Here’s the backstory: I travel to New York City once or twice a year, and I’m lucky to have a friend there whose parents’ basement is my home-away-from-home when I’m in town. I’ve always been deeply grateful for this travel subsidy. So, after my first lengthy stay in their basement, I started wondering whether there weren’t some way I could repay them for their kindness. Naturally, brewing came to mind. It certainly didn’t hurt that I’ve been brewing tiny batches—from shot glass to gallon-sized—for years.
Still, the constraints were profound. I didn’t want to be seen in the kitchen brewing, so I needed to work out a way to brew without boiling wort. I also didn’t have much more than a week, so the beer needed to ferment and carbonate in short order. As a result—and since lightning-quick kveiks were still relatively scarce at the time—I never actually pulled off a “travel beer” in their basement. However, the proliferation of multiple kveiks and clean Lactobacillus strains in recent years has allowed me to test some techniques for brewing these travel beers.
After a bit of experimentation, I’ve landed on some equipment setups and recipe-design principles that yield tasty results. So, if you’d like to play around with brewing on the go—to make a gift for your hosts, to enjoy your hobby while on vacation, or even to brew with a fruit that you can’t legally take home—here’s how you might go about it.