Is This the World Microbrew Capital?
We Americans like superlatives. The best, the biggest, the fastest, the smallest. If it’s not a superlative, we’re not likely to be that interested. The second-biggest skyscraper in the world? Meh. The third fastest race car? Not so much. I tend to seek out superlatives when looking for interesting stories to write about, but occasionally a superlative will find me. Even better when the superlative involves beer.
A clever marketing idea has made an otherwise unremarkable town called Žalec into a sort of beer destination. They installed a “beer fountain,” which dispenses beer into special glasses fitted with a chip to regulate the number of refills, in the town park. In a matter of months, Žalec became a destination for bus tours and tourists. You can get the same beers that they rotate through the beer fountain elsewhere. It really is just a gimmick, but a fun one, and one that has produced quick results.
Beer clearly has an enthusiastic audience and draws tourists. This got me to thinking how my own new hometown could draw more tourists through its unusually high number of microbreweries per capita.
I grew up in the United States but have been an expat for decades. My adopted hometown of Kamnik, population 13,000, nestled at the foot of the Alps and featuring three castles, can make a claim to being the beer capital of Slovenia. The town boasts six microbreweries (more, if we consider the greater Kamnik area), all of which sell out of all they can produce and most of which have won international awards. The largest of them is Maister Brewery (producing around 18,000 liters per month) and Mali Grad Brewery (10,000 liters per month), so they are indeed micro, but the quantity of them in one small alpine town is distinctive. In addition to these two larger microbreweries, you can find Meninc (run by a farmer who grows his own hops), Lampelj (with beers named after Slavic gods), Mister (which brews at the Mali Grad brewery, but from its own recipes, and whose owner hosts a weekly vlog on adventures in microbrewing) and Barut (run by a team of chemists who use very exotic, experimental methods and ingredients, like wild yeast). A few minutes out of Kamnik proper, you can find Adam Ravbar, one of the first microbreweries in Slovenia, in the form of what is locally described as a “pizza pub:” a pizzeria that makes its own beer, but primarily to sell to its restaurant customers; and Hopsbrew, a microbrewery with a new beer every month, run by a Russian couple transplanted to Slovenia.
A few decades back, Slovenia was full of microbreweries, with around 200 in operation. They were gradually bought up by the two national beer giants, Union and Lasko, and systematically closed, to eliminate them as competition. The result was a duopoly of beer for the last half-century. For decades, entering a bar in Slovenia and ordering a beer was only a question of choosing red (the color of the Union can) or green (the Lasko). Both beers are fine, if undistinguished. But that was that. Then, slowly, starting in the late 90s, a few pizza pubs started making beer, as well as a few truly independent microbrewers. Now there are between 60 and 80 in the country (no one seems to know exactly how many, and some are household-small-scale operations, some only open periodically, so only about two dozen are active players, with their beer available beyond their locality). Even Union and Lasko (both now owned by Heineken) started making “microbrew style” beers, to join the wave. Slovenia once more has a rich and award-winning clutch of quality microbrewers, but one source told me that the government’s policy does nothing to support them. A recent law halved the tax that microbrewers have to pay on their product, but it is still by far the highest tax in Europe, and tax must be paid when beer is brewed, not when it is sold — a policy which makes no sense, since some beers have to age and won’t be sold for months or years, meaning taxes are due long before income is generated. This approach is laughably behind the times, and will have to change, but it means that microbrewers have an uphill battle. One of the most successful, Bevog, decided to establish their brewery just across the border, in Austria, because Slovenian bureaucracy was so counterproductive, a move that is very embarrassing for Slovenia’s ministry.
Just why there are so many microbreweries in Kamnik is down to one thing: the water. It turns out that Kamnik has unusually good, pure water. I always knew that the water from the tap tasted good, but water usually is only remarked upon if it tastes bad (or is some color other than transparent), so I hadn’t given it much thought. Kamnik is an idyllic, pristine clean Alpine town, so it was no surprise that the water should be good here, but why is it better here than in the neighboring municipalities? I asked some of the brewers and they all told me that they chose Kamnik to brew their beer to take advantage of the water. “It is very soft,” said Miha from Barut Brewery, “which means that it is like a tabula rasa, a clean first layer into which you can mix other ingredients. If you have hard water, which will affect the taste of the beer, then you might have to treat it with chemicals before it is suitable to brew with.” In Kamnik, the water straight from the tap is ideal. Oddly enough, if you drive about five minutes out of town, the water is completed different. Anja of Mali Grad Brewery told me that the water in Nozice, a village a short drive from Kamnik, has water that is “hard,” full of calcium deposits, so that when you boil water, a film develops. Her husband and fellow brewer, Urban, once prepared a stout in Nozice and thought it was great, but couldn’t make a good pale ale. When they moved their operations to Kamnik, his pale ale was perfect, but the stout recipe was lousy and had to be changed. The only difference was the water, but as Frenk from Meninc said, “Water is the main ingredient in beer. We tend to think of hops or barley, but beer is mostly water. If the water isn’t good, then the beer won’t be good.”
Having hosted a local beer festival, Pivofest, in Kamnik I’ve had the pleasure of tasting the local beers and interviewing the knowledgeable, passionate brewers. But I’m an American hungry for superlatives. I started to wonder whether Kamnik might actually be a superlative, hosting the most microbreweries per capita in the world.
First off, let’s take a look at the competition, and then we’ll do a bit of math. In the US, Portland, Maine has the most microbreweries per capita, with one microbrewery per 3941 people. In Europe, Bamberg, Germany is the “beer capital” but it’s claim to fame are large-scale breweries (there are 9 major ones, and the number of microbreweries is not widely published). Focusing on the big 9 means that Bamberg has one big brewery per 7888 people.
But little Kamnik, Slovenia, population around 12,000, has one microbrewery per 2166 people — possibly the most per capita anywhere. This would require more dedicated research (and someone better at math than I am) to determine officially, followed by a call to the Guinness World Records folks, but I think we’ve got a shot.
If indeed Kamnik is the “microbrew capital” of Europe or the world, what to do with this fact, to transform it into benefit for the town and its admirable brewers? I would borrow a note from Žalec but set up not just one beer fountain but a series situated throughout the walkable town center. You get a glass with a chip inside it from the local tourist office, then set out with a map or an app to wind your way through town, on a sort of treasure hunt to find the six beer fountains. Each one dispenses a glass of a chosen beer from one of the six breweries. If your chip indicates that you tastes all six, then when you return it to the tourist office, you get a prize. Well, that’s my idea of a good time. Maybe we can add a seventh fountain, just for regular old tap water, Kamnik’s other claim to fame.
