drinking top-fermented
ale, best served well-chilled: citrussy, slightly sweet, made with the local spring water, treated as necessary
(Mani tap water is unfit for drinking, containing four times more fluoride than
EU recommendations, but the springs in the region provide nicely lime-hard brewing
liquor), Magnum hops, Greek pils malt from the Vergina brewery in Thessaly and
a touch of Vienna and carapils,. It’s a great beach or poolside beer. The
summer ale, paler, slightly bitterer, slightly hoppier, is a little more
complex, and a fine companion for the generally unfussy, excellent-value Greek food,
all made from local ingredients, found in the many family-run restaurants in Ag
Nik and its larger neighbours, Stoupa and Kardamili, where you can still dine
very well for under €14 a head, including drink.
Takis and John
Malcolm, an expat Scot in his 60s and another long-term home brewer who met Takis
through their mutual interest in making beer, and who is now one of two assistants
at the three-man brewery, offered a sample of the blonde ale that had been
souped up post-fermentation with masses of extra Citra hops, a beer closer to
the sorts they would like to educate local drinkers into appreciating. It was
tremendous: the pale malts giving an almost transparent underpinning, like clear
glass struts, to a beautifully sculpted structure of lemons, limes and mangoes
whirled together in a frothy, scented, just-bitter-enough delight.
The brewery itself, which opened in June last year just off the main road south from Stoupa, between the mountains and the sea, after a short period where Nema beers were being made by the Sparta brewery, on the other side of the Taygetus mountains that divide the Mani peninsula, is housed in a building that started as an olive oil factory, spent some time as a marble works and was later a disco, which has to be, surely, one of the most varied careers of any brewery premises on the planet. Today it holds shiny Chinese-made stainless steel brewing kit: 1,200-litre brew length, mash tun, copper, lauter tun, whirlpool and hop kettle, four fermenting vessels (three 25hl, one 12.5hl), pumps and valves computer-operated, it only brews top-fermented, unfiltered, unpasteurised ales, so no lagering tanks, and there is a very small bottling and kegging line, with CO2 flushing. The kit was manufactured by Tiantai, in Jinan, Shandong, China to Takis’s specifications, and Tiantai send its Mr Wu over to Greece to put it all together: according to John Malcolm, Mr Wu did not speak English, let alone Greek, and all communication with him was via Google Translate. How much the kit actually cost, the Mani Brewery won’t say (indeed, they were rather upset when I made a guess), although John Malcolm did reveal that it cost more to ship the kit from Piraeus, Greece’s main port, to Ag Nik than it did to get it from China to Piraeus.
Takis is coy about the whole source of the brewery’s funding, saying only that it is “local financing”. He has backing from a big local drinks distributor, and he has also had encouragement from Mythos Brewery, the Carlsberg subsidiary that supplies what is probably the best of Greece’s macro-lagers. The encouragement from Mythos, he thinks, is there because the company sees an operation like the Mani Brewery as expanding the market for beer in Greece, and Carlsberg would like to be able to introduce some of its more “craft” brands, such as Grimbergen (yes, I know, but that’s how Carlsberg sees it) into the country. The reasoning seems to be that if, through the availability of more craft beer from the likes of the Mani Brewery, the Greeks are persuaded to drink more unusual beers and less macro-lager and ouzo, then this will be good for Carlsberg as well.
It’s a brave
step to push unfiltered, unpasteurised, slightly hazy ales at a market that
doesn’t really understand such beers yet, and once, at least, in my multiple samplings
of Mani Brewery beers in numerous outlets over more than a fortnight it didn’t work – ironically,
at a restaurant in Ag Nik itself, where the beer in two consecut