Once Craft Beer’s Most Exciting Yeast, Kveik Is Quietly Thriving in Norway’s Farmhouse Breweries
This fall, when fans of rustic farmhouse ales meet up again at their annual three-day festival in Hornindal, western Norway, they can raise their glasses to a pair of milestones: 2026 will mark the 10th anniversary of the Kornølfestival, the main gathering of the Norwegian farmers who brew their own beer and those who love it. Additionally, this year counts as more or less a full decade since kveik, the strange yeast used to ferment those beers, first started making waves in the craft world.
Those who have attended the festival describe it as unlike almost anything else. Ron Pattinson, a beer historian and writer who speaks at beer events around the globe, made it to Hornindal last autumn.
“It’s one of the best beer festivals I’ve ever been to,” he says. “There were all these people who brew these really idiosyncratic beers. You could talk to them. They’d tell you all about it. You had some really, really traditional Norwegian farmhouse styles, and then other people would be brewing IPAs and imperial stouts. The beers were all over the place.”
That split between rustic farmhouse styles and modern craft echoes the journey of kveik. Mostly unknown until a decade or so ago, that historic yeast family has taken an incredible ride in the modern era, lasting longer and spreading wider than many craft beer trends.
Coming Out of Obscurity
By 2016, blog posts from a then-obscure Oslo-based writer named Lars Marius Garshol started to catch the attention of the global beer community. Culminating in a book on brewing that Gashol published in Norwegian that year, those writings showed that western Norway still had a surviving culture of farmhouse brewing that was unknown to outsiders at the time. Until that point, “farmhouse brewing” was generally thought to mean only a couple of styles from Belgium and northern France. Phil Markowski’s book “Farmhouse Ales: Culture and Craftsmanship in the European Tradition,” for example, published by Brewers Publications in 2004, makes no reference to Norway or kveik.
Joe Stange, executive editor of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine, recalls what the beer world — and, effectively, the world itself — knew about rural brewing at the time.
“When we were talking about farmhouse beer 15, 20 years ago, we were talking about saison and bière de garde,” he says. “Our whole paradigm for traditional brewing has changed because of this research, and kveik is part of that.”
It wasn’t just that outsiders learned about a surviving farmhouse beer culture and hitherto-unknown styles in a remote part of Norway. In September 2016, Garshol posted about some of the first lab analyses on kveik, which proved that the various kveik yeasts were genetically fairly diverse, though often related, and that what the Norwegian farmers had been using to brew sometimes included a mix of two or more strains.
“I don’t think I realized the extent to which that yeast would end up mattering. The idea that you could have a yeast that ferments cleanly at blood temperatures, that is really a game changer.”
Stories about kveik started to attract attention among brewers, both professional and amateur, especially when compared to other versions of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or brewer’s yeast, which generally works best under about 72 degrees, beyond which it can create off-flavors. By contrast, kveik was said to have no trouble making beers with clean flavor profiles at temperatures of 100 degrees or more.
And while traditional ale-yeast fermentations often take up to a week to complete, sometimes even getting “stuck,” kveik strains could complete fermentation in just a couple of days — or even faster. They were said to start quickly, too, sometimes with a very active fermentation visible within less than an hour, versus the normal lag time of a day or so for S. cerevisiae. And unlike many commercial yeasts, the kveik strains didn’t require building up a starter culture to ensure healthy fermentation. Drop even a small amount of kveik into wort, people said, and it would ferment out just fine.
At that time, Stange was living in Costa Rica, a sunny country where heat is normal. Most homebrewers don’t have much — or sometimes any — control over fermentation temperatures, which makes it hard to brew great beers.
“I don’t think I realized the extent to which that yeast would end up mattering,” he says. “The idea that you could have a yeast that ferments cleanly at blood temperatures, that is really a game changer.”
Over the next few years, the growing stories about kveik created a real buzz, inasmuch as a semi-domesticated fungus can have one. In 2019, the first U.S. kveik beer festival was held at District Brew Yards in Chicago, featuring beers from craft makers like Dovetail Brewery, Hacienda Beer Co., and the now-closed Around the Bend Beer Co. A writeup by ABV Chicago noted that “kveik is having a real moment. It’s something most brewers have been aware of for a few years now, but it’s just now starting to build a following with consumers.” By 2020, VinePair’s Mandy Naglich could accurately describe kveik as “trendy.”
Both Historic and Craft Roles
A few craft brewers clearly got into kveik because of their interest in historic Scandinavian beers. At Brewery Becker in Brighton, Mich., Matt Becker has long used kveik to make a spiced, gruit-like ale called Vargdricka. “Being faithful to the style means a lot to us,” Becker says. “The main thing kveik has done for us is allowing us to make our Vargdricka beer more authentic.”
More commonly, however, kveik was picked up by craft brewers who were putting out quick IPAs, barley wines, and other modern recipes, including an array of Kveik IPAs. Other brewers found ways to work it into dry, charismatic, mixed-fermentation beers, like Vasilios Gletsos at Wunderkammer Biermanufaktur in Albany, Vt. Brewing in a direct-fired copper kettle over burning wooden logs, Gletsos generally lets his beers ferment without controlling the temperature. Last December, Wunderkammer made VinePair’s list of the best breweries in the country, as chosen by professional brewers.
“There’s something very beneficial in the kinetics of it, how it performs, just on that kind of a level. You need something that’s really heat-tolerant,” Gletsos says. “What I really liked about the kveik strain was that it had this candied-orange characteristic that I felt could be amenable to many different styles of beer. The other technical aspect of it that I really like is it’s a heavy flocculator, so it drops out of suspension after [fermentation].”
Like many brewers in North America, Gletsos uses a version of the “Sigmund” Voss kveik strain, originally sourced from the brewer Sigmund Gjernes in Norway, and now sold by various yeast providers, including in a dry version. In his experience, the different versions of that yeast create different flavor profiles. The current strain he’s using, he says, seems to have more peachy, stone-fruit characteristics than the original orangey and citrusy aromas that he first noticed.
“When we were talking about farmhouse beer 15, 20 years ago, we were talking about saison and bière de garde. Our whole paradigm for traditional brewing has changed because of this research, and kveik is part of that.”
Other brewers have noted other differences among commercial kveik strains. Becker keeps his kveik yeast on a traditional wooden ring, using it to dry and store yeast before adding it to the next batch. After several years, he says, that plate-size hoop of braided wood is now home to multiple strains of kveik, and “whatever else” might have joined them. His beers don’t turn out the same, he says, if he uses a commercial kveik strain instead.
Despite the continuing success of kveik at some high-profile breweries, the spotlight does seem to have faded. When contacted for this article, one U.S. craft brewery said it stopped using kveik a few years ago. The kveik beer festival in Chicago was only held once, in 2019. In terms of global interest, Google Trends says that “kveik IPA” peaked in August 2020.
Stange sees kveik’s potential as unrealized.
“I don’t think it’s the most popular yeast among craft brewers,” he says. “There are definitely professional breweries who are using it and making great beer with it, beer that wins awards. But it’s still not as common as it could be.”
Though it’s not quite the same as brut IPA, glitter beer, and other once-hyped craft styles, the buzz around kveik is now a lot quieter.
To Brew and Serve
But in terms of the authentic farmhouse beers of western Norway, that won’t make a whit of difference. There, a handful of farmers are still using kveik to make beer for themselves, the way many rural families make their own preserves or any other foods they might need throughout the year. That tradition has probably been going on for about as long as modern humans have been living there. Hype doesn’t figure into it.
When asked about the festival, visitors like Pattinson cite the incredible natural beauty of the area, which includes rugged mountains, fjords, and other photo-worthy attractions. But for fans of beer history, the event offers something else. Garshol, who sits on the festival board, says that it has helped to ensure the local survival of farmhouse brewing, once under serious threat. It’s one of the only times when the farmer-brewers themselves can form connections, in an area where tough landscapes and hard winters often make travel difficult. Until the festival started, Garshol says, many of the brewers didn’t know that others were also making beer nearby.
For outsiders, it might seem like a chance to try a historic beverage in a beautiful landscape. But for locals, it’s also a way to show off a brewing tradition that was overlooked until 10 years ago.
“You get to see farmhouse brewing culture up close,” Garshol says. “I mean, just tasting the beers is almost impossible if you don’t go there. Theoretically, you could travel to Voss and try to find the farmhouse brewers and persuade them to give you beer, but it’s not going to be like here, where you have 40 of them sitting there, just waiting to serve you.”
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