Translated by Mette Rurup from the original Dutch article by Cees Groenewegen, Portugal Portal, Published on April 26th 2024. Read the original Dutch version here.
Suddenly, there was the unexpected moment of decision. A house that was too good to be true, idyllic, with a river and an orange grove, a house to swoon over. But to be decided right now, because there were more candidates. Fortunately, the thought process about emigrating started years ago, so Mette and Pieter didn’t hesitate for a moment. A job was quit, a house sold, stuff given to the thrift store, and off they went to the other side of Europe. The gentle south of Portugal was preferred over the USA, for example, because of its political stability and, of course, its climate. And craft beer was only just emerging in Portugal. A good thing, because Mette and Pieter were still far too young to rest on their laurels and so they suddenly went from being hobby brewers to professional brewers. Beasty Beers saw the light of day and even before Mette and Pieter could harvest their oranges, they were already shipping beer throughout Portugal.
No horror stories like in the television series ‘No going back’, that we can enjoy? No, says Mette. ‘Of course, not everything went as we thought it would, but that’s rarely the case in life. And some things worked out better. We were taken by surprise when we found this house, but because of that, things went much faster than we had expected. Otherwise, it would have taken much longer for Beasty Beers to be on the market. All the paperwork surrounding the start-up of Beasty Beers, it’s a food product and strict rules apply, wasn’t too bad.’
Craft beer and special beer
Not the same. All craft beers are special beers but not all special beers are craft beers. To use the term craft beer you must only use the best ingredients, you have to be an independent brewer, and your brewing volume cannot exceed certain limits.
Yes, of course, don’t underestimate the importance of the Portuguese beer market! There is a reason that the two major Portuguese beer brands sponsor everything and anything. As a result, the marketing costs included in the price of an ‘imperial’ in your neighborhood café are enormous. Craft beers hardly put any money into marketing, they prefer to spend it on top-quality ingredients. Of course, you’ll never grow very big with that frame of mind, but if you like beer, you don’t have to. Then you want to make a beautiful product that you believe in. That you want to drink yourself and that you want to share with your friends. In the long run that’s the best marketing there is, after all, a good product always wins, says Mette. ‘In the past, wine may have been more “upper-class” than beer, but now that has become equivalent, with the rise of craft. Craft beer is trending, also in combination with food, food pairing, gastronomy. There are even beer sommeliers.’
‘We started brewing in the Netherlands for the love of beer. Beer is a lot of fun, there are endless variations and recipes. Pieter can also fully indulge in the technical side of things. To brew good quality beer, you need to understand the processes so that you have control over the taste. I have less affinity with the technical side, but I really enjoy brewing beer and I love the beer culture. A friendly atmosphere, where everyone is welcome. I help a lot with the brewing, but while Pieter loses himself in raw materials and calculations, I get to work on the website.’
Mette and Pieter are animal lovers. On the website of Beasty Beers, dog Selin figures as a member of the team, her job is in Public Relations, she is a friend to everyone. Animals are everywhere at Beasty Beers. All beers have an animal on the label and you will also come across them constantly on the website. A chameleon, a hoopoe, but also just a cow.
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‘What strikes us most about Portuguese culture is that it feels like the Netherlands in the 80s, from our youth. Much more is done with personal contact, online is less important. You still have a post office and a bank branch here [you don’t have these in the Netherlands anymore – Ed.]. That feeling is strengthened by the fact that our lives are now more like they were then, we get to know a lot of new people, we have let go of the settled life and all possibilities for the future are open again. We can choose all over again how we organize our lives. Now, we have a life from which we don’t need vacation.”
Beasty Beers will never use ingredients such as rice, corn or sugar as a cheap substitute for barley, but will limit itself to traditional ingredients. For most beers, these are water, grain, hops and yeast. Very occasionally, a beer style requires additional ingredients, such as coriander seeds, chamomile and bitter orange peel in Belgian witbier. But most of the time, the flavor is just created by a good selection of hops and also a smart approach to the brewing process. Good brewing doesn’t happen on autopilot, it’s a process of staying sharp, calculating, testing and adjusting. The fact that both Mette and Pieter are graduated biologists helps a lot.
Buy?
Mette and Pieter immediately set up the distribution on a large scale. Throughout Portugal, it is delivered directly to consumers via a state-of-the-art website. This was important in order to quickly build a critical mass, selling their production directly to consumers. You can buy beer packages, but also monthly subscriptions with which you constantly have a supply of beautiful beers and also a surprise every month. Subscribers also receive background information about the beers and the brewing process, and about the ups and downs of Mette and Pieter and Beasty Beers. As a subscriber, you can experience the adventure at first hand [or more accurately: second hand – Ed.].
Portugal Portal Reader offer: get a beer subscription from Beasty Beers no later than May 31, 2024 and get a 30% discount on your first beer package! Click here and use coupon code ‘Portugal Portal’.
For the time being, beer is only delivered in Portugal, clothing and accessories can also be ordered in other countries. At the time of writing, the website is already completely ready in English; Dutch and Portuguese will follow soon. And then perhaps Spanish, Spain is also a nice market for craft beer.
Mette: ‘My favorite is the Hazy Sunrise. For me, beer tastes best when you drink it outside in the sun. I like light, refreshing summer beers. We developed the recipe for Hazy Sunrise, a wheat beer, in the Netherlands. Back there, the sun is often just a vague memory, and this beer gave me that sunny feeling.’
Pieter: ‘Thirsty Dolphin is my favorite, because of the taste, but also because of the emotional connection. Thirsty Dolphin was the very first beer we brewed ourselves, still in the Netherlands, and a lot of preparation had gone into it. We wanted to brew a lager beer. This requires low temperatures and we feared that later, in warm Portugal, this would become expensive and environmentally unfriendly. That’s why we opted for a California lager: a lager beer fermented at relatively high temperatures with specially selected lager yeast. In addition, I had completely ‘submerged’ myself in water. That may sound strange, but the mineral composition of water is very important for all phases of the brewing process and therefore also for the final taste. That also took a lot of time. So it was very exciting to taste our first beer, six weeks after the brewing day. We had made all kinds of mistakes during brewing and fermentation, we knew that. Did we succeed?
We poured two glasses. It foamed, we smelled, tasted, and… it worked! We loved it!
That was a moment of happiness, because I realized: this might work. And I still get a bit emotional when I drink a Thirsty Dolphin, because it symbolizes our new life in Portugal, which actually started on that day in the Netherlands.
