Brewing For Impact celebrates Brewmaster Garrett Oliver’s thirty year anniversary at Brooklyn Brewery. Garrett collaborated with seven breweries around the world to showcase fonio, a remarkable West African grain that can light the way towards a sustainable and equitable brewing future. Each collaboration will also support the Michael James Jackson Foundation’s scholarship program for BIPOC brewery and distillery professionals. Learn more about Brewing For Impact here and look for more releases throughout 2024.
Carlsberg’s iconic green logo and beloved lagers are easy to find around the world. But the real global impact of Carlsberg comes from the Carlsberg Research Lab, founded in Copenhagen in 1875.
This lab is where chemist S. P L. Sørensen invented the pH scale, earning several Nobel Prize nominations. It’s where the yeast strain Saccharomyces carlsbergensis was isolated by Emil Chr. Hansen, giving rise to the modern lager yeast. And it’s where our Brewmaster Garrett Oliver has been collaborating with the Carlsberg team for over 20 years to push the boundaries of beer.
While putting together his Brewing For Impact collaborations, Garrett got in touch with his friend and fellow “alco-naut,” Zoran Gojkovic, Director of Brewing Science and Technology at Carlsberg. Zoran was intrigued by Garrett’s description of the grain and wanted to truly capture the flavors of fonio. But to do it, he wanted to do something extraordinary: brew a beer made with 100% fonio grain.
For most beers, the mash bill is made up of a mix of barley malts and other grains to balance flavor and fermentation. Take wheat beers, for example – despite the name, many wheat beers contain roughly 50% barley malt to build the base of the recipe. And while Garrett has brewed plenty of fonio-forward beers, he’d never tried using fonio as the sole grain.
Zoran expanded on the challenges of brewing with fonio. “Fonio is an amazing West African grain, but it presented several technical challenges for us to learn from and overcome – especially as there are no recipes for a beer like this. However, the extremely clean, crisp beer we’ve made is sure to set curious minds ablaze as we continue to test the potential of fonio in brewing and beyond.”
“You’ve fermented everything, you’ve tasted everything,” Zoran said to Garrett. “But I bet you never tasted anything so good as this.”
The next surprise came into view as Garrett and Zoran poured their glasses, deep within the Carlsberg cellars: “It’s perfectly clear! It looks like sake, or champagne,” Garrett said of the sparkling fonio beer.
Zoran responded, “It’s not sake, it’s not champagne, it’s a lager beer, brewed with fonio.” The beer features notes of apricots, white peaches, and melon from the fonio, all wrapping up with a vibrant and delicate finish. As Garrett puts it, “this is gonna blow people’s minds.”
Garrett and Zoran also highlighted the stylish bottle, which Garrett was quick to point out was originally created to bottle beer before champagne caught on to bottle conditioning. It’s a worthy vessel for such a remarkable beer – as Garrett puts it, “if you really want something to be delicious, it has to look delicious.”
The label design was created by Kevin Bongang, a commercial muralist, designer, and painter who was born in Cameroon, West Africa. His roots in fonio’s ancestral home come through in the vivid shapes and colors that leap from the bottle label.
Lynsey Woods, Carlsberg Global Brand Director, told Garrett, “This beer is living proof of what happens when curious minds come together to make something special, both in the beer and in the art and design of the bottle.”
“To be 170-plus years old and to be able to make something new is just spectacular.” Garrett says. “So bravo, Dr. Gojkovic – I think you may have discovered the future of beer.”
Carlsberg Fonio Lager will be available as a limited release from the Home of Carlsberg in Copenhagen, Denmark, first pouring on July 25, 2024. Follow Garrett and Carlsberg for more on their collaboration, and follow us for more to come from Brewing For Impact.
Looking for more stories and beers from Brewing For Impact? Check out Garrett’s work with Maison Kalao, Thornbridge Brewery, and Omnipollo, and stay tuned for more.