S4 ● E50 A farm for €3000, The village brewery, New REKO Platform and Filming our Trainings

Thursday, and we're getting everyone together to.

Go and visit the brewer that we grow the hops for.

You got the sun behind you, so you look awesome.

I'm the brewer and owner of the company, started in 2014. We're going to do a brewery tour and see how. How we do it here in Sene. It was built as a hospital back in 1948. And we're going to get inside the old kitchen. It was used up to 2004 and then it was closed for 10 years before I started to hire the place.

Let's go inside.

This is where all the good stuff ends up before it gets out to Sistemas and the restaurants and bars. So the brand is Freeken Lake here and we use oats as a special grain for brewing the beer. So does anyone know what things you use in brewing beer? Well, you get dispensed grains right from me. That's actually malt. It looks like this. I'm sure most of you know about it.

It's.

I don't know the English name for the grain. Barley. Yeah, malted barley. That's right. So it's barley that has been steeped, put in water for. For a couple of days and then roasted. And the different roasts of the barley makes the color of the beer. You can actually have a taste of it. It tastes quite good. The sweetness of the malt makes is the sugar that the yeast later uses to produce alcohol, carbon dioxide and other flavors. And these are the oats we're using. It's called black oats. So we have a local mill a couple of miles north of Suna that's roasting the oats before milling it to a nice flour. You can smell it. It's a lot of fiber, so you don't have to eat it. So we use the oats as a spice to the beer. So up to 20% of the grain bill is the roasted oats. Except for the malted barley and oats, we of course use water, local water and yeast, of course. And last but not least, hops. That's what you're growing. This is a South African hops, actually. And regarding the hops, we try to be as local as we can in getting the ingredients. The malted barley comes from both Sweden and Finland, and the hops is growing in Germany, of course, and Great Britain, especially England, United States, States, Australia and New Zealand. Back in the days, Sweden had a lot of hops. The greater farms had to grow hops for the state or for the military because they used hops. Of course, in beer, especially out on sea, because beer had. It didn't went bad as water could go when they were kegged. There's a lot of stainless steel here, so most breweries look like this. A lot of tanks, stainless steel tanks, that is used for different purposes. The heart of the brewery is this brewing pot. So this is where we heat the water. It's about one pump, 250 liters. It's used for heating up water to about 65 to 75 centigrade. We will pump it up to this tank where we have put malted barley. So when we put the warm water and malt together, it makes a syrup. The syrup? Yeah, like a thick syrup. And during this process, where the warm water meets the malt, enzymes from the malt breaks down the starch in the malt and produces sugars, mostly maltose is the primary sugar produced, but also fructose and sucrose. And this chemical process takes about an hour and then we pour it back to the pot so the grains will stay there. And that's the grains you will receive later during the day. But the syrup where you worked is now being poured into the pot and then reheated up to the boiling point. So it we will boil it. And during the boiling process we put in hops. So the hops will contribute with the bittering.

This is the old hospital mall. It now makes beer.

We used the yellow one when we started. Sorry. We have two different mills here. The yellow one was the first one we used, but it was quite loud. So we have child care service upstairs. So we couldn't crush the grains during the day, so I had to do it early morning or late in the afternoon or light. But then we bought this one from Germany. It's quite quiet and it's very efficient. We have cold water in here and hot wort in there, and the cold water will chill the wort.

How long does it take for a thousand litres?

It takes about 45 minutes to chill it down. It's the perfect time.

It's very efficient and a good pump.

With it and quite a good pressure in the water system as well. In the old system that we still are using is one of these tanks back there. These are milk tanks with a chiller on the back and we use them for fermenting in an open system. So the last day of fermenting, the last day of the fermentation process, we transfer the beer to a closed tank, one of the tanks you saw in the corridor. But the fermentation process takes About a week, from five to 10 days. The ideal fermentation time would be five or six days because then we can use the tank or the whole system once a week. But with these tanks we can. We use them for beer that should ferment for a longer time and should be lagering for a longer time or stored. Because during the lagering or storage time it also matures so it gets its final flavors during the maturing process. It could be about. For one of the beers, the maturing process takes only one week. And for the more heavy beers like the porter and the third tank here, it could take a couple of months before it's ready for consumption.

How many kilos do you use in one year currently, do you think?

Let's see if we can carry on it. About 55, about 250, 300 kilos.

And you think we could possibly supply.

That with 300 plants.

In good conditions?

Yeah. Yeah.

Down in Germany and Czech Republic you can. You can get about two, two and a half kilos per. Per plant.

The main season is shorter.

Yes, but here you could hit for a kilo or something like that.

That would be super sweet. If we can supply.

We'll see about it. And that's the dried hops. All the valves here, magnetic valves, is controlled by different type settings. When we start filling the beer, we also open the exit valve. And when the beer is coming up to the end of the bottle or the top of the bottle, we cut off the beer supply and keep the exit valve open. And the pressure will zero in about a second. And it's equal to when you open a bottle. So it just produces a little foam. But most important, the beer will not produces foam during the filling process. Labeling.

Would you be willing to say what you've invested in this? Yeah.

From the start, 400,000 in equipment. Yeah. And six or eight months higher as well. And during the last two or three years. Two years, two and a half years, I've invested about 500,000 more. About five to 600,000 grams.

That's very reasonable, no?

Yeah. I know other breweries, even here in Vermont, started out with 3 or 4 million crowns.

Is that because you're buying a lot.

Of second hand equipment?

Yeah. And doing it by yourself.

Christian just went to the toilet, so I'm just testing everything.

That was really cool. And thanks, Christian, for showing us around. What I really appreciate about Christian's attitude in business is he's really trying to support local enterprise through his own business. And having us grow hops, for example, if we can get 350 plants together and get them cropping well. Then we can supply his entire hops demand. He's also been having meetings with the Agricultural board SLRF to try and establish a malting business in Vamland so that all the ingredients for the beer can come from Vermland, which would be awesome. We love to work with other innovators, producers who are trying to create change in their fields. And I also really inspired that. All that stainless steel and equipment and chillers, etc. It's a very low start up, about $100,000 to start the business up, which surprised me a lot in Sweden. For all that gear, you know, it's a lot of expense that you could easily spend four or five times that if you didn't take the time to source all that material secondhand and used. And he found things a lot cheaper from the milk industry. A lot of milk farmers going out of business here in Sweden regularly because of the monopoly in the milk market. Big problem with the commodity market. One of the great things about small microbreweries is that there's a monopoly on alcohol in Sweden. You can only buy alcohol above 3.5% from the system, government regulated shops. But if you're a small producer, they have to supply your beer. You have the right to have it in front of customers. So it works really well for innovative small organic producers like this.

I'm off into the forest to get the ATV fixed at Arnie's place.

He's an awesome guy who knows everything about these machines.

I have paid €3,000 for it. Well, I moved in here 43 years.

Ago and he built this whole place. I don't know if you heard on the camera. He bought this farm for €3,000 and built everything here with his own hands. Beautiful buildings, really nice yard. And he's got an amazing workshop. But he's done everything in the old fashioned ways with the old building techniques and old materials. He's just showing us his saun here.

He built.

4 centimeters from the beginning. And now it's almost.

How long did you say you. When. When did you buy it?

For €3,000 back in 78.

€3,000 or €3,000?

€3,000?

Yeah.

Amazing. And you put a lot of work into.

I have no road. It wasn't even a road to get here. And I had. I had no houses around. I have built all the houses myself.

So it turns out that we have a totally bent.

Parking brake disc.

The parking brake is a separate disc here. And it's totally bent out of shape because some people have been driving it with a handbrake on which is one of those things that having lots of people sometimes costs a lot of money. And also this switch that does the diff and forward drive doesn't open. And Arnie, in how many years have you been fixing bikes, Arnie?

30.

30 years. And how many four wheelers?

30 years and bikes? 40 maybe.

And how many of these have you changed?

12,000.

No, this unit?

No one.

He's never changed one of these before.

It never happened.

So this is the cost of having peeps, but that's the way it goes. This is Arnai's new bike. He loves riding as well as fixing things. He's fixed thousands of machines and he's known locally as the best repairman going. And I love his workshop. It's super compact. But everything in here for fixing up everything you could possibly do for quad bikes, snowmobiles, motorbikes, four wheel drives. He's just an awesome guy. Also we just really love coming. He lived in California for some years.

So he likes speaking English with us.

And he likes showing people around his property when we come and fix up the bike. Manny does special winter spikes for quad bikes because obviously it's quite icy here which he does with this cool tool over here.

This has been done.

It just opens up the. You drill a hole in the tire and it opens it up and pops in the spike. So he likes making these 100%. How old is this one?

Six years. Hard riding and that is gives it the top performance.

It's dinosaur.

Whose nest is that, Gracie? I don't know. Some water bird.

But they're quite big eggs.

You think it's seagull. So I'm going driving to the forest to our friend who's a welder where we bought the peacocks. And we're putting extra racking on the slaughter racks because we're going to be processing nearly double the chickens per day this year. And we managed to knock these together using a normal welder that's not designed for stainless steel but he's got all the gear and is a much better welder. And so we thought we'd give him the job. So I'm off to the forest Grace to be taking you to mama's so you can say goodbye to Miso and monkey. This is our friend's place where the peacocks came from. And we're just dropping off these racks. We're just welding in 20 mil box tubing two extra pieces in each bar to Put up the capacity to a couple of hundred chickens.

I've been driving around a lot today and seeing different people and just feeling really inspired by the local community. There's so many skillful people, so many helpful people and I'm really interested in the idea of bringing back villages and communities to life. Not in any alternative community sense, but getting the basic interactions and businesses and, you know, respectful relating and communication and simple things like a farm is the basis of a community. In my mind. Once you have a farm in place producing really epic quality food, then people want to start opening restaurants with that food, then people want to start moving there and when there's kids around, people want to start thinking about alternatives to schooling, etc. For me, this is really where food is the thing that connects us all. We all eat food all the time and we all need good, healthy, local, poison free food. I'm really blessed to be in this part of the world and whilst it's not exactly the hub for agriculture in Europe, it's amazing what you can do at such high latitude in the short growing season. I'm just really inspired to find more and more people each year who are interested in this thing. It's really growing in Sweden. We're a bit behind other countries with these kind of movements, but it's growing a lot right now and it's becoming really popular in regular people's minds. So really excited for these next few years and collaborations. I'm going to make a video about the new RICO ring. That's something we're going to be working with as one of the admins on the Facebook page. It's a new hub for producers and consumers to connect. All done via Facebook and pre sales, which is kind of what we're doing anyway, but it allows a lot more producers to get involved and do drop off points that we've been trying to get other producers to use our drop off points that we've been working on. But this is a much more evened out way to do it where we're not responsible. It's actually the consumers that will start administrating the page. So I'm going to do a whole video about that as that kicks off in June. It's a very exciting time. That's it for today folks.

Restful day here and we've got a.

Few restful days before everything gets really busy here next week. Thanks for watching our videos as always.

Really appreciate your time and your comments, etc.

You can find out a lot more in a book Making Small Farms work.

On the website, etc.

And looking forward to filming the course coming up. And we're going to be releasing our online trainings in multiple formats later this year so that people of all levels of income and experience can.