In this episode, Markus meets Norwegian brewing pioneer Kjetil Jikiun for a very special “beer cast” recorded in the car. Kjetil looks back on an extraordinary journey that led him from life as an airline pilot to becoming one of the key figures of the modern Norwegian beer revolution. He shares how homebrewing, American craft beer, and a deep curiosity for flavor inspired him to co-found Nøgne Ø and help introduce bold styles like IPA, saison, and imperial stout to Norway.

The conversation also takes some remarkable detours: from brewing what may be the highest-altitude beer in the world on a mountain pass in Central Asia, to building a brewery project in Crete and discovering how different beer cultures can be. Kjetil reflects on innovation, responsibility, and the balance between brewing as science and brewing as art. A fascinating episode about adventure, flavor, and the courage to keep reinventing yourself.

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Link für Apple/iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/biertalk/id1505720750

Link für Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7FWgPXstFr1zR9Fm2G0UJS

Markus: Hello and welcome to another episode of our podcast, BierTalk. Today is the first time we are doing a podcast while driving in a car. Very funny. So I am curious to see how it works, but I am very happy to have Kjetil Jikiun next to me. He is quite a famous brewing icon from Norway. Some people say he is the one who brought flavor to the country, so we will explore that. He was also a pilot, so it is a very, very interesting story. I am happy to be here. Maybe you can tell us something about yourself.

Kjetil Jikiun: I am very happy to be here with you, Markus. I think we first met in Blumenau, judging in Brazil, maybe in 2013. I am guessing something like that. Yes, that is 13 years ago.

Markus: No, a long, long time ago.

Kjetil Jikiun: It has been a while.

Markus: Perfect. Yesterday you told me that you brewed the highest-altitude beer ever brewed in the world. Maybe we should start with that, because that is basically a world record. How did that come about, where was it, and what was the beer like?

Kjetil Jikiun: Well, a friend and I decided to take a Japanese kei truck, a very small underpowered truck, and drive it in the Mongol Rally from Norway to Kazakhstan. Then we passed the Pamir Highway, through the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan – a beautiful area, by the way. We realized that we were passing some pretty high terrain, so we thought, why not talk to KegLand, a supplier of homebrewing equipment that my friend works with, and ask whether they wanted to sponsor us? Then we would brew the highest-altitude beer ever made in the world, at 4,655 meters above sea level. And yes, we did exactly that. It worked out very well. It was a lot of fun, although dealing with altitude sickness and getting very sunburned because of the high UV radiation at that elevation was also part of the experience. But it was cool – super nice.

Markus: And you had to bring everything – all the equipment and, of course, everything else.

Kjetil Jikiun: Absolutely everything. Our challenge up there was that, almost at the mountaintop, you do not have much water, do you? Water runs downhill, and we were on top of everything. So we brought the water for the brewing, and we needed to sparge with cold water. As for cooling, we did not really have many ways to do that, so we simply brought the wort down to lower elevation and let it cool slowly in plastic bags made for that purpose.

Markus: So there was no ice around?

Kjetil Jikiun: There was no ice around.

Markus: No, unbelievable. What were the differences when you brew that high in terms of temperature, maybe fermentation, or anything else?

Kjetil Jikiun: Yes, it is quite simple. At that elevation, the wort boils at 84 degrees Celsius. At that temperature, you get less bitterness out of the hops, but you retain more hop aroma because the aromas do not evaporate as much. These days, when the trend is toward lower bitterness and smoother beer with more hop aroma, that actually suited us very well. So we brewed a pale ale, fermented it while we were driving, took it to Kazakhstan, and served it three weeks later at the Ginger Bar in Almaty. It worked out very well. It was very smooth and hop-aromatic.

Markus: Fantastic. That almost cries out for a repeat even higher. Do you have any plans for that?

Kjetil Jikiun: Yes. There are even higher roads crossing mountain passes, especially in India, and it would be very attractive to go there and do something crazy again at 6,000 meters or so.

Markus: So you do have a plan. And that brings us back to the beginning, because when you started with the whole beer thing, you were a pilot, so you were already used to altitude, let us say it like that. How did you get the idea of going into beer? Being a pilot is not exactly the worst job in the world.

Kjetil Jikiun: No, no, no. It was not about looking for a new career at all. It just ended up that way. I am generally interested in culinary arts and cooking and all these things, and I wanted to understand more about beer. As a pilot, I flew intercontinental routes and went to the United States a lot. We are talking about the 1990s. In Europe in the 1990s, it was more difficult to find a beer bar with a huge range of beers. You could go to Germany and have German beers, or even regional German beers. You could go to Belgium and have Belgian beers, and so on. But in the US, I could walk into a bar and start with a German beer, move on to an American IPA, then a Belgian beer, and finish with an ESB from the UK. Everything was available, and that allowed me to familiarize myself with all these different beer styles. The more I did that, the more curious I became about how they actually made these beers. So I started homebrewing again. There was not much homebrewing equipment in Norway at that time, so I bought everything in the US. As a pilot, we did not have weight restrictions on checked baggage, so I put a sack of malt in my suitcase, brought fresh yeast with me, and asked the cabin crew if I could keep it cold in the galley. I brought everything back from the US to Norway and started brewing. At that time there was no internet, so it was all about buying books with recipes and learning how to homebrew the old-fashioned way.

Markus: It sounds like a really fascinating story.

Kjetil Jikiun: Then what happened was that I served my beers to friends and relatives, and they liked them. But they had no references. If I served them something like a porter or an IPA, they would say, yes, this is good, but they did not know what to compare it with. So I realized that nobody really understood me. Then I submitted my best IPA ever to the Norwegian national competition for homebrewers. In the light ale category, which was where the IPA belonged, there were 14 entries that year – maybe this was back in 1999. My American IPA, which I was so proud of, ended up in 13th place. It was the second worst beer according to the judges, and their comment was that it was too hoppy and too hop-aromatic. That made me realize that their frame of reference for IPA was English IPA, not American IPA. So I realized that even the so-called professional judges in Norway did not understand beer. Then I became really annoyed, and maybe a little angry, and thought that somebody had to take responsibility for educating the Norwegian population about beer. I approached another homebrewer, and together we started Nøgne Ø Brewery – not to earn money or create jobs for ourselves, but to educate Norwegians and try to change the beer landscape in Norway.

Markus: It is a bit like speaking a different language. And just to go back to the pilot years for a moment: in those days, on those intercontinental flights, you were able to stay for a while at your destinations. It was also acceptable to go into bars and have some beers, because nowadays people would probably look a bit strangely at a pilot sitting in a bar having five or six beers and then going back to the airport. But at that time that was not really a problem.

Kjetil Jikiun: If you stayed for 24 or 48 hours, then of course you had the opportunity to do that – especially with 48- or even 72-hour layovers. That was very relaxed.

Markus: Did you have any favorite beer at that time, in the US?

Kjetil Jikiun: Not really, not at that time. Initially, it took me a long time to crack the code and understand hoppy American IPAs, for example. They were far from my favorites, even though I realized how important they were in the landscape at that moment. I try not to have favorites because the world is full of so many good products, and you should respect them all – as long as they are good.

Markus: Respect them, absolutely. But your first beer when you were growing up – was it something like a light lager, or what did you have?

Kjetil Jikiun: Yes, that was pretty much everything that was available in Norway: pale lagers, maybe the occasional German Weissbier, but those were not very widely available. You could find them, though.

Markus: Okay. And is it true, as I already said in the introduction, that people say you brought flavor into the Norwegian, or even the Scandinavian, beer world? So with your new company, that was what happened?

Kjetil Jikiun: Yes, we were the first in Norway to make an IPA commercially, to make a saison, and to make an imperial stout. We were probably also among the first to barrel-age beers, and among the first to do sours. We did a lot of firsts.

Markus: You tried almost everything.

Kjetil Jikiun: Not everything, but we were pretty innovative. Having said that, it sounds cool to be first, to be alone, and to break new ground, but it was also very lonely, and almost nobody understood us. Then, when other breweries were inspired by us – and I say inspired because the negative way to put it would be to say they were copying us or free-riding on the path we had paved – people started to pay attention. They began to think, okay, it is not just that one brewery doing this; actually there are several. Maybe this is smart, maybe this is interesting. And together with other breweries like Haandbryggeriet, Aegir, and others, we were paving the way together. We were working together to establish the new beer culture in Norway.

Markus: Did you have a main beer that was more or less the workhorse at the time?

Kjetil Jikiun: I think our regular IPA quite quickly became a bestseller, but we also started exporting beers fairly soon because, in Europe in general, there were not that many breweries like us at that time. Since we were innovative and not afraid of making big beers – and by big I do not only mean high in alcohol, but also very expressive in hop character or properly dark imperial stouts, really going all the way – we gained respect fairly quickly. So we ended up exporting a lot of beer to different markets. In those other markets, people appreciated us for our innovations. They did not just want another IPA or barrel-aged beer; they wanted something unusual – barrel-aged this, some special ingredient that, and so on.

Markus: Nowadays we know that Norway also has a great beer history and that whole kveik culture in parts of the south and west. Did you already have contact with that beer scene at that time?

Kjetil Jikiun: Not at all. At that time, the kveik community was isolated in fjords and villages, and they did not even really communicate with one another. They were each stuck with their own kveik culture. I think that is also a very important reason why kveik developed not as one homogeneous type of yeast strain, but very differently from one valley to the next.

Markus: But did you use that later on? Did it have some impact on your work?

Kjetil Jikiun: Actually, the kveik movement started after I left. I left in 2015, and that was more or less the turning point when kveik started to gain attention. I have used kveik a little bit afterwards, but that was at our brewery in Greece, not in Norway.

Markus: Okay, so let us go back to the time in Norway. You were breaking ground with this new idea of beer, and then maybe at some point you became the old guy yourself. How did that development happen, and when did you decide to leave the company?

Kjetil Jikiun: I probably decided to leave in 2011. I sold out in 2013 and continued working until 2015. Why did I want to leave? Because we were several partners, we had different opinions, and I was in the minority. I felt that my partners wanted to become more commercial and less innovative. How can I put it? Craft beer is a lot about people. We think it is all about beer, but there are a lot of human interactions involved, and those relationships are extremely important. I felt my partners became more focused on business, profits, and financial models. And I thought: this is not why I started this. So I had two choices. I could work for their goals, or I could sell out, leave, and do my own thing. I chose the latter. One example illustrates what I mean and why I decided to leave. We used to give yeast to homebrewers. As a brewery, you often have too much yeast – a surplus sitting at the bottom of the cone. If someone came at the right time, when it was ready to harvest, we had unlimited amounts to give away. You just had to show up with a sanitized container, and that was fine.

Markus: And we did that.

Kjetil Jikiun: Then my partners realized that this took a few minutes of the brewer’s time every single time. The brewer had to stop what he was doing, go over, sanitize, and harvest the yeast. They said, this takes too much time, so let us stop doing it. Overnight, while I was out traveling a lot – I was the ambassador for many of the new markets – they changed things. That was one of the changes. They said: no more yeast for homebrewers. We would rather dump it down the drain. We do not want to spend that time because we do not earn money from it. We need to earn money on everything we do. If we spend maybe one or two hours per week helping homebrewers, that is a waste of time, so let us stop. I thought that was so stupid because all those homebrewers were super enthusiastic. They were spreading the word about us. They were our ambassadors, our friends. But my partners did not understand that. That is just one example of why I decided to leave.

Markus: That is another story of how business can kill enthusiasm, and how success somehow eats the original spirit. So you decided to go on a new adventure and went south – obviously. You chose Greece. Why?

Kjetil Jikiun: My wife and I wanted to look at other things we could ferment. We had already seen that we could ferment beer successfully. In 2010, we were the first to make sake commercially in Europe, so that was one thing we could tick off. Then we thought that perhaps we should go into wine. So we bought a vineyard in Greece. Why Greece? Because Italy and France are very expensive, and Croatia felt very Slavic and Eastern European to us. In the end, we landed on Greece, and specifically Crete, because we were drawn to the idea of being on an island. There are not that many islands in Greece with great wine production, but Crete is one of them. So that is why we ended up there. Then we realized there was not much good beer in the country, so we launched a beer brand and invested in a brewery. After that, we did not have time to do anything with the vineyard, so we leased it to a winery, and that changed everything. Parallel to that, I also had a project with some old childhood friends to start a company making fermented vegetables. So we were looking not only at wine, but also at fermented vegetables. Of course, that is a totally different concept – fermenting food instead of fermenting beverages – but I mention it to show that we simply wanted to do something new, and it should be about fermentation. The fermented-vegetable project stalled. We had funding problems, and it is difficult to run a business together, so we realized that we should close the company. It never really materialized.

Markus: But that is another example of how you were really ahead of your time, because nowadays fermented vegetables are a big thing.

Kjetil Jikiun: That is correct.

Markus: That is correct. So you more or less went back to beer. How was it to establish a brewery in Greece, on Crete, as a foreigner, dealing with the legal side and setting up a brewery?

Kjetil Jikiun: Very challenging. If we had known all the challenges we would face, it probably would not have happened. And that brewery in Crete is not doing very well. It is not easy to work with craft beer in Greece in general. We are now at the point where we are leaving it to our employees to see whether it can survive and whether it has a future. I have invested ten years of my life in that brewery project, putting in money, losing money, and also working for ten years without a salary. At some point, you realize that this is probably not going anywhere, and that is the conclusion I reached.

Markus: The name was, or is, Solo. Where did that come from?

Kjetil Jikiun: The brand name is Solo because I felt a little disappointed that my previous partners had wanted to go in new directions. So my wife and I said to ourselves: this is our solo project, and nobody is going to ruin it for us by changing ideas or steering it in another direction.

Markus: And inside Greece – which is, of course, a totally different culture from Norway, also in terms of consumers, employees, and the whole structure – did you again have to break through walls, open up new ground, and explore new things?

Kjetil Jikiun: You need a totally new mindset. In Scandinavia, if you have good products of high quality at a good price with good distribution, that is basically everything. In Greece, it is much more about relationships: who you know, how long you have known each other, and how long you have worked together. Whether the quality of the product is great or not does not always matter as much. It is about working with people you know and strengthening relationships. So it is a different mindset. There are many challenges. The Greek government can also be a little unpredictable. Changes in legislation can happen overnight, even retroactively – as in, from two weeks ago you should have done this, even though we are only telling you now. And if you do not do it, we will fine you. The fines for not complying with regulations in Greece are extremely high. So it is a very tough country to work in for many reasons. Another example is the business culture. In the beer industry, when you issue an invoice to a client, there is often no pay-by date, because that would be seen as unfriendly. You are friends, right? You do not do that to friends. So you issue an invoice, and after a week or two the salesperson calls or visits – because you cannot send a text message or an email; that would not be friendly either – and says: you know that invoice I gave you a couple of weeks ago? Maybe it is time to pay it. And then the answer is usually: yes, yes, next week I will pay half of it, and the week after we can discuss how to settle the rest. So it becomes a never-ending process. In Greece, so much time and energy is consumed by this, and from a northern European perspective it feels wasted, because nothing particularly good comes out of it. In the north, you simply have a due date, you enter it into your online banking system, and it gets paid on time. There is nothing to discuss. In Greece, it can consume a lot of time and energy.

Markus: And I guess it is not like that on the other side, when you buy raw materials or equipment.

Kjetil Jikiun: No, this is more typical of the hospitality industry – beverages, restaurants, and that sort of business.

Markus: But the climate and the lifestyle were nice.

Kjetil Jikiun: The climate and the lifestyle are nice. And as I said, people pay attention to relationships. That means that when you have a business meeting, you need to allocate enough time for it, because after you have had some coffee, maybe you go out for lunch, and then you go for some raki. It takes a while. You can look at it in two ways. You can say it is a waste of time and that you need to spend your time efficiently. Or you can look at it the other way and say: let us have a good time together with good people. There are, of course, good people everywhere, and in Greek culture people are good at focusing on that. They enjoy themselves while doing business.

Markus: So you are now shifting your focus away from Crete. What are your new projects and ideas?

Kjetil Jikiun: Technically, I am retired. I was lucky to leave the airline business before they changed the retirement age to 65, so I am a young retiree, so to speak.

Markus: Okay, so you already get a pension while still being young.

Kjetil Jikiun: Yes, I have a pension and I can do whatever I want. Since I do not spend much time in Greece anymore, I now invest my time in two things. On the beer side, I focus on judging, doing five or six international competitions every year, which I enjoy a lot. As you know very well, the community of beer judges is almost like a big family.

Markus: It is fantastic.

Kjetil Jikiun: Yes. And I also took up some studies. I have never really done anything academic in my life, and I think now is the time. So I picked up studies in Orthodox theology. I think of it like putting things into a system. For the first twenty years of my life, it was all about basic education. The next twenty years were about being an airline pilot. The following twenty years were about craft beer. And if we live up to average life expectancy, that gives us only twenty more years after that. I am trying to dedicate those years to a more academic approach and to spiritual things. I think changing direction in what you do throughout life is probably healthy, both for your mind and for your own development.

Markus: When was the last time you flew a plane?

Kjetil Jikiun: That was in 2010. It is a long time ago.

Markus: So you do not have a small one in Norway or anything like that?

Kjetil Jikiun: No, I do not. I last flew a Boeing 737. For most of my career I did long-haul flights on wide-body aircraft, but I finished the last few years as a captain on 737s flying European routes.

Markus: Does that change your mindset? You are always above the clouds and close to heaven, let us say, but you are also responsible for all those people and for the aircraft. Does that affect you as a human being?

Kjetil Jikiun: Of course it does. It is a lot of responsibility. To answer honestly: as a co-pilot, I had a much more relaxed mentality. Of course I knew I had to do my job well and correctly, but the ultimate responsibility was not mine, it was the captain’s. So as a co-pilot, I enjoyed flying around the world on intercontinental routes and simply had a great time. Becoming a captain was much more serious. You start focusing on it even a couple of days before you go to work because you know what you are doing and you need to be in the right mindset. It is all about responsibility, and that is something you should not take lightly. It becomes much more serious.

Markus: You could probably transfer a lot of that to your later work in the beer world as well – being the captain of the company, also being responsible.

Kjetil Jikiun: Of course. Maybe.

Markus: Last question: what do you think is the difference between, let us say, a good brewer and a great brewer?

Kjetil Jikiun: I am laughing because that question came as a total surprise. There are two ways to look at it. A brewer is both a scientist and an artist. If you look at the brewer as a scientist, then of course the great brewer is the one who goes deeper, does the extra research, reads more, and has more knowledge. But if you look at the brewer as an artist, then the great brewer is the one who says: I am not afraid of anything. I will dare to do that crazy thing, that crazy idea, and just see how it works. Really, the best brewer is the one who has one foot in the world of science and one foot in the world of art, balancing both at the same time.

Markus: Perfect. Thank you very much for your time and for the information. I really wish you all the best for your next brew at a high level – in any sense of the phrase.

Kjetil Jikiun: Thanks, Markus. It has been great talking to you.

Markus: Thank you so much.