About us
Bruggsmidjan Kaldi was founded in 2006 by Agnes and Ólafur.
Ólafur had been a fisherman for 26 years but in 2003 he got injured in his knee during his time at sea. Ólafur and his wife, Agnes, were looking at difficult times because there was no other work in their little town Árskógssandur. Everything was about the fish during that time.
Two years later, in June 2005, Agnes was watching television when she saw an interview about a Microbreweries and their overall increasing popularity around the world.
The interview was about a small microbrewery located in Denmark.
At that time there were no microbreweries in Iceland, only two large mass production breweries, Vífilfell and Ölgerðin.
Agnes had always talked about how lucky they were to have such good and clean water in our little town that comes out of a spring from a mountain that stands above Árskógssandur, then she got this crazy idea: Let’s open a microbrewery!
You would think that it took a while to convince her husband but that was not the case and only a week later they were off to Denmark to visit that same brewery she had seen on the news.
The Danish brewery helped them a lot and gave them good ideas and advice, they pointed out that Czech beer has good quality style and ingredients.
Czech Republic is famous around the world for their quality made and unique beer.
This trip to Denmark inspired Agnes and Ólafur and they saw a chance to make a new beer for the Icelandic market.
They wanted quality made beer with a lot of taste so they chose a Pilsner style beer, made by the century old Czech brewing method.
They had two choices, buy a recipe or get their own brew master to make their own beer from their ideas.
They chose the second choice and by a miracle they got in touch with David Masa through a brewery equipment manufacturer.
David is a Czech brew master in fourth generation and has studied brewing for 9 years. He has specialized in helping microbreweries get on their feet all over the world
In October 2005 they made purchase agreements on brewery equipment in Czech Republic and in December that year Bruggsmidjan Kaldi was formally founded.
In March 2006, a 380 square meter sized house rose in the small town Árskógssandur, population 100.
Árskógssandur is located 35 km from Akureyri and 12 km from Dalvík.
First beer was brewed on August 22nd and first bottling on September 28th.
Kaldi formally opened on September 30th 2006.
Our goal was to make a high quality beer and chose the best ingredients available. All ingredient comes from Czech Republic and then we use our Icelandic water that comes from a mountain called Sólarfjall.
The outcome is Kaldi: Icelandic beer, brewed by century old Czech method, unpasteurized, without preservatives and added sugar.
To start with we expected our annual production to be 160.000 liters per year. But the demand was more than expected so in 2007 we decided to add more fermentation tanks and increase our fermentation space by 12.000 liters. By then our annual production was 300.000 liters per year.
In 2008 we had to expand more and added more fermentation space, around 12.000 liters in November.
In 2011 our factory was expanded by half and moved our “bottling machine” over to the new house. We added more tanks and increased our fermentation space by 12.000 liters and then again in 2014!
In 2015 a small 50 square meter house was added for the fermentation tanks, 12.000 more liters added, new filter bought for our brewers and a keg filling and cleaning machine to save us a little bit more time!
In the year 2015 our annual production is 650.000 liters per year!
The plan for 2016 is to build a 280 square meter warehouse.
Today we have 5 beers and 5 seasonal beers along with some special limited edition beers.
You can read about them here.
And today we have 12 employees that work at Kaldi.
