Region & History

What is Kveik? In the dialects of Western Norway, the word roughly means "yeast from your own farm." It doesn't refer to a beer style but to a strain of yeast that farmers passed down through generations and borrowed from neighbors.

For centuries, beer on the remote farms along the fjord was simply part of household work. People brewed for Christmas, weddings, and funerals, and the yeast belonged to the farm as naturally as sourdough belongs to a bakery. There was no brewery in the modern sense.

Outside Norway, hardly anyone knew about it for a long time. Beer writer Michael Jackson came across brewers in Voss in 1995 who were still working with this yeast. The definitive work on the old brewing tradition was written by Odd Nordland and published in 1969.

The fact that Kveik is now found in breweries worldwide is largely thanks to Lars Marius Garshol. He traveled to farms in Voss, Hornindal, and further north, collected yeast samples, wrote about them on his blog, and as early as 2009 sent samples of the Voss yeasts to a British yeast bank.

Today the region belongs to the province of Vestland, formed in 2020 from Hordaland and Sogn og Fjordane. Stjørdal, known for its smoke-malt beer, lies further north in Trøndelag but shares the same farmhouse tradition. There's no protected designation of origin for Kveik, and no official style guidelines either.

Alongside the few remaining farmhouse brewers, craft breweries have long since sprung up in Bergen and the fjord country. Some work with Kveik, others with ordinary yeasts. But the heart of the region remains the farmhouse beer that families still brew at Christmas today.