The first steps
Ofrälse began in Lund, a historic city known for its medieval centre and Sweden’s oldest university. The three founders, Adam Östbring, Simon Leppänen and Hampus Tarras Wahlberg, met in a shared student kitchen and quickly bonded over a love of beer. Before long they were brewing their own. With three plastic fermentation buckets and a small stainless steel pot, they produced the very first Ofrälse beers and shared them with a lucky handful of Lund’s thousands of students.
Connecting to our roots
When the student kitchen became too small and the desire to connect more closely with the Skåne landscape grew, the brewery moved to an empty stable on the Tarras Wahlberg family farm. Set on Hallandsåsen, a beautiful spot an hour north of Lund, it offered the perfect setting to explore local brewing traditions. After months of work, the stable became a fully functioning test brewery where Ofrälse perfected its first commercially successful beer, a farmhouse pale ale brewed with apples from the orchards in Kivik.
Eight tons of stone was gathered from a local quarry by hand, forming the new floor of the brewery. A couple of weeks well spent! Wouldn’t it look nice if the right wall was full of windows, though? We thought so too.
Luckily, a farm in a neighbouring county had decided it was time to replace all their windows. With more time than money at Ofrälse’s disposal, the windows were picked up, renovated, and installed.
In 2019, the old stable could officially be inagurated as the new HQ of Ofrälse. However, with the stable being too small to supply demand and sustain brewing on a commercial scale, Ofrälse used a co-brewing approach at Uncharted Brewing Company outside Lund to ship out the first pallets of beer to customers in southern Sweden.
TIME TO SCALE UP
After The Big Cone – Ofrälses classic New England IPA – was selected for nationwide distribution by the Swedish state monopoly Systembolaget, it was time to scale up. In just under two months, 48 000 cans Big Cone were sold, and Ofrälse had established itself firmly on the Swedish craft beer scene.
AIMING HIGHER
With Ofrälse consistently winning nationwide distribution deals, larger production facilities were desperately needed. As luck would have it, three other students from Lund had embarked on the same journey a few years earlier, and opened a large scale brewery in Landskrona called Brygghuset Finn. After discussions over some beers, it was decided that Ofrälse would move its co-brewing operations to Finn.
COMING FULL CIRLCE
Today Ofrälse has established itself as a major player in the Swedish craft beer scene, standing in the top 5% of breweries selected for nationwide distribution deals. With test brewing on Hallandsåsen and in Malmö, and large scale production in Landskrona, we create beers rooted in tradition with a modern twist. If you want to learn more about how we brew, follow the link below. Cheers to everyday beer drinkers and to all the Ofrälse people out there.
