Welcome to Beerland

Greenland’s first independent microbrewery — Greenland Brewhouse — held its official launch this week at the Tivoli amusement park in downtown Copenhagen, Denmark.

“It was terrific,” Salik Hand, the director of Greenland Brewhouse, said in a telephone interview from Copenhagen. “We were handing out samples of beer and there was a long line of people waiting.”

Greenland Brewhouse is making dark and pale ale using water from the island’s huge ice cap at its microbrewery in the southern Greenland community of Narsaq. The operation recently produced the first batch of 66,600 litres of beer.

Hard, 38, has been working on this project since 2004 and invested about four million Danish kroner (about $800,000) in the company. Greenland’s home rule government is also backing the microbrewery.

When it reaches full capacity, Greenland Brewhouse expects to produce up to 400,000 litres of beer per year, which, for the time being, will be shipped from Greenland to Germany for bottling.

The beer will be sold in Denmark, other European countries and possibly the United States. The beer’s alcohol content is 5.5 per cent, and in Denmark will sell for about 37 Danish kroner ($7) for a half-litre bottle, about the same price as other similarly sized beers from microbreweries in Denmark.

However Greenlanders won’t be able to buy the beer in Greenland right now because the company Nuuk Imeq currently holds the monopoly for all beverage sales and bottling in Greenland. This means Greenland Brewhouse won’t be able to sell its product until the rules governing beverage sales and bottling are changed.

“I hope by the beginning of the new year that we’ll be able to sell in Greenland,” Hand said.

The microbrewery is planning to market a Christmas beer for the end of 2006 and hopes to create a fourth brew in 2007.

As it expands, Greenland Brewhouse may help create more jobs in Narsaq, population 2,000.

But, for now, the microbrewery remains a small-scale business, with only three employees: Hard, his partner and sales manager Steen Outzen, and brewmaster Rasmus Broge. Hard and Broge previously worked at one of Denmark’s leading microbreweries.

A second brewery, called Godthaab Bryghus, owned by a Danish restaurant chain and specializing in brewing its own beer, is planning to open Aug. 17 in Nuuk. Its yearly production of 40,000 litres of beer will be sold only in the bar and restaurant of Nuuk’s Hotel Hans Egede.