On the face of it brewing beer in a region famous for its wine might appear a little crazy. But as any winemaker worth their salt will tell you should during harvest time 'it takes a lot of beer to make wine’.
Quinta de la Rosa Craft Beer was born in 2017 when visiting Brewer Richard Naisby from Milton Brewery in Cambridge came to visit following a cricket tour to Porto. After many long lunches the idea was born to adapt LaRosa’s existing wine equipment to see whether making the Douro’s first craft beer was possible. In keeping with family’s entrepreneurial spirit, Philip Bergqvist jumped at the opportunity as he had long dreamed of brewing beer at La Rosa.
His first step was to recruit his nephew, Kit, who at the time was fresh out of university. His second was to set about building a brewery from existing and easily adaptable equipment for locally, much of which is still in use today. Together they set about developing recipes and honing their techniques under the watchful eye of winemaker Jorge Moreira whose legendary palate influenced the style of the beers we drink today.
A lot changed when legendary Portuguese brewer, Pedro Lima, agreed to help in addition to his work at Musa. It enabled us to evolve the idea into something more ambitious. We want to take advantage of our unique position of having both a winery and brewery by blending decades of winemaking experience with our newfound passion for brewing. Just like in our wines, we want to show balance, elegance, and finesse in both our core range beers as well as out barrel aged series.
