We’re three Norwegian girls and one Melbournian bloke home brewing and searching for a new Norwegian beer to launch on the Melbourne market.

14 months ago we, Emilie Løkken, Kristine Blikseth and Mari Guren, came to Melbourne to finish our BA in Communication (Advertising) at RMIT. Having studied and lived in Oslo our entire lives, Melbourne was like a breath of fresh air. Melbourne got the culture, creative environment and enthusiastic, curious and friendly people. Whenever we met a new Melbournian, they humoured us with their lack of knowledge about Norway. The urge for putting our little country on the Melbourne map probably started to grow already then. Subconsciously.

We’ve many times talked about and played around with the thought of starting something up somewhere down the road. What we all had in mind was probably something in Advertising or Design. But when we were sitting around brainstorming for our AD Project assignment at RMIT, we started talking about Norway, then beer and after the ball started rolling and ideas were popping up left and right, we got so excited. Then we remembered that a mate of ours, Julian Allen, is a major beer enthusiast and have done some home brewing, so we asked him if he wanted to join us in the beer search and be in charge of the brewing. Of course he said yes, we all love tasty as beer!

After living in Melbourne for a little while we all came to love the wonderfully wide range of new beers, wines and foods we could explore. We got really into it for awhile and we’ve had some favorites over these past months, some of them are the White Rabbit dark and pale ale, Mountain Goat steam ale and the Little Creatures pale ale to mention some of our early favorites. As the Vinkings before us, we Norwegians love beer, but our beer range and culture is very different from the Melbournian one. The range consists of pilsner or bayer mainly, which we love, but the market isn’t that big and there’s little to no competition. In Melbourne the market is more vibrant and exciting. There’s room and a growing market for small, quirky boutique beers and Melbourne is always open for something young and fresh. The challenge, the scary part, but the most exciting part, is that we get to do it all. Business planning, financing, funding, investors, branding, marketing and advertising! And as The Beatles sung “I get by with a little help from my friends”, so by outsourcing here and there, why couldn’t we do this?

You can say, if you want, that we have no idea what we’re doing and be all critical, but everyone have to start somewhere. We learn as we go and our journey is probably going to be long and a bit bumpy, but it’s also going to be awesome, exciting and have some major ups! The dream is to start up a microbrewery, but to begin with, we want to tell our story as we are searching, drinking and home brewing. You got to start somewhere!

So follow our journey people, in the search and making of the Norwegian/Melbourne made beer!

/snø

kristine, emilie, mari, julz