In this episode, we take you on an adventure far north—beyond Norway, all the way to Iceland! Host Markus Raupach sits down with two fascinating guests: Bjarni Kristjánsson, a professor at Hólar University and founder of the Icelandic Beer Centre, and Zophonías Jónsson, a molecular biologist and brewing enthusiast.

Together, they unravel the unique history of Icelandic beer—from Viking-age brewing to the surprising effects of prohibition that lasted until 1989. We dive into Iceland’s vibrant modern beer scene, the rise of microbreweries, and the impact of climate change on local barley production. Plus, we explore how a love for beer sparked a brewing revolution on this remote island!

Recorded at the Farmhouse Beer Festival in Norway, this conversation is packed with history, humor, and insider insights into the world of Nordic brewing. Whether you’re a beer lover, a history buff, or just curious about Iceland’s liquid gold, this episode is for you…

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BierTalk – Gespräche über und beim Bier.

Markus Raupach: Hello, and welcome to another episode of our podcast, BierTalk. Today I’m far in the north, in Norway, but I meet people that come from even further north, from Iceland, two new friends of mine: Bjarni and Zophonías. They are friends; they have a lot to do with the Icelandic beer history and we are all curious to hear what they have to say. So maybe you introduce yourselves a little bit to our listeners?

Bjarni Kristjánsson: I’m Bjarni Kristjánsson, I’m a professor at Hólar University in the north of Iceland. There I founded a place called Bjórsetur Íslands, or Icelandic Beer Centre. There we do basically everything related to beer, because beer is here and there the reason for our existence, as you know. So we brew and we have beer courses, beer introductions and our Beer Festival. So that’s what I do with beer.

Zophonías Jónsson: Yes, I’m Zophonías Jónsson, I’m another professor, in molecular biology at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. I got into brewing through my work on yeast genetics. We started collaborating on completely different things and you sort of dragged me into the beer scene in the north. So I help him out in the brewery. Besides, of course, we also have our own course in Iceland on brewing, a two weeks‘ course, and a course on applied microbiology. We do have a brewing exercise. It’s a very popular course.

Markus Raupach: Are people regularly taking part in the courses?

Zophonías Jónsson: Yes, it’s annually.

Markus Raupach: Okay. So you produce new brewers of Iceland?

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Yes.

Zophonías Jónsson: Yes. Not very many but at least three other people. From the first three years we taught that course, one student per year became a brewer.

Markus Raupach: Wow! Very nice. So, Bjarni, maybe a little first introduction into the Icelandic beer world, for the German people. So as far as I know, beer was not so common in Iceland until maybe 40 years ago, something like that? So could you take us with you in the more Icelandic beer history?

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Yes. I mean, Iceland of course has a history of beers and brewing from the settlement in the year of 900 when the Vikings came. And they were probably brewing similar beers as we’ve been tasting here in Norway. These raw beers, you know, and so on. But then we had the little Ice Age and you couldn’t grow corn in Iceland. So it was only the really rich that kept brewing. This went on up until the 19th century. But then in the early 20th century we got the prohibition, so all alcohol was banned. The prohibition ended maybe 20, 30 years after it started. But they didn’t allow beer. They thought it  so there were actually three reasons why they didn’t allow beer. The first reason was taxation. So you get lower money per litre of beer than you get for a litre of vodka. Secondly was because of the Good Templars, the people who were fighting against drinking, they were very strong in Iceland, and they had to have something. And thirdly, because we were a Danish colony, we connected the beer very strongly with the Danes. So beer was banned until 1989. There had been brewing in Iceland before that, because we had an American military base, so Icelandic brewers were actually brewing beer for them, but they could not be sold in Iceland. So in 1989, 1 March was Beer Day in Iceland. It’s still celebrated. The Beer Day, when beer was allowed to come. A friend of mine had slept outside the alcohol store to be the first person to buy beer in Iceland. Then there were two main breweries that kind of kept going, Viking and Egils are the names of these guys. They are the biggest breweries in Iceland today. But it was similar as throughout the world. We got this kind of American beer revolution coming in in around 2007 to 2010. Since then it’s just been a quite quick growth in microbreweries in Iceland and we have about 25 to 30 microbreweries now, that are a mixture of being phantom breweries or having their own equipment. Our brewery is one of the oldest. We were founded in 2007.

Markus Raupach: Can you still remember your first beer?

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes. Of course, I didn’t like beer when I started drinking, so I drank something else. But it was a very hot summer day, downtown, my home town, Habnagurud I was working for the municipality. We had been fixing water pipes for a restaurant, and they gave us beer, ice cold Viking beer. And I loved it.

Markus Raupach: So some love started for the whole of your life?

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

Markus Raupach: And what about you?

Zophonías Jónsson: Yes, I actually did a cultural gran about 13 and I went to Eastern Germany and Pionierlagers. I stopped over with a friend of mine who was half Faroese and his grandmother gave us, the children, two burgerand zolte. I still remember that, as it goes to the Danish culture of beer drinking. She did nothing that was anything abnormal.

Markus Raupach: Then the idea of a brewery started in you first, or you first, I don’t know?

Bjarni Kristjánsson: No, actually, I think in neither of us. So I founded this Icelandic Beer Centre based on drinking beer. That’s more on it. So I realised, I mean, at that time we were getting all these different types of beer into Iceland. So I was tasting these different types: like this is fantastic to taste beer here. Beer is fantastic. It’s so diverse. You can drink, you know, no two beers are the same, almost. So I said, okay, this is something that all people need to experience. So I said to my colleagues at the university, should we create a beer club? So I created this beer club; I went and I bought  I started by buying two bottles of beer, and there were two bottles of each type, and I invited people just to taste. The people were also happy after drinking all this beer and also this diversity that they all agreed to start this beer club. So I went out and I bought five boxes of five different types of beer. They went very rapidly. We’d got a small apartment that we were sitting in and I just kept buying beer and people kept drinking it, and it was like mail order, you could call it. People just signed up and once a month I would charge them for the beer. This was in 2007. In 2010 our friend Broty, he was a very keen amateur brewer and we said, well, we have a little bit of money. Why don’t we just create a brewery, a little brewery? He was really very interested in everything related to beer, also what does it take to become a professional brewer? So in 2010 we started our brewery. We bought a Braumeister 50 and we were brewing in plastic buckets. Then Broty, he changed his interest maybe  what do you think it was, eight years ago, something like that? Then I took over the brewing, and I don’t know anything about brewing, so I got some professionals like Zophonías, to come and help me.

Markus Raupach: So you came in? Or had you been before?

Zophonías Jónsson: I had been there before. I had been helping, collaborating on other things, you know, we do research on fish. I’d been there quite a bit before and I besides, I actually had gone and taken a course with Broty, so he offered weekend courses on brewing in the brewery. We went in and brewed some good beer. I kept coming back, so that’s it.

Markus Raupach: You were brewing in Reykjavik, weren’t you?

Zophonías Jónsson: I was brewing in Reykjavik, yes. I had been brewing  actually, I did my first all grain when I was doing my PhD in Switzerland, in the laboratory. At that time I was still allowed. It turned out quite all right.

Markus Raupach: The brewery is still existent?

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Yes. So, I mean, it’s all voluntary based and it’s all kind of  it’s a hobby. It’s not a professional brewery, but we have the smallest, little brewery and other the smallest little brewery in Iceland. So we were producing about 300 litres to 500 litres a year. But last year we decided to expand a little, so we bought a 300 litre fermenter. So we are producing  this year we produced over 1500 litres and we can can them. So we are starting to sell it a little bit to bars in Reykjavik, in our district.

Markus Raupach: What is the name of the brewery?

Bjarni Kristjánsson: It’s Bjórsetur Íslands. It’s the same  Icelandic Beer Centre. The house where we brew in, the Brauerei, we call Hyrtahús. Hyrtahús is the old word in Icelandic for “brewery”. It means basically “house” with “eat”. I think it’s still going strong. We can only see upwards movement.

Zophonías Jónsson: Stronger and stronger.

Markus Raupach: So the Icelandic people like beer now?

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Yes. I mean, Icelandic people always liked beer. But, of course, when it was banned, you know, there was some smuggling of beer and all other. But at that time Icelandic people of course drank a lot of vodka, strong alcohol, so they focused a lot on strong beers like Elephant, or something like that.

Zophonías Jónsson: There’s actually an interesting story, you know, in the years leading up to 1989, when beer was allowed. You could always buy light beer in Iceland, so 2.5 percent. That was deemed alcohol-free beer. Then people figured out that actually, if you mixed it with some schnapps or vodka or whisky, you would end up with something more similar to beer. Then the bars kept developing this and they added some extras. They actually made something that was somewhat close to a beer. You could buy it off the tap in the bar. And of course our Templars are not happy with that. So after this had been going on for a few years and actually this fake beer became very popular, a law was passed that you had to mix all cocktails in front of the customer. People figured out ways to do that so that they’d even taste like beer, and people saw how ridiculous it was not to allow just full-strength beer.

Markus Raupach: A crazy story.

Zophonías Jónsson: Yes.

Markus Raupach: Yesterday you also told me about the Spanish wine. I think that was also an interesting story. Maybe you can explain that also a little bit?

Zophonías Jónsson: Why alcohol was allowed. Can I ask, Bjarni, you take it.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Yes, so the reason why the prohibition ended in Iceland was because we were exporting salted cod, bacalao, to Spain. Then the Spanish government basically said, okay, we will not buy your fish unless you buy wine from us. So the Icelandic government started this governmental alcohol storeroom, they started importing red wine, white wine and some stronger alcohol, and the story is that they were actually mixing it together and would just sell Spanish wine. At that time, so all through the prohibition, people were making their own moonshine, or beer or something like that. So it was basically we had a saying in Icelandic that “something looks Spanish to me”  it looks strange to me. But that was if somebody was drunk in the street, you say, he looks Spanish to me, because he must have been drinking Spanish wine, because that was the only thing that was allowed. But Icelanders have had a very bad drinking culture, maybe as a lot of the Nordic countries have. So we work a lot, or people used to work a lot in the small towns, working in fish factories, farming. And then would just get drunk on weekends, work all the week, long working hours, get drunk on the weekend. So as I say they would buy one bottle of vodka for Friday, one bottle of vodka for Saturday and then they’d have a hangover on Sunday and they just kept going. Just after the beer was allowed, people would keep buying two bottles of vodka. They would just buy four six-packs of beer. So, you know, the idea was, it was actually not getting better, but it has changed enormously in Iceland. So we have gone away from like teenage drinking. People are of course drinking beer more regularly throughout the week but excess drinking has gone down extremely, so beer has actually done a lot of good for the drinking culture of the nation.

Markus Raupach: Did the work of the people also change? Is it not any more so much in the fishing industry, maybe more IT-related things and things like that?

Zophonías Jónsson: Yes, and fisheries are not as large a proportion as it was. I mean, it was more than half of the economy. There are other things now.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Yes. And the work has changed, for sure.

Zophonías Jónsson: It’s also much more automated.

Markus Raupach: If we see Iceland, we see always the whole island, and if you look closer to a map, you see the big capital, Reykjavik, but also the other cities. So maybe you can take us a little bit through the island. Are the settlements more or less around the coast? Are there bigger, smaller ones? Where are the breweries mostly, and how does that look?

Zophonías Jónsson: That’s an interesting question about the breweries. The settlements are the towns, villages, around the coast. Of course, more than half of the population lives in the Reykjavik area in the south. But the largest brewery, actually Viking, is in  well, the third largest town in Iceland, but the second largest is basically part of Reykjavik, so it is the second largest town in Akureyri in the north. So that’s where the largest brewery is, and the second largest is in Reykjavik, Caves. Those two, of course, they are responsible for most of the production. Then the other small  the microbreweries, are spotted around the villages. It’s sort of every village must have their own brewery now.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: I think it’s almost.

Zophonías Jónsson: Almost. Otherwise, it’s not a proper village. Some of them are extremely small.

Markus Raupach: So that means for tourists, who can really do a beer tour round the island?

Zophonías Jónsson: Absolutely. There is a beer map of Iceland, sponsored by  what do we call our association in English?

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Yes, the Association of Microbrewers in Iceland. There are about 25 companies. They have published this beer map and you can collect stamps, and you can make it a collective item to taste beers all around Iceland.

Markus Raupach: This beer map, I buy it when I’m there or I can download it?

Zophonías Jónsson: You get it free.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: You can get it for free in a microbrewery.

Zophonías Jónsson: Microbrewers will have this map, you can pick it up and then you just trail the road and you get the stamp.

Markus Raupach: What types of beer will I get normally?

Zophonías Jónsson: Microbreweries, they read the same literature, they have the same recipes, so people brew  of course, the big breweries focus on light lagers, right? German-type beer. The microbreweries are experimental. You won’t know from day to day what you’ll get there.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Both of the big breweries have gone into this microbrewery business.

Zophonías Jónsson: That’s true.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: So Viking, the biggest brewery, produce about, I think, 6 m L to 9 m L a year. They have a phantom company called Einstök. People might know that beer, because it’s exported quite widely. So Einstök is their kind of a microbrewery type of thing. Then Egil is the other big brewery. I think they produce 4 m L to 5 m L, or something. They have something called Borg Brewery, and that’s been very, very successful in developing stouts and all kinds of good microbrewery beers. But they also have their marketing of the strong company.

Zophonías Jónsson: It’s actually a nice concept for a big brewery to have an in-house microbrewery for the brewers to actually let their creativity shine.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: The beer market is a tough market, in the world in general. The big breweries are tough. That’s the same in Iceland. So it has been very hard for  or more specifically very hard for the microbrewers to get into the bar to sell their products. A friend of ours actually founded his own bar in downtown Reykjavik to sell his own beer. That created a little bit of a landslide of beer bars around Iceland. So like our bar was a beer bar originally. We had up to a hundred types of beer for sale in our tiny bar. But in Reykjavik you can now go to these really nice beer bars, either directly related to a microbrewery, or just in open beer bars that invite the microbreweries, and the big breweries. So the availability of high-quality beers has changed greatly.

Markus Raupach: Do the breweries all work together? Or is there a split between the big ones and the small ones?

Zophonías Jónsson: Of course, the big ones are in another league. There’s actually one brewery that is sort of semi-big. It’s an interesting concept. That’s not far away from Akureyri. Basically they decided to  well, the owner was a fisherman and he had some injury, so his wife had to figure out something for him to do. She decided, well, let’s make beer. They had the buildings and they thought, we like Czech beer, so they basically got a Czech brewer to help them set up a brewery. They made a slightly, what they thought higher quality lagers than the big breweries. That’s been done actually, I know that the Viking Brewery does the analysis for them and things like that, so they’re not  they are friendly. They are helping them out. All the small breweries, it’s a happy club, I mean, there’s no competition, nor anything. People help each other out and visit each other and do call-ups and things like that.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: A healthy competition, I would say. You know, so they know of each other and, you know, we created the venue, have allowed these guys to meet and party together, and we have a beer festival. So the first weekend in June every year we have a beer festival where we invite all the breweries to come; we get maybe half of them, something like that. They come together and the brewers, it’s like a, you know, uppskeruhátíð, we call it in Icelandic. It’s like the Harvest Festival of the Brewers in Hólar, because we’re kind of on neutral ground because we are so small, we are not competing with anyone. And this was the first beer festival in Iceland we started, and we’ve been doing it for, what? Twelve years now? And now there are four, five, six beer festivals that are going strong also.

Markus Raupach: As you said, in June, so I think there’s a big difference between summer and winter, because you have so much daylight and so low daylight in the winter. Is there a difference in the behaviour of the people and the drinking behaviour or in the way people are going out or drinking beer in general between the seasons?

Zophonías Jónsson: Of course. People drink beer all year round, but then in summer, in June, when it’s light all night, you don’t have to sleep.

Markus Raupach: So they don’t!

Zophonías Jónsson: I mean, this also, every brewery tries to make at least one or two Christmas brews and there is Easter beer. But there’s also a unique Thorrablöt. So basically, Thorra is the old month of the year which coincides  it’s roughly February, and there is a few decades‘ old tradition to eat traditional Icelandic food, which is terrible, but people are supposed to do that at least once per year in Thorra.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: It’s great food.

Markus Raupach: What is it? Let us know.

Zophonías Jónsson: Pickled sheep testicles, rotten shark and things like that.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Dried fish, sheep heads, sheep testicles, that’s all from the sheep. Rotted whale blubber and most of it is pickled in whey, so it’s sour. Sour. Some of it is an acquired taste and most of it is something you only eat once a year.

Markus Raupach: It can be a challenge.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Yes. But there was one brewery that went all in with this, actually, more in than can be called healthy. So they made beers with smoked whale testicles.

Markus Raupach: Yes, I heard about that.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: So that’s very popular. But it tasted horrible. And they are now closed. Not because of this, but  

Zophonías Jónsson: I know of no one who did not pour that beer down the drain after taking one sip. They sold well, even if only to tourists that tasted it once.

Markus Raupach: That brings us to another question. Are there traditional Icelandic ingredients? Or even maybe like an historic Icelandic beer that is now recovered, or something like that?

Zophonías Jónsson: I think we can say no.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: No.

Zophonías Jónsson: The tradition died out, because as Bjarni mentioned, we had the little Ice Age, the barley couldn’t be grown any more, it was very expensive. Only the richest of the rich could import grain to do the brewing. The strains then, because of the prohibition, all strains died out, of course.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. So there is no traditional Icelandic beer. That died out. Through the prohibition and throughout the years, bakers kept brewing techniques alive and the oldest breweries in Iceland are from the early 20th century, just before the prohibition, actually, and those were founded by bakers. So they were just keeping the yeast alive, and they probably were brewing very traditional lager-type beer.

Zophonías Jónsson: They were of course influenced by the Danish/German tradition. So it’s basically lager-type beers.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: But the brewers today, many of them are trying to use herbs and stuff from the Icelandic countryside to spice up the beers a little bit.

Markus Raupach: So herbs and berries and things like that?

Bjarni Kristjánsson: They can use, yes.

Zophonías Jónsson: There is actually one thing that is sort of specific to Iceland. That’s a children’s drink, that was very popular when we were growing up. It’s malti. It’s basically a very lightly fermented, dark  like a stout-type malt.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: With liquorice.

Zophonías Jónsson: Yes, a little bit of liquorice in it, and actually, for Christmas, we would always drink Krito. It’s essentially the same without the liquorice, so it’s just enough, light stout. So that is still drunk, but mainly it’s a children’s drink. So you grow up drinking most, something like a beer.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Yes, I mean, it’s similar customs for us and we had Finnlumper, they make this beer and they ferment it overnight and serve it to the children at weddings and so on. But in Iceland they would bottle it and sell this, and it’s very good. When Icelanders go abroad, they always try to find this malt type of thing for Christmas.

Markus Raupach: Talking about the little Ice Age, now we have the climate change. Is there something happening in Iceland? Do you see, is it getting warmer?

Zophonías Jónsson: Yes, it is, and people are growing barley again now. So we do have breweries that are brewing purely from Icelandic barley. We have tried that, but of course, there’s no malt house in Iceland. People at the agricultural university have experimented with malting. Of course, it’s doable. But no one has taken a step to set up a malt house. So most of the production is of course with imported grain. But people use  there are parts of the mash with unmalted Icelandic barley. We tried that. I mean, it works. The beer was excellent. But it’s hard to work within a brewery. It becomes a thick porridge.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: We do a lot of beer tastings, so we get groups and give them seven to ten different types of beers and tell them the history of beer and the culture of beer bought in Iceland by the world. One thing we talk about is the Icelandic barley, because often there is a farmer and they will always ask this question. Do you brew from Icelandic barley? And I say, well, Icelandic barley is made to create cows, so it’s full of proteins instead of full of starch. So sometimes you say it’s little bit like seal hamburgers in Newfoundland. If you go to Newfoundland you can go to a restaurant and say, seal hamburger. It’s only 10% seal meat. So we can say Icelandic beer from Icelandic barley, only 10% Icelandic barley.

Markus Raupach: But at least

Bjarni Kristjánsson: It is definitely growing. But in general, because we are biologists, we see the effects of global changes. It’s not necessarily that it’s warming, it’s more it’s becoming unpredictable, the weather. For example, the week after our Beer Festival in June in Hólar, where I live, there was 20 cm of snow, on 10 June. Then the year before we had 20°C plus in January. That is also tough on the barley industry. So this summer, for example, was horrible for the barley, because it was a really cold summer and very wet summer.

Zophonías Jónsson: Cold and raining.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: So it’s a challenge. There is a little bit of hop production in Iceland now, but mostly in greenhouses. So there is actually somebody, a small brewery that has produced a truly Icelandic beer with Icelandic barley and Icelandic hops. But that’s an exception.

Markus Raupach: Yes, but that’s a great story.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: It’s a great story, yes.

Markus Raupach: For the people who want to visit Iceland, what would you suggest is the best time of the year to go?

Zophonías Jónsson: If you are hunting for beer, of course, if you come in winter it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to drive around the coast without hitting some icy roads and put yourself in danger. If that’s your plan, to visit all the villages, all the small breweries, then I would recommend the summertime. Early spring is pretty best.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: From May until September, I would think.

Zophonías Jónsson: It’s very hard to advise you when you can expect the best weather, because like Bjarni said, it is changing. So the last few years we’ve been having rather good weather early in the spring and then maybe in September and then the summer has been horrible, but that’s usually not that way.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: But if you go, I mean, there’s a lot of people have come over just for a weekend. A weekend in Reykjavik and the areas around there is fantastic for beer lovers, because there is about half the microbreweries are still in the capital city and the other half is distributed in the small towns. So you can make a very good pub crawl in Reykjavik visiting the tap houses of these microbreweries. And most of them have a tap house, either where they are brewing or closer by. And Icelandic brewers love to talk about beers and brewing and so they’re very often in the brewery themselves. So he can sit down with the owner or the brewer and have a chat about the beer and so on. Many of them offer also you can come and see the brewery, book it ahead of time and so on. That’s also fun.

Markus Raupach: Yes, that sounds like a plan. Perfect. Maybe a last question. We are here in Norway at the Farmhouse Beer Festival in Hornindal. How do you see that? What are your experiences? What do you think of it? What beers did you like? What were your impressions?

Zophonías Jónsson: Yes, how shall I answer that? We’ve been interested in Norwegian tradition for a long time. Of course, they kept alive our tradition and actually, some of the literature that decided about what Norwegians know about the history of Norwegian brewing is actually from Icelandic literature, because that was all documented in Iceland. Sometimes a little bit later than actually, you know, the books are written, maybe 200, 300 years after the fact, but still had said the best documentation that we have about how things were. Of course, we read the Net, we happened across Lars. Everyone knows who Lars is, I think, that listens to this.

Markus Raupach: Yes. They know Lars Garshol. We already did a beer talk episode with him.

Zophonías Jónsson: We, of course, like others, read his blogs and I was interested in trying this kveik, so I got it from the type country collection, a few different strains of kveik, and we actually brewed. We tried, without having ever tasted the Norwegian (korn), we tried to brew some, because that they use instead of the hops grows in Iceland. I must say, now that I have tasted the real thing, we were pretty close. I’m happy with that. So that’s one of the reasons we decided to come here, just to get the authentic stuff and see how close we were.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: It’s been a fantastic trip also. Yesterday we went and participated or watched them brew, and I think that was absolutely an eye-opener for us. That was fantastic to see. The night before, we went to this gathering in the brewhouse and tasted some of the beer just straight out of the fermentation vessel. That was also great. The Beer Festival is very much fun. I like both the traditional but I also like the smoked ones. I think that’s a very interesting taste. I mean, they’re not all good, but most of them are, like you say, unusual and a lot of them are very  it is a surprise how good they are.

Zophonías Jónsson: It’s surprising how varied they are. There’s so much variation. Although it’s all the same basic recipe, of course, the kveik strains are quite different, give different tastes. But the main thing is people, their heart is in it. You can see people are really proud of their beers.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: That’s fantastic.

Zophonías Jónsson: Fantastic to see.

Markus Raupach: Yes, I think also, that’s also my experience. It’s really great to see their effort, their mood and everything and also I think the smoky complement brings us together a little bit, because that’s my background, so that’s a fantastic thing. Yes, thank you very much for your time, for the information about Iceland. We will put the links in the show notes and probably a lot of our listeners will maybe come to you and have fun.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Fantastic.

Markus Raupach: Enjoy the beer.

Bjarni Kristjánsson: Thank you. Thank you.

BierTalk – der Podcast rund ums Bier. Alle Folgen unter www.biertalk.de.