Spanish Company Awarded for 'Olive Beer'

A beer made with Empeltre olive extract in Bajo Aragón, Spain, has been awarded at the SIAL Paris 2022 Awards as the most inno­v­a­tive alco­holic bev­er­age.

OliBa Green Beer was lauded by the panel of judges for its cre­ativ­ity, antic­i­pa­tion of mar­ket trends and orig­i­nal­ity.

According to Fortune Business Insights, a research firm, the global craft beer mar­ket is pre­dicted to grow from $103 bil­lion in 2021 to $211 bil­lion in 2028, with many com­pa­nies adding new ingre­di­ents to the four stal­warts of tra­di­tional beer brew­ing.

Ivan Caellas Colomés, OliBa Green Beer’s chief exec­u­tive, told Olive Oil Times that the inspi­ra­tion for the beer came dur­ing an olive oil tast­ing he was host­ing at his com­pa­ny’s estate perched on the foot of the Pyrenees Mountains in north­east­ern Spain.

“The idea came to me dur­ing an oil-tast­ing ses­sion with some clients,” he said. ​“I make green oils with green olives, and I wanted to emu­late the color of the oil in the beer.”

While he had no brew­ing expe­ri­ence before this, Caellas thought that brew­ing a craft beer with olives would be an excel­lent chance to show­case the region’s unique cul­ti­vars.

He said that adding the olive extract infused the fla­vors, aro­mas and col­ors of the olives into the beer, yield­ing a unique fla­vor pro­file.

Normally, the beer brew­ing process begins with malt­ing, when ripe grains are soaked in water daily. After a few days, they are moved to a sep­a­rate tank to aer­ate, allow­ing for the pro­duc­tion of the nec­es­sary enzymes for fer­men­ta­tion.

After aer­at­ing, grains are roasted, cre­at­ing malt. The length and tem­per­a­ture involved in this phase deter­mine the beer’s color and taste.

Once the malt is roasted, the next step is to add water, which yields mash. The mash is heated to a near-boil before being cooled and fil­tered, becom­ing wart. During the heat­ing process, hops are added to the wart.

The final phase of beer pro­duc­tion is fer­men­ta­tion, when the wart becomes alco­holic as added yeast trans­forms sugar into ethanol.

“The olive extract is added at the end of the fer­men­ta­tion of the beer because, in this way, it is bet­ter infused with the taste and aroma of the extract,” Caellas said.

After fer­men­ta­tion, which takes about 10 days, the beer is placed in bar­rels and sent to sit for another 10 days before it is ready to drink.

Caellas said his Empeltre beer is the sec­ond in his line of green olive beers.

“In the Original One ver­sion, I decided to pre­pare the extract with my native olives from the pre-Pyrenees of the Pallars Jussà region,” he said. ​“In the next ver­sion, the Empeltre One, we col­lab­o­rated with some pro­duc­ers from the region of Aragón using the autochtho­nous vari­ety.”

Given the suc­cess of his first two, Caellas is already plan­ning a third, alco­hol-free olive beer.

Caellas added that he orig­i­nally entered the SIAL Paris Awards after receiv­ing sev­eral other awards at food com­pe­ti­tions. He wanted to see how OliBa would fare at the world’s largest food and bev­er­age show.

“We are very happy and proud of the work done by the OliBa Green Beer team,” he said about win­ning the inno­va­tion award. ​“For us, SIAL is a global show­case and win­ning the award helped us attract the atten­tion of many dis­trib­u­tors and agents.”

Indeed, he said the event is a great moment for net­work­ing. At the side­lines of the award cer­e­mony in Paris, Caellas met with ven­dors inter­ested in sell­ing his beer in Belgium, Israel and Kazakhstan.

“We had many meet­ings with dis­trib­u­tors inter­ested in mar­ket­ing our beer from many coun­tries,” he said. ​“We made many con­tacts and closed many agree­ments that will help increase sales expo­nen­tially.”

“This award moti­vates us to con­tinue doing what we like: exper­i­ment­ing and com­mit­ting our­selves to the dis­tinc­tive value of our beer,” Caellas con­cluded.

• OliBa Green Beer
• Fortune Business Insights