 Beer culture is a huge thing in Denmark. Every national holiday has a different beer. And more and more Danes have started brewing beers on their own. On the night of the launch of the Christmas beer. A lot of people go out. It's even more crowded than the bars that are new years. Personally, I know nothing about beer. But I've teamed up with my colleague who's even had a beer subscription. Together we're going to ask a bunch of questions to one of our local beer experts right here in office. I have worked with beer for almost 40 years now. During my education I was always interested in food and drink. And in Denmark it wasn't at least 40 years ago possible to become a wine maker. And therefore beer was the obvious choice. It's a fashion thing. Home brewing was very popular 50 years ago. And died out completely during a 10 year period. And over the last 10 years has become very popular again. And it's I think very much to do with the fact that we are having all these craft beers popping up in the market. And people have found out that it's relatively easy to brew yourself in the kitchen. It's a lot of work and it's very messy. But it's actually quite easy to brew a beer. I mean 100 years ago every family were brewing their own beer. So it's not difficult to brew a beer. And it's just a lot of work involved in it. But people find it a good pastime. We have two main target groups of consumers. One is people of my age where the children have left the home and the parents are well off and can do whatever they like to do. And they will indulge in a good beer and they will buy whatever they like. They don't look at the economy. And the other group is the young students. We usually say age 25 and up who have the urge to try something perhaps a little bit better than a two-borg. Oh yes, in the garden after cutting, mowing the lawn and the neighbor comes along and asks should we share two beers then I would definitely drink a two-borg if he offers me to. I wouldn't buy it myself. Nothing really. Craft beer is a local phenomenon. We sell approximately 90% of our beer within 25 kilometers of the brewery. So if you want to drink local craft beer in Aarhus, you drink it from Aarhus by Kuks. If you go to Rannas, you will drink local craft beer from Rannas by Kuks. If you go to Skain, you will drink local craft beer from Skain by Kuks. It's more interesting what difference there is between craft beer and what we call industry beer. I think the main difference is that craft beer is being produced in an organization where there are no marketing people, there are no finance people, there are no shareholders. We don't look at the bottom line. If you go to an industry brewery, they will start to make a project and they will say, well, we want to sell this beer at this price. So how cheap can you make it so that we can maximize our profits? Here, we say, well, we would like to make this beer. So what is the cost to make this beer? Okay, then let's try to see if we can sell it. And there is a big difference there because I worked 20 years at a large brewery and I was never allowed to buy the ingredients myself. We had a purchasing organization, we had a finance organization with controllers and you got beaten in the head if you were using just too much and therefore it was the cheapest ingredients that you could buy that we were using. Oh, there is a time for everything. Here in what we will call the northern countries, the food and the climate is suitable for growing barley and making beer and the food that we eat is or has developed to be suitable for beer. So the Nordic cuisine is very good with beer as the French cuisine is very good with wine because in the Mediterranean regions where it's warm, the climate is good for wine and the food has then developed to be paired with wine where the food is developed to be paired with beer in the Nordic countries. This is historic. I drink beer every day with moderation. We don't have a very good beer culture in Denmark unfortunately. And I have to use a Danish word, we have what we call belliculture. We drink a lot of beer and we drink a lot of beer on Fridays, we drink a lot of beer on Saturdays and we don't have a very healthy relationship to drinking beer in moderation on a daily basis. It's Friday, Saturday and nothing which I think is not a very healthy beer or drinking alcohol culture. If you go again to the Mediterranean countries, they will drink wine every day but in moderation and they will not drink a lot Friday, they will not drink a lot Saturday. They will just have a regular consumption which is from a health point, not better. We just drink it in buckets Fridays and Saturdays. If you go back 100 years, they would drink beer and buckets every day. Now they only drink beer and buckets Friday and Saturday. If you go back 500 years, then everyone in this country would be drinking beer because it was the only thing we had. The water was poisonous all over the world. If you dug a well, the first thing that happened was that the women would wash their clothes in it and then it was contaminated. So you could not drink the water. People knew that if they drank the water, they would die. But when you make the beer from this water, you boil it and therefore you kill all the germs. Wine was only available for the king, for the clergy. Milk was too precious to drink. You used milk for butter, cheese, whatever. So all you had was beer and you drank a lot of it. You drank six to eight liters of beer per person if you went back 500 years. But it was only one and a half, two percent beer. It wasn't very strong. That was what we called the daily beer. Then you would have what we called the good beer that we would use for Christmas or for a wedding or a funeral, which would be around four percent. And then you would have what we call the weak beer, which was the last running, which was about a half percent alcohol, which was what you gave to the children because everyone drank beer because it had been boiled. So even the children would be drinking beer at half a percent. If you go further up in time and reach the 18th century, then we have a very famous Danish author called Louis de Holberg, who wrote a play called Jebe på Bjaue, Jebe on the Mountain. And Jebe drinks snaps, and he drinks a lot of it. But he was not alone because in the middle of the 18th century, every dain in Denmark drank one bottle of snaps per person, plus six to eight liters of beer. But that snaps was only about 17 or 18 percent alcohol because they were not so good at the distillation process. One of our kings, Christian IV, who lived around that time, he would be drinking ten liters of beer per day. But on top of that, he drank wine with all his meals. And with all his meals, I really mean all his meals. If you wanted to talk to the king, it happened between sunset and 10 a.m. because after that time, you could not understand what he said he was drunk. And this was quite ordinary at that time. At the end of the 18th century, coffee and tea is introduced to Denmark. And the same author, Louis de Holberg, writes in a letter to one of his friends, he's so happy because his wife can go on all these visits all day and come home sober because she was now drinking coffee. Travels, tasting other beers, food. We produce batches of 1,700 liters here. And when we do a new beer, we would normally do two batches of 1,700 liters. If this is where I want to be, then I will aim a little to the one side and a little to the other side, two batches. And maybe I have to mix them 60, 40 or 70, 30 to get the final beer and then after that I know exactly where to be. But sometimes I just hit it dead straight. Beer is a fermented drink made from grain. Typically we will use barley because barley is robust and has the ability to go through all the processes, especially of germination during the malting process. Grain contains starch and if you just take the starch and mix it with water, nothing happens. You need to degrade the starch into sugars first. This is what happens during malting where you germinate the grain, the grain sprouts and you dry it. During that drying process you can roast the malt and produce various qualities of pale malts or dark malts that you then mix to get the proportion that you want. Once the barley has sprouted and germinated then enzymes have developed that can degrade the starch into sugars. When we then crush the malt and mix it with hot water the enzymes degrade the starch into sugars. We sieve the mixture which is like a porridge and draw out all the sugars. Add more water to extract approximately 98-99% of the sugars. Boil the solution with hops. Hops are flowers and they give the bitterness in the beer but you have to boil the flowers to get the bitterness. This mixture of sugars and hops is boiled. Cool down and transfer to the fermenter where we add yeast. We have many different types of yeast depending on what type of beer we want to make. The yeast will quite simply eat the sugars, generate alcohol, generate carbon dioxide, generate heat. Our tanks are chilled. After one to two weeks the yeast has eaten all the sugars and we chill the beer to approximately 0 degrees. The yeast doesn't want to be there anymore because it's cold, there's no sugar left and the beer is under pressure because during the last phases of the fermentation we will apply pressure to retain the carbon dioxide in the beer so the carbon dioxide is naturally formed. So the yeast will deposit and as all our tanks are conical we can crop the yeast out of the tank, centrifuge the beer and bottle it or package it into cakes. We reuse the yeast approximately five to ten times and then we discard it. The best beer I've ever tried that's very difficult because the experience of drinking beer is related to the environment that you're in and often it's a good experience when you are having a good time and I have had a good time many times with beers and I think it's going to be very difficult to single out one particular beer. No, because again it depends on my mood or the time of the year. If it's summertime I will like a pale beer with not too much alcohol in it because I will probably drink two or three because the sun is shining and in the winter time when it's dark and gloomy I want a dark beer, I want a strong beer I want to sit by the fireplace and I want to enjoy it I want to drink it very slowly and not a lot of it.