Craft beer in Catalonia: a flourishing industry rewarding creativity and collaboration

Catalonia’s craft beer scene is booming. The industry has seen exponential growth in practically all metrics for over a decade, save for the slight bump due to the pandemic. 

Despite the health crisis, the sector is bouncing back strongly and has already gotten back to business, especially with the return of Catalonia’s biggest celebration of craft beer, the Barcelona Beer Fest, holding its first edition since the pandemic began between December 17-19.

The Catalan Guild of Craft Beer Maker’s (GECAN) annual report in 2019, the last year not affected by the pandemic, stated that the brewing industry was worth some €46 million. When the Covid-19 pandemic brought the world to a halt, this figure dipped to €37 million for 2020. 

What is craft beer?

All beer, no matter the colour, body, or flavour, is made with four ingredients: water, grains, hops, and yeast. Brewers play with the different types of grains and hops, and the balances between all ingredients and processes to create different styles of beer. 

How is craft beer distinguished from regular beer? This is a question without a clear answer, but there are some elements and characteristics that can help us get somewhat closer to understanding the difference. 

Firstly, GECAN sets one important standard to meet the definition of craft beer in Catalonia, that the product cannot be pasteurized. This is a heat-treatment process at the very final stage of brewing beer that destroys pathogenic microorganisms. The result is a product that has a much longer shelf life, but one that is not entirely natural, and in the context of craft beer, some key flavours get lost. 

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Another factor is style; the type of beer that the beverage is. Most standard beers on the market are lagers that serve the principal aim of quenching thirst and refreshing the drinker. Craft lagers exist, but perhaps the most commonly found style of craft beer is IPA - India Pale Ale - and there are dozens of different varieties and offshoots of IPA.  

Beyond that, there are stouts, porters, brown ales, rye ales, sours ales, Saisons, lambics, meads, and many more, plus the derivations of each of them too. 

But people working in the industry highlight two key characteristics that go some way to defining craft beer: quality and passion.

“The most important thing is not numbers -although they are important, of course- but rather, being able to make a product with character, well made with the best ingredients,” explains Jordi Llebaria, one of the head brewers at Cervesa del Montseny.

“I think it’s about quality, it’s about the brewer wanting to show their passion in the beer,” Mikel Rius, director of the Barcelona Beer Festival told Catalan News. “I think it’s more about that than about numbers or the ways to make it, it’s about passion and quality.”

Dedication and attention go hand-in-hand with the quality on offer. According to GECAN’s 2016 report, the average amount of time spent on producing one bottle of beer in microbreweries was more than two minutes, whereas mass-producers were able to churn out a fresh bottle in merely seconds.

Another defining feature would be the adventurous spirit among brewers. Browse the production lists of any craft producers and you’re bound to find more and more experimental and strange flavours and taste combinations the longer you search, such as carrot cake ale, cherry bomb sour, and even chocolate and chilli stout.

Catalan craft beer industry

Across Catalonia, there are over 100 craft breweries, which make around 1,000 different beers. Before the pandemic hit, there were precisely 117 brewhouses, while the health crisis lowered this figure to 107. 

2019 saw more than 5 million litres of craft brew produced in Catalonia. The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic saw this drop to just over 3.5 million litres, but the long-term trend is clear, Catalonia is making and drinking more and more craft beer each year. 

In 2012, fewer than 40 breweries existed here and together they brewed only around 790,000 litres of beer. Just five years earlier, there weren’t even ten craft breweries in Catalonia. 

The typical craft brewery is a small operation, with just a handful of employees. Even the largest of craft breweries are still micro-brewers, with just 10-15 workers. 

In total, the industry directly employed 376 people before the pandemic and ensuing economic crisis hit, without counting the number of jobs created in adjacent businesses such as craft beer pubs.

The pandemic also forced brewers to change their sales operations, with just 19 selling their stock on online stores before the health crisis, and 68 now providing fans with the chance to buy online.

Is there anything distinctly Catalan about the beer that’s produced here? With some beers, yes. Montseny, for example, is a rural mountainous area filled with chestnut trees, so the local brewery came up with a recipe for a brown ale that includes chestnuts in it.

Jordi Llebaria and Mikel Rius both acknowledge that Catalonia is wine country, and particularly cava country, and this is something that provides exciting opportunities for the festival director.

“There’s a lot of connections about the use of yeast and using barrels of cava, and in the next few years, we want to say that we’ll have our own beer style in Catalonia, and maybe this is the way,” Rius says. 

The industry in Catalonia is a very decentralized one, spread out throughout the territory. Some 20% of the breweries are located in rural areas, and over 70% of them are outside of the county capitals. 

Community and culture

One thing that stands out in the world of craft beer is the sense of community among all involved. United by a love of great-tasting brews, producers and drinkers alike tend to be very outward-looking and open to helping their peers and colleagues any way they can, as, in many cases, they are friends, even when from another brewery.

In Catalonia, Jordi Llebaria says they have “set up a sector from scratch that did not exist before, and there has been collaboration.” Montseny brewery was founded in 2007 and has both relied on the help of others and given help to others in the industry, especially in the early days. 

“I’d say there has been more collaboration than competition, and this is one of the things I am most proud of about being part of this industry,” Llebaria says.

Collaborations can also take the form of two breweries coming together to work on new, usually limited edition, beers, and are another common feature of the industry. 

Additionally, more than 50,000 people took part in various beer tourism activities in craft breweries in 2019, an emerging side to this flourishing sector. 

These cultural activities can range from beer tastings, concerts, book launches, film screenings, and they help spread the culture of the growing trade and give microbreweries more visibility, meaning this artisanal market will likely continue going from strength to strength in the years to come.