By Russian realities Podsosnovsky brewery is almost a miracle: it is an industrial brewery working entirely on local raw materials. It takes water from the own well, malt barley in the own malt house and grows hops in the own hop farm, that is surprisingly for Russia. We’ve found out why and how the brewery established the hop production.
Untappd is a mobile application known to many beer geeks in Russia. It is “the Foursquare for beer”, where you can mark your location. In Untappd you can check in the beer that you’re enjoying, for example, in your favorite bar. Immediately you get likes from your friends and you can see what others drink, the ratings they put to this beer and the bar menu of the location they are. We’ve talked to Pavel Logvinov — the only Russian moderator of this social network — about how he discovered Untappd and what beer he likes.
At the end of 2016, it became known that AF Brew was launching its own production. Profibeer immediately volunteered to visit — do industrial espionage to see and take pictures of the new brewery and at the same time to take an interview about the plans of the creators of Redrum IPA and Lobotomy.
In November 2011, the brewer and Chief Development Officer of KwakInn brewery Sergey "Mager" Grigoriev wrote an article "Sleep well, or why there will be no beer revolution in Russia yet”. In that article Sergei Grigoriev pointed out the basic terms of the beer revolution:
To open a brewery in Russia, you need to collect a lot of documents, to get permissions, to agree on the beginning of work with the Federal Service for Regulation of the Alcohol Market, to connect the EGAIS (Integrated State Automated Information System), to develop HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) documents... For a person, who isn’t familiar with all this, opening a brewery seems to be extremely complicated.
The beginning of the second decade of the XXI century was marked by the rise of the so-called "craft beer" in Russia. Of course, craft beer has been imported to Russia and even brewed by some of our breweries before, but the term "craft" wasn’t used at that time.
What kind of beer was drunk in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the last century? Beer geeks and beer bloggers were not there at that time, and nobody actually analyzed the taste of beer (except the descriptions like "sour", "sweet" or "bitter", although it is clear, that the taste of that beer was already close to the modern one). Instead of that detailed statistics of breweries were gathered. In our age of computers, Internet and EGAIS (Integrated State Automated Information System) to find such detailed statistics on brewing is a much more complicated task than 100 years ago.
There is a well-known joke that in the USSR there were two kinds of beer - "there is beer" and "there is no beer" ;-) Although in every joke there is some truth, in fact about 350 varieties of beer were brewed during the time of the former Soviet Union! Of course, many of them duplicated each other, but there were also a great number of really unique varieties. So, it is not easy to mark the five most interesting of them.
