A brewery with soul

Bøgedal Bryghus was started in 2004 by Casper Vorting, immediately after he left Brøckhouse — Denmark's first microbrewery — which he had helped build up. Gitte Holmboe joined the brewery a couple of years later to take over the recipes and the contact with customers.

Bøgedal is Scandinavia's only all-gravity brewery. The beer runs from vessel to vessel by hoist — entirely without pumps. The wort is boiled over a wood fire in a kettle shaped like a bull, built by the brewmaster himself. As it boils, coagulated protein is skimmed off.

The whole process is done by hand and takes its time, because we believe that is what is best for the beer. Pumps are hard on beer — and we do not want to be. We are also the only commercial brewery in the world to brew the historic GODTØL, drawing on old Danish tradition: a strong, rich beer with a great deal of residual sweetness.

Every brew is unique, and for many years each carried its brew number, type and aroma hop. Today most of them have names, simply to keep things clear.

Does it give a better or a worse result? There is no single answer, but our position is clear: the beer becomes softer and rounder in taste. You see the same tendency in wine, where the great wines are often moved by pressure or by gravity.

For Bøgedal, doing without pumps is a core value: the structure of many organic molecules is fragile. Handled roughly, they change — and the taste changes with them.

The wish is simply that the beer keeps its original taste and comes across clean.

Ours is a small, exclusive production of a little over 25,000 bottles a year. The beer is unfiltered and unpasteurised. Once fermentation is finished it is bottled in 75 or 36.5 cl champagne bottles and carbonated naturally by conditioning in bottle or keg.

We use mainly Danish malt. The spent mash feeds our cattle, and for that reason the malt is organic — as are most of our beers. The brewery is certified under organic control and approved by FindSmiley. Only when we use wild berries or leaves picked outside certified land do we set the organic label aside.

The farm's production of handmade beer has our primary attention, but it has never been enough on its own. We see the beer as part of a larger whole: the farm, ourselves and the world around us — nature, culture and respect for genuine craftsmanship.

Gitte Holmboe and Casper Vorting have made history at Bøgedal by reinterpreting the old farm and its outdated buildings as a small utopia. That is why keeping up the buildings, and the animals on the hills, is a decisive part of the story. Here Casper's eye for detail, thoroughness and absorption comes into its own, so that the whole place is full of soul.

The story of Bøgedal begins in the 1970s, when brewer Casper Vorting’s parents partly turned their backs on an affluent city life in favor of a farm in Vejle Ådal. While the wave of industrialized food swept across Denmark, they chose to supplement their livelihood with a gigantic vegetable garden and farm animals in order to become self-sufficient. Here, Casper grew up with the unadulterated taste of raw ingredients and learned the value of true craftsmanship. That very philosophy inspired us to create Bøgedal Brew.

We took over Bøgedal, a four-winged farm from the 1840s perched on the edge of Northern Europe’s longest tunnel valley, with centuries of history woven into its woodwork. Here, we live in harmony with the tales of the past—and all the new ones we create every single day.

We brew beer exactly the way we do—100% handcrafted according to ancient artisanal traditions. Every batch is created in a slow, uncompromising interplay with nature’s own raw ingredients, the surroundings, and the farm’s historic setting, because true, unadulterated flavor only emerges when people take the time to truly sense and respect the ingredient.