We have already published the first part of the interview with Alexei Semin, the founder of the Endemic mountain brewery. Now, you can read the second part of the conversation — how the brewery interprets local traditions and ingredients, and how difficult it is to promote craft beer in such an unusual market as Sochi.
Profibeer visited Endemic mountain brewery that is located outside Sochi and had a talk with its founder Alexei Semin. You will find out how they managed to find an investor and open a craft brewery in a small southern village, at an altitude of 560 meters above the sea level, and how the brewery implements the endemic philosophy which is contained in its name.
In the generally accepted guide to the styles of the Brewers Certification Program (BJCP) "Baltic Porter" is described as a traditional beer from countries bordering the Baltic Sea, a derivative from English porters, but influenced by Russian imperial stouts. A "signature" feature of this sub-style, distinguishing it from other porters is lager yeast (or cold fermentation, if ale yeast is used). How has this style developed in Russia and how is it feeling now, at the time of the "craft" revolution?
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.