There is no compromise when it comes to quality. Just like the brewers in Ryesgade, it is the brewers in Hedehusene most important assignment to taste beer in all the different stages of the production. But it does not end there. In connection with establishing the brewery in Hedehusene, we decided to make a whole new standard for controlling the technical quality of the beer at smaller breweries.

What is the “Technical Quality”? And what has it to do with crafted beer?

The technical quality is in short, what determines, whether or not you as a consumer gets the beer-experience, the brewer wanted you to have. In other words, it is a blanket term for all the circumstances that determines if the beer has a consistent, with a margin, taste every time the brew is made, if the durability of the beer is what it is stated on the bottle and if the bottling of the beer is done in an acceptable way, so that none of the bottled beer becomes sour because of bacteria. And finally it is very important to control the contents of the carbon dioxide, because it is determined for how we experience the release of the different tastes in the mouth. And that is the essence of it all, isn’t?

This is not meant to be a lecture book on how to assure the quality at a brewery, so we will only mention one very important example of the control of the technical quality of the beer at Nørrebro Bryghus: the amount of oxygen in the beer. Oxygen is the determined factor for the durability of the taste in the beer. That is why we have installed a meter that measures the amount of oxygen in the beer. We measure the oxygen level when we filter the beer and when we pour the beer from one tank to another, in that way we can keep the harmful oxygen effects down at the same level as the larger industrial breweries.

The beer used for the bottling is very carefully pasteurised, to make sure that the beer is free from the bacteria that can make the beer sour or in other way damage the beer. Our attitude towards quality can also be seen in fact that we guarantee a shorter period of durability on our bottled beer then most of the other breweries. This does not mean that our beers are more vulnerable or less durable then others – on the contrary! We have just decided that not to make “the best before” time longer, then what we have experienced from our own practical experiments. We have many times be wondering about how a newly opened microbrewery can say that their beer has a one year expiring date. How can they know this?