The creators of some of the most distinctive craft beers in the world are identical twins who hate e
4 replies, posted
[QUOTE][IMG]http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/03/30/magazine/30beer1/30beer1-master1050-v4.jpg[/IMG]
[I]The creators of some of the most distinctive craft beers in the world are identical twins from Denmark who can’t stand each other. Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergso, left, in Brooklyn. Mikkel Borg Bjergso, right, in Copenhagen.[/I][/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]Mikkel Borg Bjergso, a 38-year-old former high-school science teacher who runs the Danish brewery Mikkeller, stuck his face into a bag of hops and inhaled deeply. It was a rainy February afternoon, and Mikkel, who makes some of the world’s most inventive beer, was visiting de Proef, a Belgian brewery in the town of Lochristi. The hops had been processed into unctuous pellets that resembled cat food, and they released a ripe botanical stink heavy on lemon grass and cannabis. “That’s nice,” Mikkel said, crumbling a few pellets between his fingers and nodding approvingly at the sticky green smear they deposited on his thumb. They were specimens of a strain called Polaris, developed by growers in Germany, which Mikkel had asked de Proef’s proprietor, Dirk Naudts, to purchase for use in a new Mikkeller beer. “They’re very fatty,” Naudts said.
Unlike most brewers, Mikkel doesn’t own a brewery. A typical Mikkeller beer originates in his brain as a far-fetched question: What quality of fattiness would a beer obtain if you sprinkled popcorn into the mash? What would happen if you dumped in a load of mouth-numbing Sichuan peppercorns during the brewing? How much fresh seaweed would lend a beer the right umami jolt? He then finds his answers by proxy, outsourcing the actual brewing to facilities, like de Proef, owned and operated by other people. Mikkel draws up detailed instructions for these fabricators to follow — specifying malt quantity to the milligram, mash schedule to the minute, bitterness to the I.B.U. — and the first time he tastes his own beer is usually when the brewer sends him a shipment and an invoice. “I don’t enjoy making beer,” he says. “I like making recipes and hanging out.”[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE][IMG]http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/03/30/magazine/30beer2/mag-30Beer-t_CA1-blog427.jpg[/IMG]
[I]Craft beers sold at Mikkeller & Friends Bottle Shop in Copenhagen.[/I][/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]This way of working is known as “phantom brewing” or “gypsy brewing,” and Mikkel is one of its best-known practitioners. His creations are adored not only on aficionado websites but also by chefs at Michelin-starred restaurants like Noma, in Copenhagen, and El Celler de Can Roca, in Girona, Spain, each of which enlisted him to design beers for their menus. As a phantom, Mikkel can source unwashed seaweed from the western fjords of Iceland, yuzu from Japan and avocado leaves from Mexico while leaving someone like Naudts to deal with the nitty-gritty of putting such ingredients into a beer someone might actually drink. And because he has so little overhead, Mikkel doesn’t have to worry about appealing to mass tastes. Which means more creative freedom. In any given year, a typical craft brewery produces maybe 20 different beers. Last year, Mikkeller made 124.
The number of phantom brewers is growing, and Mikkel, who got into the game in 2006, views this with a mixture of magnanimity and trendsetter’s pride. But he pays particularly close attention to one Brooklyn-based phantom brewery, because it is owned by his identical twin, Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergso. Jeppe started his brewery four years after Mikkeller began and, in an act of winking provocation, named the outfit Evil Twin. It is a smaller operation than Mikkeller, but similarly well regarded among connoisseurs. (Jeppe used to help Noma curate its beer selection.) The Bjergso brothers have opposite temperaments: Mikkel is reserved; Jeppe is an extrovert. And they are not on good terms, despite — or rather, because of — their shared infatuation with beer. They haven’t spoken to each other in more than a year.
The Danish press has caught the conflict’s biblical whiff, casting Mikkel and Jeppe as sworn enemies. Thomas Schon, Mikkeller’s first employee, told me that the twins suffer from a pronounced personality clash: “It was a big relief for Mikkel when Jeppe moved to Brooklyn. It was like the Danish beer scene wasn’t big enough for the two of them.” Mikkeller’s operations manager, Jacob Gram Alsing, said that the subject of Jeppe “is very sensitive for Mikkel to talk about.” Mikkel himself put it this way: “You know Oasis? The Gallagher brothers? They were one of the most successful bands in the world, but those guys had problems with each other.” With twins, he said, “it’s a matter of seeing yourself in another person, and sometimes seeing something you don’t like.”
Mikkel is tall and taciturn, with a solemn bearing that can make him appear extremely bored even when he’s in good spirits. “He can seem very arrogant and distant when you meet him,” his wife, Pernille Pang, says. “All my friends thought he was, at first.”
Wearing a black sweatshirt and worn bluejeans, he seemed underdressed for de Proef, a 70,000-square-foot operation that looks as if it might manufacture the occasional microprocessor in addition to its porters and pale ales. Through a spotless, two-story glass wall, a man in blue workman’s pants darted purposefully between nine steel brewing vessels, while a woman in a lab coat hustled up a staircase with a clipboard. Naudts is less beer geek than egghead: He describes his vocation as “applied research.” Last year, he installed a laboratory at de Proef that is outfitted with instruments for, among other things, moisture measurement, oil distillation, gas chromatography and mass spectrometry; three full-time lab technicians perform extensive diagnostic testing on hops, malts, spices and yeasts.
Mikkel had flown in from Copenhagen to check on a couple of Mikkeller beers in progress at de Proef and to witness the start of a brand-new brew, but these were largely ceremonial duties. For Mikkel, brewing has become primarily a discursive activity. “I get inspiration from tasting beers, food, coffees and wine, and from talking to people who have different ways of thinking about flavors and aromas,” he said. “Winemakers, coffee-makers, chefs, other brewers.”
Joining him were Alsing and an American named Chris Boggess, the head brewer of Three Floyds in Munster, Ind., known for its adventurous stouts. Mikkeller and Three Floyds have collaborated on several beers, and before leaving Indiana, Boggess procured a water-analysis sheet of Lake Michigan, which feeds Munster’s taps, for Naudts to replicate at de Proef. This simulated water would be used in a corn-heavy beer, called Majsgoop, that he and Mikkel were putting into production that day. “The water in Lake Michigan is pretty neutral,” Boggess said. “I think it just tastes really good with our yeast selection.”[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]Naudts said that when an ingredient’s effects are especially unpredictable — licorice, say, or shiso — “we send Mikkel a sample, he tastes it, and if he thinks the ingredient is too much or too low, we make a second, adapted brew and we blend them together.” But Mikkel rarely asks his contractors for sample batches, confident that a brew will come out as he intends. “When I do a recipe, it’s not difficult anymore,” he said. “I know what comes out of it.” He once bought $8,000 worth of truffles for use in a small-batch beer called the Forager. Schon, describing Mikkel’s facility with potentially overpowering flavors, told me later: “It’s all about balance. If you buy a blueberry beer, it’s got to have a clear, defined blueberry taste, but that’s No. 2. You want it to taste like beer first.”
Mikkel handed the bag of hops back to Naudts and smiled. “The hard life of a brewer,” he said.
The tale of the phantom twins has generated attention for both Mikkeller and Evil Twin, and while Mikkel acknowledges that “it’s a great story,” he regards it with some circumspection. “Our relationship is very complicated,” he said, adding, “I don’t see Jeppe as a rival.” He was unsure whether Jeppe regarded him the same way. When I mentioned my plans to meet Jeppe in the United States, Mikkel fixed me with a heavy gaze and sighed: “He’s going to talk so much trash about me.”
Jeppe lives with his wife and their two young boys in north Brooklyn, near Torst, a bar he co-founded and whose rarefied offerings he manages. On an early March afternoon, I met him at the bar, where he had happy news to share. “I’m here on an E-1 visa — a business visa,” he said, “but we’re changing it to an O-1, which is an artist visa. I just got preapproved last week.” He smiled. “Now I’ll have it on paper that I’m an artist.” Jeppe has shaggier hair than Mikkel and is far more gregarious. He sprinkles emails with exclamation points and showers casual conversation with the word “dude.” His New York friends include the musician Julian Casablancas, a fellow dad whom Jeppe chatted up one day as they watched their children at the playground. At Torst, he patted a stool, inviting me to sit, and asked, “You want some beer?”
The bar was fashioned from thick marble, and the walls were covered in wood salvaged from upstate barns. Mikkeller, which has contracted with brewers in Holland, Scotland and Norway and has bars in Copenhagen (where the company is headquartered), San Francisco, Stockholm and Bangkok, has greater global reach than Evil Twin; Jeppe concentrates on the American market, New York particularly. His beer is available at specialty shops and restaurants across the city, including Eleven Madison Park and Pok Pok. “Being a gypsy brewer, I don’t have my own brewery, so I couldn’t showcase beers at my own place,” Jeppe said. With Torst, that has changed. Mounted on a marble slab were 21 beer taps, a third of them devoted to Evil Twin; Jeppe had a $16,000, custom-built draft system called a flux capacitor, which allows the bartender to control the precise carbonation and temperature of each selection. Despite this elaborate rig, Jeppe said: “I didn’t want Torst to be just a geeky place, just for beer nerds. I like to go out sometimes and not only be around fat men that drink beer.”
Jeppe’s affability notwithstanding, he was full of bravado when it came to discussing business. “I wanted to change the beer scene in New York,” he said. “I wanted to show New York how to do it.” I ordered an Evil Twin beer called Bikini, a mere 2.7 percent alcohol by volume, and when I expressed surprise at its abundant flavor, Jeppe took a shot at his brother’s tendencies. “For me, drinkability is the most important,” Jeppe said. “I’m not gonna make a Dark Lord” — the ultrarich Three Floyds stout. “It’s a fun beer to try, but it’s undrinkable. I don’t want to sound like I put down my brother’s beer, but he’s in the line of Three Floyds a bit too much. He’s very fascinated with what they do. He makes this blueberry spontaneous” — a Belgian-inspired ale — “and I hate it. I think it’s disgusting. It tastes like Kool-Aid.”
Laughing, Jeppe told me about Bozo, a high-alcohol stout that he designed expressly to “make fun of” the extreme flavor experiments in which craft brewers like Mikkeller often engage. “We added cocoa, chocolate, coconut, cinnamon, oak chips, chili, coffee, vanilla, hazelnut, chestnut, marshmallows,” Jeppe said. “It’s not a beer I’d drink, but it came out excellent, and it gets crazy high ratings.”[/QUOTE]
[B]This is a realllyyy long article. It's super interesting though so read the rest here:[/B][url]http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/magazine/a-fight-is-brewing.html?ref=magazine[/url]
I never get bored or a ceasing of amazement from learning about drinks. Such an interesting industry its become over the centuries.
[T]http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2010/07/Blutarch-and-Redmond.jpg[/T]
Reminds me way too much of this.
[QUOTE=NO ONE;44377693]I never get bored or a ceasing of amazement from learning about drinks. Such an interesting industry its become over the centuries.[/QUOTE]
Go to Copenhagen then, i live there. There's a city dedicated to beer, and it has a museum with the worlds largest collection of beers.
Of course they had to be danish :v:
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.