Co-fermentation and collaboration with Ølbrygging

In April, Lallemand was pleased to announce the first in a series of collaborative all-grain kits with Ølbrygging in Norway. This joint effort pulled in the combined expertise of both companies, with the Lallemand team providing the branding and recipes, designed by their in-house team of global technical experts, and Olbrygging providing the manufacturing capacity for the kits.

Andrew Paterson, Technical Sales Manager for the UK and Scandinavia who led the project describes how the collaboration came about: “Olbrygging originally approached us in the summer of 2020 to discuss the possibility of creating cobranded kits for the Scandinavian market. This wasn’t something we had done before but with a team of former brewers providing technical support to clients around the world we had a bank of proven recipes ready to go, and a design team itching to get their hands on an exciting new project. This seemed like too good an opportunity to waste”. Not that the task was all plain sailing continues Andrew: “The kits launching in 2021 are the result of a great deal of hard work behind the scenes, multiple design edits were needed to meet the requirements of both parties, as well as some recipe tweaks here and there to account for varied ingredient availability in different parts of the world.”

The first kit to launch, the so-called “Austin IPA” was designed by Lallemand representatives Molly Browning and Eric Dixon in collaboration with a brewery local to Austin Texas. The beer was originally intended to celebrate the launch of the 2020 Craft Brewers Conference in San Antonio and, they hoped, establish Austin IPA as a new trendy style of beer! Austin IPA utilizes an innovative technique called co-fermentation where two different yeasts are used for fermentation creating a beer which is more nuanced in flavor and expresses characters of both the strains chosen for fermentation. In this case Lalbrew® Voss and Lalbrew® Köln.

Next to launch in the series is a classic Czech lager designed by Lallemand representative for the Czech Republic, Jan Nevelos, along with a hoppy pale ale, also by Browning.