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 takes only one brew to figure out this Nordic nation’s a two-fisted drinker. Like its Nordic neighbors, on one hand the country’s brewing industry is rife with taxation and regulation, while on the other hand its centuries-old drinking roots are ingrained in the culture. The good news is that, despite heavy government control and the stubborn domination of light lagers, the demand for change is bringing new variety to the northern beer scene.

Coming of Age

Microbreweries have come of age in Norway. “I know Ringnes and Hansa and all the biggest breweries have their own,” says Odd Pederson, pub manager at Mack’s, the world’s northernmost brewery. The times are changing for this nation whose beer drinking history dates back to the Bronze Age.

“Before we got our microbrewery, we didn’t test out so many different types of beers as we do today,” notes the Tromsø local. In the past, Mack’s would have to brew a minimum of 22,000 liters just to test out a new Christmas Beer. “Now we can scale it down to 800 liters. All the breweries are doing this, especially with the wheat beer,” he adds.

“I call our microbrewery Mack’s laboratory because that’s where we develop types of beer like wheat and ale, test out the yeast and improve the beer we have,” explains Pederson. “The last real test that we had was a Mack’s Christmas beer recipe from 1936. It was unfiltered and unpasteurized when we tasted it right off the tank, but it was really good, just pure beer.”

A beer festival held in Tromsø last summer is a sign that Norway is broadening its horizons. Pederson remembers the top beer at the event was Hobgoblin from England’s Wychwood Brewery—it was some 5.2% alcohol, very dark and had a fantastic taste. “This is what’s coming out of the microbrewery trend that’s going around the world,” says Pederson.

Brewing Craft

The growing craft beer market has everyone wanting to get a piece of the action these days. The Norwegian beer market’s two largest brewers, Carlsberg-Ringnes and Hansa-Borg which control over 85% of market, are testing the waters, but it’s the small new breweries that are making the biggest splash within the last ten years, mostly with their top-fermented ales.

HaandBryggeriet (“The Hand Brewery”), considered Norway’s smallest, in Drammen just outside Oslo run by a long-time homebrewer in his childhood house, is making a name for itself. The Nøgne ø (old Norwegian/Danish for “Naked Isle”), an independent microbrewery in Grimstad, started in 2002 by an airline pilot with a yen for brewing, is gaining a worldwide reputation amongst beer lovers for its American-influenced ales.

Oslo Mikrobryggeri, Scandinavia’s first microbrewery and brewpub founded in 1989, serves up a range of styles: pilsner, steam ale, porters and stouts.

Berentsens Brygghus in Egersund, on Norway’s southern tip, started out as a family cider business in 1895. With beers originally brewed by Aass (one of the best-known and oldest macro breweries in Norway, founded in 1834), it is now trying to stand on its own.

Although the craft beer movement is on a roll in Norway, there have been casualties. Baatbryggeriet, an up-and-coming microbrewery in Vestnes on the country’s northwest coast, called it quits in just three years. Making a go of it with just two brews to their name was hard enough but, thanks to government restrictions, spreading the word was nearly impossible. Breweries have their hands tied when it comes to publicity.