From a high-school brewing lab to a gypsy brewer.

To Øl, Danish for “two beers,” is a Danish craft brewery founded in Copenhagen by Tore Gynther and Tobias Emil Jensen. The company says the two were students at Det Frie Gymnasium, a school in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen, when in 2005 they began using the school kitchen after hours as a brewing lab, and that the name refers to the two founders. It released its first commercial beer in 2010, the year it gives as its founding. Munchies reported in 2016 that the founders’ school brewing had grown into a small club before they turned it into a business.

The pair had help from a teacher who was already a brewer. English Wikipedia, citing Mikkeller’s own site, says Mikkel Borg Bjergsø, then a high-school mathematics and physics teacher, showed two of his students how to brew outside school hours, and that they went on to start To Øl. Munchies, Vice’s food site, described Bjergsø in March 2016 as a friend and former teacher of the founders and quoted Jensen as saying he had helped them find contacts in the American market.

Like Mikkeller, To Øl began without a brewery of its own. English Wikipedia says it started as a “gypsy” brewer, brewing mainly at De Proefbrouwerij in Belgium, and Munchies reported in 2016 that it was using other breweries’ equipment and selling in more than 40 countries. The company’s own count today is more than 31 export countries.

The founding partnership did not last. The company says that at the beginning of 2017 Tobias Emil Jensen stepped out of To Øl to work on other projects; English Wikipedia lists Tore Gynther as the owner, and the company describes itself as an independently owned Danish brewery.

No fixed template, and a can that spells out its colours.

To Øl’s beer names are often part of the joke. Munchies listed titles such as Liquid Confidential among its beers in 2016, and described a collaboration with the London brewer Beavertown, a pair of beers called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, sold together in a box of two. English Wikipedia says the range includes an alcohol-free beer, and the company’s shop today also sells cider, sodas and canned cocktails alongside its beers.

The clearest documented example of how the brewery thinks about a label is its Mr. Series. AIGA’s Eye on Design reported in March 2019 that the cans and bottles for beers such as Mr. Pink, brewed with pomegranate, Mr. Brown, brewed with coffee, and Mr. Orange, brewed with persimmon, were designed by Kasper Ledet, then To Øl’s in-house art director. Each carried a CMYK code printed in a large sans-serif, with a ring of colour around the top giving a further hint of the flavour; the magazine called the result a simple but clever design that turns the can into a game.

The same spirit runs through the brewery’s venues. In 2016 To Øl opened BRUS, a combined bar, shop and restaurant with its own brewery in Nørrebro, English Wikipedia says; Munchies visited the site during construction and described it as a former locomotive factory and iron foundry. English Wikipedia says beer brewed there is canned on site and sold as To Øl CPH, and that a second BRUS bar opened in Oslo in 2017.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Nordic beer names: Mikkeller, To Øl, Nøgne Ø, Aass, Karhu, Lervig and Amager Bryghus. They span two centuries of brewing. Aass was founded in Drammen in 1834 and is still owned by the Aass family, English Wikipedia records; Karhu is a Finnish beer brand that belongs to the brewer Sinebrychoff, part of the Carlsberg Group. The rest are products of the craft-beer wave that began around the turn of this century: Nøgne Ø in Grimstad in 2002, Lervig in Stavanger in 2003, Mikkeller in Copenhagen in 2006, Amager Bryghus on the island of Amager in 2007 and To Øl in Copenhagen in 2010.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a name, a label and the place it promises, because the company behind it may have changed hands, taken on investors or moved its brewing somewhere else entirely. Some of these names began as “gypsy” brewers that rented other breweries’ equipment before, in some cases, building their own; others became part of larger brewing groups. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beer is actually brewed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is brewed and how its labels and cans have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From borrowed tanks to a factory of its own.

The gypsy years ended in west Zealand. The company says that in 2019 it took over the former Beauvais ketchup factory in Svinninge, in the western part of Zealand, to build a purpose-designed brewery it calls To Øl City, with 26,600 square metres of buildings on the site, and that the move brought all of its beer production home to Denmark while it continues to brew abroad on collaborations. English Wikipedia says production at Svinninge began in 2020.

The company presents To Øl City as more than a brewery. It says the site is a hub for other craft drinks producers who lacked space of their own, and that it already hosts cider makers, kombucha brewers and rum distillers. The company’s site also lists other brands under its roof, including Mikropolis, Æblerov and Svinninge Mineralvand.

The link with Mikkeller has stayed close. Danish Wikipedia records that in March 2013 the two breweries opened the bar Mikkeller & Friends together on Stefansgade in Nørrebro, and English Wikipedia says To Øl co-owns a number of craft beer bars and shops with Mikkeller in Denmark, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, and lists collaborations with brewers including Mikkeller, Lervig, Põhjala and BrewDog. The brand’s own web address is toolbeer.dk.

For a design guide, To Øl shows how a brewery with a constantly changing range can stay recognisable by treating each label as its own object and, in its Mr. Series, by turning printer’s colour codes into the design itself. Compare Mikkeller, the Copenhagen brewery founded by the founders’ former teacher, and Lervig, the Stavanger brewer. For this guide we use process cyan, magenta and yellow with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep To Øl’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.