. For example, they forgo temperature control. “We like an X factor,” Halldórsson says. “We don’t want to overcontrol it and buy a contraption where we insert the ingredients and press play.” The friends rarely repeat recipes and eagerly tackle experiments such as a strong Scotch ale boiled with hot stones—no electricity needed. “We went to a tombstone manufacturer and asked for leftovers,” says Halldórsson. “I looked at some broken tombstones that said, like, ‘Here lies blah blah blah.’ I was like, ‘Should we take this?’ He said, ‘No, no, I’m repairing that one.’ We got some other granite and heated it on the barbecue. It was beer 37, and it was actually quite good.”
Plimmó also made Iceland’s first indigenous beer. They bought barley from a farmer in southern Iceland, then malted and dried the grain. Hops grew wild in a member’s backyard. They harvested some in August and dried them the next day. “We made the worst beer in the history of Iceland,” Halldórsson says. “We got a really bad transformation of the starches. It was like drinking yellow mud.”
Their creativity didn’t end there, though. Plimmó has made hazy New England IPAs and imperial IPAs with ABVs creeping illicitly toward double digits. That’s right: In Iceland, it’s still against the law to homebrew beer stronger than 2.25 percent, a lingering hangover from nearly 75 years of Prohibition. “It’s illegal but not really enforced,” Waldorff says, noting that the club taught an introductory homebrew class to employees of Vínbúð, the state-run chain of alcohol and tobacco stores. “At first we thought it was a setup, but they were so interested and so happy to hear from us.”
FUN FACT
March 1, known as Beer Day, commemorates the end of Prohibition in Iceland. The booze ban started in 1915, underwent modification in 1935 that permitted beer up to 2.25% ABV, and finally ended altogether in 1989.
Plimmó has no plans to go pro. The pals are content to pour beer at local festivals, brew for competitions, and keep their friendship flowing, one communal pint after another.
ADVICE
“Don’t invest too heavily in equipment,” says Halldórsson, who found Plimmó’s washing-machine brew kettle abandoned outside an apartment building. “Have patience and wait for the equipment to find you. It’s much more fun to build a brewery your own way. If you maintain it well, you’ll like the brewery more than if you take the equipment out of a box that cost you $2,000.”
BREWER SPOTLIGHT
Brugghús Steðja harnesses Iceland’s terroir in Hvalur 2, a seasonal ale made with sheep dung–smoked whale testicles. You’d be nuts not to try it once.