Griffin loves the romance of the road; the relationships acquired along the way. From the Impressionists to Dadaist collectives, art has always thrived where creators could fuel one another through sharing space, physical and otherwise. Similarly, nomads brew using other people’s brick-and-mortars and equipment, chasing the serendipity and expansion that comes when minds collide.
Yet Up Front is far from the first nomadic brewery. The model was spearheaded, in part, by two other artistically minded brewers who pursued spontaneity and resisted being anchored to one spot. When Henok Fentie founded Omnipollo in Sweden in 2011, he was inspired by Belgian painter René Magritte and his communism-inspired approach to surrealism—where painters, photographers, and even fashion designers worked in a series, interpolating one central theme through their chosen medium.
“The base idea is that you could transmit from one form of expression to another,” says Fentie. “I had this idea that if I ever ran a company, I wanted to run it that way.”
Around this time, Fentie met Karl Grandin, a visual artist based in Stockholm, and pitched him the idea of opening a brewery that embodied these principles. Fentie would handle the beer, and Grandin would do the design. Grandin was on board, but Fentie only had $3,000 in startup money, a loan from his mother. There was no way the two surrealist dreamers could flip that meager sum into their own real estate.
Instead, Fentie leveraged relationships from his brewpub job and found them production space in other, established breweries. They brewed on short-term contracts, often collaborating with their hosts, and in exchange for the time and space, they would bring their artistic vision into the brewhouse.
At the same time, in Baltimore, Brian Strumke was plotting his own vagabond adventure. Strumke was a homebrewer and globally touring techno DJ who began brewing full-time when his DJ career ended. He was drawn to nomadic brewing for the same reason as Fentie: It was an invitation to travel the world and experiment with new collaborators. Early on, a friend introduced Strumke to Twelve Percent; like Stein, he immediately saw how the distributor could help establish a brand without the burden of leasing a building.
“I was like, ‘Oh, shit, this can be my record label,’” Strumke says. “From a creative standpoint, if I wanted to truly stick to my art, then spreading it far and wide was a safer bet than expecting just one specific local market to absorb your concept.”
Like those auteurs of first-wave American craft beer, the media fell in love with Strumke’s story. They called him a “gypsy brewer,” a term he originally embraced but has since abandoned because of its racist connotation (it’s still frequently invoked both in the U.S. and U.K.). NPR praised Stillwater right out of the gate, likening Strumke to “an old-world itinerant preacher.” In 2011, Stillwater was named the number-two best new brewer in the world by RateBeer.
For any traditional brewery, the logical next step would be commodification and mass-production. But throughout history, iconoclastic artists have operated on a communitarian, egalitarian ethos that dissolves traditional notions of ownership, and nomadic brewers are no exception. “I’m an anticapitalist at heart, and in some ways, it’s very weird that I’ve started a business,” Griffin says. “You can be against money, but still have to spend it, because it’s the dominant system.”
Up Front’s Giulia exemplifies this ethos. An English-style Barleywine blend that’s aged on figs and dates, it’s the product of six different brewing locations. Every time Griffin moved, the barrels came with him. When the end result proved unsatisfactory, he dumped it into a glass of another Barleywine he made that he was tasting at the same time, and the beer was born.
“That’s the beauty of collaboration,” Fentie says. “It’s almost always the case that the end result, both in terms of flavor and everything else around these beers, actually does come out better.”
Nomads aren’t inherently against growth; they’re just finding different, more decentralized ways to do it. Griffin subsidizes his more creative brews largely through the sales of one popular beer, a Gose called Das Ist Techno Sex: a variation of Yojo that swaps in lime for kalamansi. Demand for this beer is high enough that he flipped the script and contracted his brewing out to 71 Brewing in Dundee, Scotland, where he does all his canning.
Still, it can be a slippery slope from outsourcing to empire-building. Omnipollo now operates two bars in Stockholm as well as others in Hamburg and Tokyo that produce roughly one-third of its beer, and it just converted a church in Sundbyberg, Stockholm, into a flagship brewery/taproom. Strumke has found a semi-permanent production space at Native-owned Talking Cedar Brewery, Distillery, Tasting Room & Restaurant in Rochester, Washington; simultaneously, he’s planning outposts in Leeds and Brazil. These moves follow the steps of former nomads like Prairie Artisan Ales and Grimm Artisanal Ales, which transformed into more traditional breweries after starting on the road.
While the traditional, static brewery models don’t necessarily reproduce toxic cultures, owning physical space and equipment creates power dynamics that can quickly get complicated. By eschewing ownership, nomadic breweries could seemingly disrupt these structures, but that has not unilaterally been the case. It’s impossible to discuss the equity of the nomadic brewing model without pointing to Mikkeller: perhaps the world’s best-known nomadic brewery, now an empire notorious for its ongoing saga of workplace abuses.
Many nomadic breweries have also had to negotiate the fallout of partnering with businesses later marred by similar allegations. Up Front’s Techno Sex was born when a Glasgow BrewDog pub commissioned a Yojo-like beer for a festival. And both Stillwater and Omnipollo had ties to Tired Hands leading up to its own scandal (Omnipollo has continued to work with the brewery after reviewing its plans to establish an “equitable and fair workplace,” Fentie says).
Griffin is resisting, but sees home, family, and finance as inevitable frictions upon the nomadic path. He’s noticeably uncomfortable with his recent acquisition of a rental unit for his cans, tanks, and office equipment. Fellow nomad Harry Weskin is building a brew kit in the spartan, high-ceilinged warehouse, turning his Dookit Brewing Company into a full-time endeavor. The move is mutually beneficial, but as Griffin says, “as soon as we get a brewing license, we won’t be [nomadic] brewers anymore.” For this reason, he plans to stay mobile as long as he can, versus using Weskin’s kit.
“It’s going to be a shame when I do have a home that I don’t have to leave,” Griffin says. “I never want to have a kit that is capable of more than two batches a month. I could certainly bring costs down significantly, but that would be at the expense of my lifestyle changing significantly.”
