STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN—Workmen began installing fermenters and a brew house at The New Carnegie Brewery in Stockholm today. The project is a partnership between the Brooklyn Brewery, Carlsberg Sweden and a group of private investors.

“This is an important step forward,” said Fredrik Vogel, general manager of the project. “We also are pleased to announce we have hired the Swedish brewing team, which is training at Brooklyn Brewery in Brooklyn, NY this year.”

Brooklyn Brewery’s Swedish subsidiary is the operating partner of the project and Brooklyn Brewmaster Garrett Oliver and Vogel hired the Swedish brewing team. The head brewer is Anders Wendler, a graduate of Sweden’s Lunds University. Anders has worked at breweries in the Ukraine, Germany and Sweden since the early 1990s. He is passionate about beer and spends his spare time experimenting with home brews. He was Sweden’s “Best Home Brewer of the Year.”

“I am really looking forward to working with the New Carnegie Brewery,” said Wendler. “For me, beer is both my job and my hobby. So it is obviously very exciting to be involved in the creation of Stockholm’s new craft brewery.”

The New Carnegie Brewery is located in the Hammarby Sjöstad (Hammarby Lake City) neighborhood of Stockholm. It can be reached by car or by a free ferry boat. It is expected to open in early 2014. Wendler said the brewery will have a capacity of 300,000 liters in the first year and will be expanded to a million liters annual production.

Wendler’s team includes brewer Chris Thurgeson, formerly of Nils Oscar Brewery; microbiologist Josefine Karlsson and cellarman Karl Fornarve, formerly of Sigtuna Brygghus.

Carlsberg, a Danish company, is the #1 brewery in Scandinavia and the #4 brewery in the world. Carlsberg owns the brands of the Carnegie Brewery, a Swedish brewery with a 178-year-old history. Carlsberg also imports Brooklyn Brewery beers to Sweden. Brooklyn Brewery once distributed the classic Carnegie Porter beer in New York and Massachusetts.

In 2003, Carlsberg awarded Brooklyn Brewmaster Oliver its “Semper Ardens” medal, recognizing Oliver’s contributions to the world’s beer industry, notably his book, The Brewmaster’s Table, the definitive study of beer and food pairings. At the same time, Carlsberg began importing Brooklyn Brewery beers to Scandinavia.

The New Carnegie Brewery is a result of the friendship that has developed between Carlsberg’s Joakim Losin, Third Party Products Commercial Director, and Brooklyn’s Chief Operating Officer, Eric Ottaway. Brooklyn Brewery will continue to ship packaged beer and tankers of beer to Sweden, but will brew some special beers at New Carnegie. Oliver and Wendler plan to develop partnerships with the great chefs of Scandinavia and the world and showcase New Carnegie and Brooklyn beers with them.

“We want New Carnegie to be a beacon for craft beer culture in northern Europe,” said Oliver. “New Carnegie will produce craft beers with a Scandinavian accent.”

It started when I was only 16 or 17, in our equivalent of high school. I was very interested in chemistry, and I’d already decided that I wanted to do something professionally that had to do with chemistry.

I didn’t want to be university scientist, and I didn’t want to teach high school, so I was very much in doubt how I would find some kind of practical career. At some point I found out that if I was very lucky, I could become a master brewer, which required a master’s degree in chemical engineering.

I knew the chances were slim that I’d be able to follow that career path to the end, but I thought, if I don’t become a master brewer, chemical engineering sounds pretty interesting, and it has a lot of practical applications.

Obviously, I love beer. I managed to squeeze myself into Carlsberg’s research center. I did my final thesis in chemical engineering on something pretty wild, the botanical composition of rye, because the Carlsberg research center does a lot of basic research that is not related to beer. My thesis had absolutely nothing to do with beer.

It must have been intriguing, studying at Carlsberg, that being such a prominent name in the history of brewing research.

Yes, I asked about the master brewing education while I was there, and found the teachers were pretty closely connected to the brewing school. They offered to ease my way in, because that was—and still is—a private education sponsored by the Scandinavian Brewers’ Association. They only let in as many applicants as they know the industry will need.

That’s why I knew from the start that the chances were pretty slim that I’d make it, but again, with my connections at Carlsberg, I kind of squeezed my way in and got the master brewers education.

Eventually, I ended up where I had dreamed to be when I was 16 or 17 years old.

Did you go straight to Nørrebro?

No, no, I had a minor spot of 16 years working for Carlsberg after that. That’s why you could say that my background in craft brewing is very unusual, because very few craft brewers have this sort of very formal education.

I know that’s true here in the United States. Is it also the case in Denmark?

Yes, it is. There are a few of us, but less than a handful.

So the Danish craft beer movement has grown up separate from professional brewing?

Yes. You can even say that there is—not hostility, but people feel that brewers working for big breweries are in a totally different universe from craft brewers, and in a lot of senses that is true.

How did you make the transition?

My basic curiosity, I think. Even though I was working for Carlsberg, I had my eyes and ears and taste buds open to all kinds of other interesting stuff, besides those nice but standard lagers that I was taking care of. I did a lot of traveling during those years with Carlsberg.

In particular, in the mid-90s I was appointed to be the technical liaison between the head office in Copenhagen and Carlsberg-Tetley in the U.K. So I had to travel there about a week each month, and my very good friends at Carlsberg-Tetley made a big point of introducing me to traditional English beer styles.

I had this typically snobbish Danish attitude towards real ale, that it was something warm and flat and often not very nice. But these guys knew where to find the really good stuff and it was an eye-opener. Wow, I thought, these beer styles are so different to what I’m used to brewing, and they can be very, very good.

Was there a craft brewing movement in Denmark at that time?

No, not whatsoever. Only a few years later, I had my introduction to American craft brewing, particularly on the West Coast. I saw what was going on there—I didn’t know anything about it, but I realized when you go into a supermarket in Oregon or Washington or California, there was a huge variety of different beers with strange-looking labels and odd names and weird ingredients. Being curious, I sampled all I could, and I was totally fascinated by all the variety.

This was in the nineties?

The early nineties, yes. I had no idea I would ever change my own career path, so I started proposing all kinds of product development inside Carlsberg because I thought all these beer styles were so interesting and needed to be explored. I didn’t have much success in that respect.

But Carlsberg has the Jacobsen pilot brewery, don’t they?

Yes, they jumped on the wagon as well, but that happened quite a few years later. Carlsberg only took the decision when they had seen that craft brewing was really catching on with the Danish market.

When did you found Nørrebro?

At the very end of the nineties, I was beginning to ask myself if I wanted to finish my career being a Carlsberg brewer. I was extremely lucky in that I had a good friend who had made a lot of money, and he offered to sponsor a project that would allow me to work full time on getting a craft brewery up and running. That caused me to jump at the occasion, because all of a sudden, I had a chance to do something where my expertise was.

What was your first venture in the new company?

We brewed a handful of beers to begin with, most of them were quite inspired by American craft beer. We did one that is still one of our best sellers, called New York Lager, which is a pre-Prohibition-style American lager, very, very heavily inspired by Brooklyn Lager. I had met Garrett Oliver: he’s helped me quite a lot, and been a big inspiration.

Our most popular beer is another of the handful I mentioned earlier. That has a Danish name, because on the street in Copenhagen where our restaurant and brewery is, there used to be a previous brewery called the Ravnsborg. So we named the beer after that, Ravnsborg Red. It’s kind of inspired by New Belgium’s Fat Tire, but it’s got a bit more character to it. We were extremely lucky with that beer. It appeals to people who are used to drinking standard Danish lagers, because it’s not that wild or big or strong or bitter, and it still has the complexity so more experienced craft beer drinkers find it a good beer.

Which of your beers have you most enjoyed developing?

To this point, it would be the Old Odense that we brewed with Sam Calagione, because it’s just so different, not just in terms of aroma and taste, but in the way it is produced. It’s unique. Because first we boil the brewing liquor on fir branches, there’s virtually no hops in it, and we use all these strange herbs and maple syrup, then there’s the souring of the beer during fermentation, which makes it sort of a hybrid between a traditional ale and a lambic-style beer.

You began exporting to the US?

About two years ago. It doesn’t knock us out with volume, but that is something we were well aware of from the outset because of the price structure. Our beers are quite expensive, so we knew not to expect big volume, but it’s steady, and spread out nicely, so I’m quite happy with it.

What similarities and differences do you find between the Danish and American craft markets?

To take the similarities first, which I think dominate, over here it’s kind of a grassroots culture that grew out of consumers and brewers wanting more variety. Even though Americans usually say that Danish lager beer is nice and has more character to it than there is to North American standard lager, it was still so dominant here—until five or six years ago, it was 90-some percent of beer consumption here—in people’s minds, it was synonymous. Beer was Carlsberg or Tuborg lager. And there were consumers and brewers who thought, uh-uh, there’s so much more to beer why not give it a shot?

That brings us to differences: we have a stronger beer culture than Americans do. If you measure per capita consumption, it’s much higher in Denmark. People think of beer as the original, traditional Danish beverage, so it’s very rooted in everybody’s culture and self-perception. So when the craft beer movement started, you felt as if the market was insatiable. Everybody was craving more. We’ve been giving a lot of tours at our brewpub since we opened, and I could feel that people were not just interested in what we were doing on an intellectual basis, or because they liked the beer. I could feel we were giving them a kind of pride in our original beverage. I know it sounds a bit pompous, but I believe it to be true.

It sounds like the interest was much broader than what we’d call the beer geek crowd.

Oh, yes. Again if you look at figures, if you look at sales, we have gone from zero to around four percent of the market, a number it’s taken the American craft beer revolution a quarter of a century to achieve. It’s been totally crazy.

Will it continue to grow?

We’ve seen what you saw in the States in the mid-nineties: it’ still growing, but at what I’d call a “normal” rate of 10 to 15 percent per year, compared to 2003-5, when it was growing at 150 to 200 percent per year. Wow, gold rush.

We opened in 2000, and we’re now one of the veteran companies in the Danish beer revolution. There was a small handful of others that preceded us, but the really big explosion came afterwards. No one knows exactly how many there are, but it’s somewhere around 130. There are still a lot of new ones popping up.

These include both microbreweries and brewpubs?

Not so many that are brewpubs. It’s mostly small traditional microbreweries. And again, a similarity that we talked about earlier: most are being started up by former homebrewers who believe that the market’s there, we have something to offer, let’s give it a shot.

Among American craft brewers, you seem to have most in common with Dan Carey, who also has extensive formal training. Have you met him?

Only very briefly, but he’s high on my list of guest brewers I’d really like to persuade to come across. Yes, he’s unusual in the States. I’ve met a few who after getting started in craft brewing then go on for training. Dan Gordon studied in Munich.

You have a collaboration brew with Will Meyers at Cambridge Brew House planned this spring. What will you brew when you come over here?

The idea is to brew something that has some Scandinavian inspiration, so the plan is to brew a dark, strong lager with a bit of rye and a bit of smoked malt.

What do you do when you’re not brewing?

Watch TV and sleep! The brewing days are pretty long, and it is very much a combination of a hobby and work right now—and I’m thoroughly enjoying it.

Germanic wheat beers were once widespread and survive today. But the greatest influence from the mid-19th century came not from an invader but from neighboring Bohemia, now the modern Czech Republic. The brewing revolution that started in Pilsen and produced the first golden lager beer was soon manifest in Poland. Breweries that had been built on hills in the mountainous Tatra region were found to be ideal for digging deep, cold cellars in which the new-style pilsner beer could be stored or lagered for several months.

But Poland also had a Monty Python moment. At the same time as pilsner beer was changing the methods of brewing, something completely different was making an appearance in the Baltic states. The British were no slouches where empire was concerned, but their only involvement in the east was to export substantial quantities of a potent black beer called Baltic porter. It is a wonderful irony of brewing history that, just as golden lager began to transform brewing practice in central and eastern Europe, a beer that broke all the new rules by using warm fermentation and dark, roasted malts also put down deep roots in those countries.

A Brewing Aristocrat

For centuries, brewing in Poland had been a small-scale operation run either by farmers or town councils and strictly controlled by the church or local dukes. In the 19th century, a definable commercial brewing industry began to develop due in the main to the enormous power of the ruling Habsburg dynasty that ran the Austro-Hungarian empire.

One of the key participants in the new brewing industry of that period was Archduke Albrecht Friedrich von Habsburg. He inherited vast swathes of land in Galicia and Silesia and was encouraged by his father to go into brewing on the grounds that “if you own land and make beer, my son, you can’t go wrong.” The archduke’s first brewery was built in 1846 high above the small town of Cieszyn in the Silesia region, a stone’s throw from the Czech border. It was a fortuitous choice. for Cieszyn had a steelworks and there were many thirsty throats to refresh.

In the manner of aristocrats in the German-speaking countries of Bavaria and Austria, the archduke at first made wheat beer at Cieszyn, but he switched to cold fermentation when pilsen burst on the brewing scene in the 1840s. As a result of the brewery’s dominant position above the town, it was a comparatively simple matter to dig deep lager cellars for cold-fermented beer.

The archduke’s brewery prospered and within five years he summoned the best engineers and water experts to join him for an expedition into the forests of the Zywiec [zhiv-y-etz] region of Galicia to find a spring that could supply pure water for a bigger brewery than Cieszyn. A suitable site was found and a local priest blessed the plot. Within weeks, the plant was under construction and in 1856 the new Archducal Brewery of Zywiec was registered with the Austrian authorities. It used all the new technologies of the industrial age, with lager beer stored for between three and eight months in deep cellars cooled by rooms above that were packed with ice cut from rivers and lakes in winter.

This year’s World Cup is being hosted by the entire country of Germany. Amazingly, one of the major sponsors this year is Anheuser-Busch, the brewers of Budweiser. In order to gain worldwide appeal, A-B is spending multiple millions to sponsor soccer events in the U.S. and other parts of the world. Germany’s Bitburger brand will also have a role in advertising the 2006 World Cup.

For some time, A-B has sponsored various soccer events in this country, including a variety of beer cans saluting the World Cup. A great number of commemorative items (such as tap handles in the shape of a soccer ball, various wearables, lighted signs, metal tackers and bar mirrors) have been issued by A-B to promote soccer in America. The majority of these collectables were issued when the U.S. hosted the World Cup in 1994.

The Tortoise & the Beer

Certain brands of beer have become famous simply through their sponsorship of national teams. For example, many soccer fans know the Q on the Argentinean team stands for Quilmes, the largest selling beer in Argentina.

In Brazil, it is Brahma that soccer fans know. An animated turtle pitchman turns into a soccer superstar and steals a can of Brahma beer that falls off of a beer delivery truck. In Canada, Molson has even named their energy-spiked entry Kick; its packaging features graphics reflective of a soccer theme.

For years now, Carlsberg’s marketing divisions in both Denmark and Canada have produced hundreds of soccer-themed pieces of advertising. One memorable Canadian piece required you to collect roughly 50 different bottle caps. Each cap depicted a different country participating in the World Cup. Carlsberg has even issued a cooler shaped like a soccer ball.

Brown is a breezy and entertaining writer who adds new details to familiar subjects. For example, many writers have discussed how the great microbiologist, Louis Pasteur, while working for Carlsberg, was the first person to see a yeast cell with a microscope. But Brown explains why Pasteur was working for Carlsberg-because Pasteur, a patriotic Frenchman, hated Germans and was happy to help a Danish company gain a competitive advantage over German brewers.

Brown has cogent criticisms of the Campaign for Real Ale and its allies. If real ale remains stuck at 10 percent of the British beer market, he argues, it’s because CAMRA and other ale aficionados haven’t given outsiders a reason to join their club. He visits the Great British Beer Festival and finds it an event hostile to new drinkers who might be put off by special members-only lines that enable CAMRA members to skip the lengthy queue to get in, or by a program that simply lists breweries alphabetically, without offering any explanation of what the breweries are or what they make. “The lasting impression” of the GBBF, Brown writes, “is that this is a club and you are not a member. Nor would you want to be.”

Instead of complaining, Brown writes, real ale lovers have to make their product inviting to newcomers-including advertising in an intelligent, non-snobbish way.

Man Walks into a Pub is a promising debut by an important new British beer writer.

On the river itself, three linked barges haul rice from the fertile central plain to the north. In the dark, they slide past modern high-rises and hotels; past the Grand Palace on the east bank, the sprawling complex of temples and royal residences built by Thailand’s former kings; and on the west bank, Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn.

On the Thonburi side, activity stirs along the klongs—the small canals that thread from the river through the city. Bangkok lived on the water until recent times. The river and canals determined patterns of building and trading, until the last major klong was filled in in the fifties. One look at Bangkok traffic and you might wonder if a modern road system was really progress.

The famous floating markets are almost gone, although some still operate outside the urban center. Here in the city, the klongs carry limited trade. A few small, flat-bottomed boats glide from the night flower and vegetable markets with fresh goods to sell to the individual houses, small shops and shanties that stand on stilts above the water.

Some homes are very humble, with one room and a corrugated tin roof. The older homes are built of teak panels, carved on the outside. Spirit houses, models of traditional Thai homes, sit atop pillars with offerings of fresh flowers and food for the earth spirit that was displaced when the human house was built. It seems that every house, grand or modest, has space for hanging pots of orchids, birdcages, or paths laid out in pieces of colored tile.

After a morning on the river, the visitor takes away an impression of contrast: old with new, spiritual with secular, east with west, and lavish with squalid. It’s hard to say what real “Thai-ness” is about.

Images of Siam

In the West, the image of Thailand has been shaped almost entirely by non-Thai forces that are inaccurate or incomplete: “The King and I,” which is banned in Thailand for its disrespectful depiction of the king; “The Beach,” the Leonardo di Caprio film of Western backpackers seeking an Asian utopia; or Pat Pong, the garish and notorious red light district that developed to cater to soldiers on R & R during Viet Nam.

In the past decade, however, the most faithful and influential ambassador for the country has been its cuisine. Western countries “discovered” Thai food in the eighties and nineties, and Thai beer came along for the ride.

In some countries the challenge for a beer lover is to taste the whole range of traditional beer styles—a tough task in England, and a downright daunting one in Belgium. In Ireland, by contrast, one style dominates the beer scene, and the real pleasure is to explore all the varied settings for enjoying a good pint of stout.

In Thailand, you can’t talk about the beer without starting with the food, since the place of Thai beer is to play the supporting role to one of the world’s most varied cuisines.

The Flavors of Thailand

Thailand is at a culinary crossroads of Asia, with Burma to the northwest, Laos and Cambodia to the east, Malaysia to the south, and the giant neighbors of China and India to the north and the far west. All these cultures have contributed to Thai cuisine over the centuries and the result is unique.

The food is a balance of hot, sour, spicy and sweet notes. Pungent fish sauce combines with creamy coconut milk and tangy lime in an aromatic curry; fiery seasonings pair with crisp, fresh vegetables in distinctive salads; fresh fruit for dessert is served with sugar for dipping, dusted with powdered chili.

The Thai cook draws upon a huge range of spices and flavorings: ginger and the related galanga, garlic and shallots, coriander leaves and roots, Thai basil, kaffir lime leaves, lemon grass, fresh lime juice, and over a dozen types of chili.

In the tradition of palace-style cooking, hours are lavished on multi-step dishes, that are then beautifully garnished with fruits and vegetables carved into intricate leaf and flower shapes.

But good flavor is not the prerogative of the rich. Thais seem to cook—and eat—everywhere. At all hours in the cities, on the sidewalks, under the bypasses, next to the water, cooks are slicing fresh ingredients for the world’s best fast food.

In many cases in US restaurants, Thai fare has been dialed back to appeal to American tastes. The results are somewhat sweeter, richer, and certainly less spicy than the same dishes in Thailand. The same is true even in the restaurants in Thailand that cater to foreigners. The legendary heat of some dishes is an acquired taste, even among the Thais; children are given milder food than adults.

The Danes (along with their cousins, the Norwegians) were the globe-trotting conquerors from the 700s through the first century of the second millennium. The Viking word for bitter was “aul(t).” As the Vikings successfully, and repeatedly, conquered coastal towns in the British Isles, the letter “t” was eventually dropped from this Viking word and “ale” came into being. On a similar linguistic note, the modern-day Danish word for beer is “øl.”

All this, of course, is nothing more than a diversion from the opening statement: Denmark may be a land of lager. And lager drinkers command the overwhelming majority of Danish beer drinkers. Soon after the lager revolution that began in the 1840s way down south in Munich, Vienna and Pilsen, the Danes, like beer drinkers over most of Europe, turned away in droves from their traditional beers—dark ales and weak table beers—and readily embraced the clear, golden lagers developed abroad.

The 1850s and 1860s saw a burst in brewery openings in Denmark, all concentrating on lager production. The most famous story of them all, a story that goes down in the annals of Great Brewing History, involves Denmark’s most internationally famous brewery, Carlsberg.

Carlsberg

Jacob Christian Jacobsen, born in 1811, followed his father into the brewing business in Copenhagen. JC, as he became known later in life, also shared his father’s interest in scientific brewing matters. When JC heard of the new lager beer experiments being undertaken by German, Austrian and Czech brewers, he set off in the pursuit of higher brewing knowledge. He became a student of Gabriel Sedlmayr II, the famed owner and master brewer of Munich’s Spaten Brewery.

Sedlmayer, along with his friend and rival, Anton Dreher of Vienna, were the pioneers in developing lagers in the 1840s. From The Book of Carlsberg, it’s written that JC “managed to secure two pots of yeast from Brewer Sedlmayr.” Two pots of the new lager yeast were indeed a fine thing for JC to obtain.

But he was in Munich at the time and he wanted to brew with this yeast in Copenhagen, a not-so-mere 600 miles north. JC was in a tough spot. How could he transport a perishable, living food product such as yeast, a product that needed to be kept constantly cool, all the way home? It was 1845. Refrigeration was still some years off in the future. The story told by Carlsberg is that JC placed the pots of yeast under his stovepipe hat during that several-weeks-long stagecoach ride home, cooling the pots with water from streams at every coach stop.

Once home, JC brewed his first batch of lager using his mother’s washtub as a fermenter and lagering vessel. JC’s lager was a success. He next brewed a larger, professional batch that became the first commercial bottom-fermented Danish lager.

JC was given a royal license to lager his beer in the cellars under the Copenhagen city ramparts. He soon established a new brewery just outside the old city gates in an area called Valby. There was good water in Valby and also a new railway line for bringing in supplies and shipping out beer. Just as important to a lager brewer, Valby contained the one and only hill of any size in the otherwise flat, greater Copenhagen area. JC knew that he could dig cellars into this hill (called a “berg” in Danish), in which he could age his beers. JC named the new brewery after his son, Carl, who was five years old at the time. Thus in 1847 the new brewery was named Carlsberg—Carl’s hill.

Carlsberg, along with its totally owned subsidiaries, Tuborg and Wiibroe, today remains the largest brewer and seller of beer in Denmark, with a 70 percent market share. Carlsberg is also the seventh largest brewing group in the world. But as large as Carlsberg is in its home territory, it does have a few competitors.