It’s mid-July in Barcelona. The sun has just set behind the rooftops of the warehouse district in Sant Andreu, but the white walls still hold the heat. In the courtyard where I’m standing it radiates from all angles, making me thirstier than ever. I head for the corner where a woman is wrestling with a fobbing beer line. She smiles apologetically as a fan whips her hair across her face. Lacking basic Spanish—and even less Catalan—I wave away her apology and wait patiently.
It’s supposed to be the monthly Garage Beer Co. can release, but it’s nothing like the ones I’ve been to in the U.S. or U.K. For a start, there are no lines. Instead, everyone is milling around, drinking pints, digging into street food, and tapping their feet to the live Afro-soul music. I haven’t seen a single can leave the premises in many hours. People are here for the party, porróning their way through the endless summer.
Barcelona is not a beer geek town. Not yet, anyway. Even the drive from the airport reminds you of that, as you speed straight past Estrella Damm’s giant fermenters. They tower over the motorway, like the imposing monuments of an immovable regime.
Order a cerveza in the town center, and you’ll get Estrella. No one bothers to check, and usually they don’t stock anything else. For a city so obsessed with its food, collectively Barcelona just likes its beer cold and fizzy. In a province with a very strong local identity, the fact that Estrella is local is good enough.
That’s not quite true for everyone, of course. Look past the tourist traps and there’s an underground scene quietly bubbling with frustration. Neighbourhood bars like CatBar have staunchly supported smaller breweries for years, while getting a seat at El Vaso De Oro, a beer-centric counter restaurant, is almost impossible. Bodega Fermín, right by the beach, has started to serve great beer with delicious, casual food in an attempt to take craft mainstream, and Ølgod has brought a Nordic sensibility to the city’s scene. Most notable is BierCaB, a modern beer bar and restaurant right in the center of town, which has been going since 2013, and which has the kind of imported beer list that would impress anywhere in the world. It also happens to be around the corner from Garage’s original site.
While far from the first craft brewery in Catalonia, Garage is arguably the first to gain an international reputation for its Pales and Sours. Founders Alberto Zamborlin (an Italian) and James Welsh (an Englishman) both came to the city by way of other careers, meeting at a homebrew club in 2013. Welsh ended up in Barcelona while working in the print industry, but actually comes from a long line of cask ale brewers—his father spent most of his career at Ringwood Brewery in Hampshire. He’d fallen in love with the city and saw an opportunity to make a home for himself there while keeping the family tradition alive.
“My old man’s a brewer, my uncle’s a brewer, my brother can brew and he owns a pub,” says Welsh. “I was in limbo after leaving my printing job, so I went to a homebrew school run by a guy called Steve Huxley.”
“Beer is just beer. It may be great, it may be not. But you need something else, you need people; you need someone to tell the story.”
Huxley was a British brewer who ended up founding a brewpub in Catalonia called the Barcelona Brewing Company, but is better known for his book, La Cerveza – Poesía Líquida, and for his local mentorship. Though he died in 2015, his legacy is still visible all over the Barcelona beer scene—most conspicuously on the tokens you receive at the Barcelona Beer Festival, which bear his face.
“He had the first alcohol license of any craft brewer in the whole of Spain; he persuaded the guy who founded the Barcelona Beer Festival to set that up; he was behind Dougall’s Brewery; and he’s the reason I met Alberto,” says Welsh. “He is a big part of our history—we even put the brewpub where we did on his recommendation.”
Spanish craft beer was—and perhaps still is—in its infancy when Welsh met Zamborlin, who had fallen in love with beer while living with an American homebrewer in Dublin. They hit it off immediately, and agreed there was a lack of locally brewed, modern beer in the city. Estrella dominated, with local Lager brand Moritz fighting for second place against Heineken and Amstel. They decided to open a brewery together, but joining that multinational scrap was a one-way ticket to insolvency. Instead they settled on a brewpub model, where most of their volume would be sold on site. Zamborlin and Welsh spent months looking for the site, resorting to peering into vacant buildings or knocking on doors wherever they saw “For Rent” signs. Eventually they found an old paper shop on Carrer del Consell de Cent, in the neighborhood Huxley had recommended. It had a story, and more importantly the space and industrial set-up were well suited to a production site.
Garage Beer Co. opened in January 2015, right in the heart of Barcelona. Working on a tight budget, Welsh and Zamborlin tried to create a space that combined the easygoing style of Barcelona’s traditional bodegas with the international, industrial vibe that had, out of necessity, come to define the aesthetic of craft beer. Soon, Garage’s first location was luring creatives and students with its beer, music, and ambiance. On top of that, the brewery’s regularly rotating wall art featured the work of local artists—an additional point of connection within such a creative city.
For the first few months, Zamborlin and Welsh did everything: running the business, brewing the beer, and serving behind the bar. They hosted and partied as much as their time and stamina would allow. For them, being there personally was essential—not just on the party nights, but on the quiet ones, too.
“Beer is just beer,” says Zamborlin. “It may be great, it may be not. But you need something else, you need people; you need someone to tell the story. It sounds silly but if you don’t believe in or know what you’re doing, people know that.”
It’s lucky they were so adamant about the place and the culture, because to start with, the beer wasn’t up to scratch. They began by brewing a top-fermented, Lager-style beer—essentially an American-hopped Kölsch—and the West Coast-inspired Garage IPA, but had issues getting clean fermentations. Welsh’s dad came over to help, but he was finding diacetyl issues in the beer that he couldn’t solve, and even he ended up consulting the books written by Huxley.
“Their beer was dubious at first, then better—but most times not great,” says Spanish beer writer Joan Birraire. “Still, their place was cool, and non-beer geeks would start hanging out there because of it, while getting to taste new beer every time. They wouldn't notice if it was improving or not.”
The model was working, but pouring pints the brewer isn’t proud of is hardly sustainable, and by their own admission they needed a little help. That help came in the form of Brooklyn Brewery’s brewmaster Garrett Oliver, who strode into the bar one night during the Barcelona Beer Festival, to the astonishment of Welsh.
“Spanish drinkers are used to big aromas in wine, so our next move was to continue making very aromatic beers.”
“I was on my way out—I had to get back to my wife, who was pregnant at the time,” says Welsh. “I asked Alberto to speak to him about setting up a collaboration with someone in New York, but he was too busy. So I just stopped and quickly said, ‘You’ve tasted the beers, they’re not that great. We’d like to learn some more; who could we do a collaboration with?’”
Few people in the beer world are better-connected than Oliver, but even Welsh was surprised to be put in touch with Other Half. Sam Richardson and Matt Monahan generously agreed to come over and brew with them, and the resulting beer, In Green We Trust, set Garage on its current path. The beer, a Session IPA made with Palisade and Mosaic hops, was bold and aromatic, thanks to the stewardship of Richardson and Monahan.
“That beer just took off,” says Welsh. “It was much more hop-forward than anything we’d done before, but Spanish drinkers are used to big aromas in wine, so our next move was to continue making very aromatic beers.”
The unexpected success of In Green We Trust persuaded the pair to literally trust in green, and their Pales and IPAs all followed the heavy dry-hop blueprint of that beer. The fact that the New England-style IPA was the making of Garage is not without irony. Like most European brewers, Welsh and Zamborlin saw the trend on Instagram long before they tasted it, and like so many had even mocked it for its appearance. Thankfully, their cynicism didn’t stop them from changing their minds, and it did give them a great name for their first solo NE IPA.
“‘Soup’ was a name we banked that was a pisstake of all the styles happening over there,” says Welsh, in reference to the turbid American IPAs that kept popping up on his feed. “We never thought we’d make that kind of beer, so when we actually did a Hazy IPA, we just had to call it ‘Soup.’”
Though it was originally part of its seasonal cycle of beers, Soup has become Garage’s flagship IPA. While the combination of Mosaic and Citra hops has helped foster the beer’s popularity—each can is a crush of juicy pineapple and mango notes—there’s no denying that the name and design struck a chord with drinkers. While the former might have been luck, the can’s irreverent look (“Soup” appears to be spelled out of noodles, as in alphabet soup) was the result of careful planning. Since the start, the brewery’s visuals have been handled by Welsh’s wife, Sevkan Ariburnu. Ariburnu has a background in branding and recently started her own studio; with Garage’s look and feel, she’s achieved the tough task of standing out in an increasingly crowded and colorful marketplace
“While the beer world is full of great design, it is mostly vector design,” says Ariburnu. “I thought a photographic can with objects would stand out among the colors and shapes. Also with objects we could tell a story every month—every season there is a theme, and together they make a collection.”
Ariburnu was inspired by fashion designers who, under pressure to continually release new collections, create a range of designs that all share a common thread. So too, in Garage’s artwork, every season has a palette: a block-colored canvas on which one object is placed front and center, or repeated wallpaper-style and wrapped around. The results are always striking, even among the rainbow of 440ml cans in European fridges.
One beer, though—another collaboration with Other Half called More Green—was memorable for a different reason. It featured a nipple front and center, and though it wasn’t clearly male or female, it caused an uproar in the U.K. beer community. The British market has become sensitive to sexist labeling due to decades of exploitative alcohol advertising, and they saw it through that lens.
It still frustrates Welsh, who says that throughout the rest of Europe, and indeed within Garage Beer Co., the backlash was met with surprise. Ariburnu was also unprepared for the responses, as she saw the work closer to feminist statement than attempt at exploitation.
“I had mixed emotions when I did it,” she admits. “I was doing some feminist work on the side, I was a new mother, and I am from a Muslim country oppressed by men. So there was an anger there, but tension is not a bad thing in art.”
In the long-term that tension was probably good for the brewery. The debate that ensued served as exposure for the brand in new markets, and was also an opportunity to promote Ariburnu’s work. While that set Garage apart, the difficulty explaining Ariburnu’s intention did, however, expose one of the many risks of export. It is much harder to control the message and indeed the quality of the beer when you have to put it in someone else’s hands, and Garage Beer Co. has come to rely on export and distribution heavily to grow.
Though export wasn’t part of Garage’s initial plan, the brewery now sends around 45% of everything it makes abroad. Of course, when you establish a brewpub, you intend to sell the vast majority of your volume straight to the consumer. But once Garage hit capacity, a decision had to be made—did the founders risk an expansion and push out into the market, or did they settle?
Within 18 months of opening, the brewery was flying. The beers were gaining a strong reputation, were in demand in specialist shops, and Welsh and Zamborlin could feel the Spanish beer boom coming. Both the founders decided they wanted to build a brewery as ingrained in the culture of Barcelona as the two Lager breweries that came before them.
“When I came over I’d seen that the only beer in Barcelona was Estrella,” says Welsh. “Then in 2004 Moritz came along and a lot of money was pumped into that, and I naively thought, well, if there can be two breweries, there can be three or four or five. Our dream was to see our beer all over town.”
That meant they needed much more volume than the pub could give them, as well as a better margin. To expand, they received a grant from the government and topped that up with a public Crowdcube campaign, which brought in an extra €500,000 from their fans—the biggest crowdfunding raise in Spanish history at the time. In 2016 they opened a new, 34-barrel (40-hectoliter) production site in the district of Sant Andreu.
With the stage set, they started trying to push their beer into more mainstream venues: the kinds of bars and restaurants where beer was secondary to the food, or ambience, or price. Unfortunately, they found Estrella and Moritz had a tight hold on the market, and breaking through—particularly on draft—was almost impossible, even when pushing the lighter and cheaper Garage IPA.
“It’s incredibly competitive because there are no taps,” says Welsh. “In the niche 20-30-rotating-line bars there is an opportunity, but also plenty of opportunity to lose it. In the everyday pubs you’ll have just one tap, probably Estrella, Moritz, or Heineken—and they have paid for the install, fridges, and furniture to lock out competition.”
Ties and pricing weren’t the only issues. While much better for the beer, the brewery’s decision to go into can put it at odds with most drinkers’ preference for bottles, born out of Spain’s love of wine. Even the gorgeous weather counted against them, with the warm temperatures creating pouring issues in a city that never built any cellars or cold stores for beer. They couldn’t hit capacity and within a year, the financial strain was starting to show.
“There was a period in 2017 when we were losing a lot of money on a monthly basis,” says Welsh. “There was a cushion there from funding we had from the Spanish government, but I decided to pick up the phone and speak to some people [outside Spain]. It quickly became clear we could support the business by exporting, and then slowly push into the local market.”
While the market for Garage’s beer in Spain was vocal but small, there were many other distributors around Europe looking for new brands to help their portfolios stand out. As Barcelona is one of the continent’s most popular tourist destinations, any brewery making modern and exciting beer there gets a little extra cachet in the importer’s mind. After just a few conversations, Garage was exporting to the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia. Of course, this presented new distribution issues less to do with price and more to do with quality. As well as timing packaging runs and releases to meet international shipments, Garage came up with an ingenious way to track its cold-chain system.
“Our beer is like cask beer: it has to be sold fast because we know how it drops off. We have these thermal stickers that you stick on a pallet and if it goes outside of 6–8° [Celsius; 43-46° Fahrenheit], it will change color. When it’s received by the distributor they take a picture of it and send it to us, so we can ensure the haulage are transporting it right.”
“While the beer world is full of great design, it is mostly vector design. I thought a photographic can with objects would stand out among the colors and shapes.”
The brewery was growing again, and export was giving both Garage and Barcelona an international name in beer. In 2018, the company made just shy of 2,400 barrels (2,800 hectoliters), and in 2019 is on course to double that figure. Local business, however, has continued to be difficult outside of specialist craft beer bars. Around 20% of what Garage brews remains in Catalonia, which would surprise anyone who knows how much its people value local produce. Of course, with Moritz and Estrella able to claim the same origins, a valuable marketing tool is lost. It’s hoped that personalized service and a love of artisan produce will win out instead.
“We have an international sales manager and a national sales manager, who looks after our Spanish distributors and Barcelona craft sales,” says Zamborlin. “Then we have another person whose job is to open new accounts in non-craft—cafeteria, hotels, restaurants. His job is the most difficult in the short run, but we hope the long run is going to compensate him!”
Welsh says they are also focusing more on finding a terroir in their brewing, using more local fruits and barrels to develop the story they want to tell about the place they have chosen to call home. They’ve now let wild yeasts take over the original brewhouse, and will use that to produce beers more connected to the region. It seems strange to focus on Wild Ales in a bid to reach a wider audience, but they trust the educated palates of the Catalonians. They have to.
You can sense the desperation in both the founders to make something that’s loved by locals, and is woven into the historic fabric of the city. You can also see the pride the founders have in what they have built: it is written all over Zamborlin’s face as he walks among the crowds at the can launch, shaking hands, cheersing people, and indulging in beer from a porrón for a photo opportunity.
Perhaps that hunger comes from being two foreigners working to justify their place in a city already teeming with expats and tourists. Local success would be a mark of both the brewery and their standing in a place they love, but it would also be a satisfying link back to where they started: running a brewpub for locals and students. For Zamborlin, it all comes back to that.
“There’s no more growing beyond this,” he says, gesturing at the warehouse behind him. “Although if we did, the brewpub was the first thing we did and the most fun part of our job, so why not create a second one? I spent the first few years behind the bar every night, and I miss it. Garage started at the beginning with the atmosphere—the lights, the music, and us.”
Words, Jonny Garrett Photos, Jonny Garrett and Clara Rice Language
