Why PAGAN BREWS
This slogan has adorned bottles and souvenirs for a year now. In short, PAGAN BREWS best describes what we, as LABIETIS Brewery, represent on the beer world stage on the threshold of our tenth anniversary. It encompasses our roots, our vision of the evolution of beer culture since prehistory, and the pervasive guiding principle that we follow in making our beers. More below, in a lightly manifest spirit.
On the border of the beer world
If Europe can be considered the cradle of modern beer, Latvia has always been a bit on the periphery. We are marginal. Christian culture came to us last, and not entirely. Unlike the rest of Europe, it has never been forbidden to make beer at home, nor have Latvians ever substituted prayers for herbs, as in many other parts of Europe. This has kept the tradition of gathering medicinal herbs alive and still practised. What Latvian doesn’t have a jar of herbal tea in their pantry at home? We look at our heritage with the eye of a contemporary brewer, who draws inspiration from the Baltic Sea region’s fascinating cultural history, but ends up with a beer that meets modern standards of taste and quality.
The boredom of one faith
Looking back over some 10 000 years of the history of the brewing of staples, including beer, the belief that beer only needs three ingredients – barley, hops and water – is a novelty. And what is beer anyway? In our belief, beer can be any fermented drink made from grains and plants. Hops are just one of the herbs that can enrich the taste of beer. Similarly, barley is only one source of sugar – we can also make beer from wheat, rye, oats, buckwheat, and add honey or a range of berries and fruits from the forest and garden. We are all about beer without prejudice!
A taste of our nature or Terua
We don’t know what beer tasted like 200 years ago, let alone before that, but it’s pretty safe to say that it was made from local ingredients. Like brewers since time immemorial, we use local ingredients in our beers, honeys and ciders as much as possible, because their flavours are more understandable to us, they are more accessible and therefore better able to carry the flavours of our fragile cultural fabric. Accordingly, if it is semi-commercially available in Latvia, we will use local raw material. We use Latvian barley, wheat and rye malts, honey, more than 10 different Latvian berries and fruits, as well as wild-harvested wild berries in our daily fermentations.
And, of course, more than 30 Latvian medicinal plants along with hops. In the name of capturing the best possible cultural and historical flavour, we often use specialised malts and yeast strains from Europe, as well as hop varieties from all over the world. But the underlying desire is to make an organoleptic record of our environment in time. We go back to the roots of our beers with a modern taste and knowledge – local ingredients, a Latvian natural take on flavour, but at the same time with an open view of the world. Like an oak tree with its roots deep in our soil and its branches caressed by the winds from overseas – a balanced taste of culture and nature. Call us children of nature, call us modern savages, call us pagans who make beer.
Cheers!
– Labieša alus parish