Most people who’ve heard of Norwegian farmhouse brewing associate it with three things: kveik, raw ale, and juniper. The style known as kornøl has the trifecta—as discussed in Kornøl: The Tale of the Ale of the Grain—yet western Norway is actually home to two very different styles of farmhouse ale. The second is known as heimabrygg—literally, “homebrew” in the local dialect.
If you look at the map, it’s not difficult to see why the region has two styles of beer rather than one: Jostedalsbreen, the biggest glacier in continental Europe, separates the kornøl area to the north from the heimabrygg area to the south.
Like kornøl, heimabrygg is from the fjord country, but the most central area is not by a fjord. Heimabrygg is brewed in Hardanger and Sogn, by the fjords of the same names, but above all in the district of Voss. The geography is likely a large part of why Voss became so central to farmhouse brewing.