It all started with a name. Back in 2008 when I bought the Pension it struck me that the mountain opposite us - the Schwarzmönch, had the perfect name for a dark beer, especially if you separated the names to feature the Mönch who is so connected with brewing.

In 2013 I bought a brew kit in London and we sourced our ingredients from a craft brewing supplier in Brixton. Our first brew was an acceptable if unexciting beer produced in the Pension Keller. Our next attempt was with largely Swiss sourced ingredients but English Hops. This tasted better and we soon added a special ingredient to give it more taste.

We were aware that the valley had belonged to the monastery in Interlaken and years ago the Monks would probably have brewed all their own beer and this would almost certainly have been a Schwarzbier, the popular traditional beer of the time. With this in mind we set out to produce a true Schwarzbier, a lager rather than a stout or ale, but one with our own distinctive taste.

We wanted a thirst quenching, smooth, dark lager that you drank chilled, one that was about 5% by volume and not too heavy with calories so that you could drink it after hiking, skiing or other activities. Not too intoxicating, not too heavy, a thirst quenching cool beer from the mountains.

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Slowly our brew improved, we changed a few ingredients and started to sell our Amber brew at the Pension.

In 2017, we developed our Biergarten and expanded the size of our bar. We also finally cracked our recipe in January by increasing the content of dark roasted malt to get the dark brew we had always wanted and changed our special ingredient to get a smoother beer. We knew we had a good Schwarzbier so we set about finding a brewer to brew with us in larger quantities. We were fortunate to find Peter Margowski of Jungfraubräu who was intrigued by Schwarz Mönch and agreed to brew with us. This tie up gave us the ability to brew much larger batches and to move into kegs for draught beer for the first time.

In the summer of 2017 we quickly sold out of our first 1000 litre brew in our Biergarten. We had to increase capacity again. By the autumn we had decided to brew enough for the winter months to sell through other outlets. By the end of the winter we were selling Schwarz Mönch in Mürren, Wengen, Interlaken, Spiez, Thun and Gstaadt. The Mönch had arrived.

Tall, dark, and snowcapped