00:04
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
The painting I chose is by Asger Jorn. It's called Tearful Eyes, or Grædeøjne.

00:11
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
It's a woman — very colorful woman, big eyes. Even though it's abstract, it still has some kind of a symmetry.

00:16
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I like colors. I have a couple of tattoos and they're all very colorful. All my furniture is very colorful. I like to look at colors and the artwork that I like and also the few original pieces I have in my house are all very colorful.

00:29
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I grew up with a lot of posters from similar painters — Picasso, Matisse, and Asger Jorn also. It brought me back to my childhood home.

00:39
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
It's pleasant and easy to look at. I like to look at stuff that gives me some kind of relaxation. And a lot of paintings don't do that. This one, I don't know, maybe it's the color combination or how the colors play together, it just gives me some kind of calm, I don't know how to explain that. It's a cool painting.

00:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today our guest is Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø, a Danish entrepreneur. Welcome Jeppe.

01:23
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Thank you.

01:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We are very happy to be at your house today. We are in California. How would you describe the location to the listeners so they can imagine where in the world we are?

01:35
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
When people ask where Thousand Oaks is, where we are, it's one hour north of Los Angeles, very suburban, but still in the mountains and close to the water. So it's not the suburbs that people often think about. We have trails right outside the door, so I describe it as the super suburbs.

01:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And your home itself?

01:54
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
We've been here for three years, moved out from New York State. We have three kids, 18, 15, and five. We cleaned it up a little bit today because you guys were coming.

02:04
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Thank you!

02:05
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Lots of Danish furniture. I bought Danish furniture before I moved here, so it's not only because I'm nostalgic. That's the furniture I like to look at, mid-century modern furniture, all original. I'm very true to the original designs. I don't like it when somebody comes in later and changes the design a little bit. I like to have it the way it was back in the day.

02:23
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I actually look at furniture as art. When I became an adult and had money to start buying nicer things for myself, I started with furniture from Danish designers. Verner Panton was, and still is, my favorite.

02:35
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I grew up in Denmark in the '70s, and my parents, after they got divorced, had a lot of mid-century modern furniture. They were into the same things that I'm into now. They're not always the most convenient. Sometimes you also need to have a good place to sit, like a couch or something.

02:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today you're in the beer business. But let's go back to the beginning of your career. You were a teacher before you turned into a beer entrepreneur. What did you teach and what was teaching like for you? Was it a calling?

03:05
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
After high school in Denmark in '94, I took one year in America, actually in Arkansas. I got a scholarship as a runner, so it gave me a taste of living in America. I went back after a year and unfortunately had to get surgeries, and quit my running career because of it. I had two surgeries back then and I realized that I was never gonna win an Olympic gold. And I'm very competitive. And when I realized that, I quit.

03:28
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So then, what are you gonna do then when you spend your whole youth on one thing? I wanted to be a teacher. I went to Blågårds Statsseminarium, which was the most creative seminarium in Denmark back then. I don't wanna call it a calling, but definitely, I knew I wanted to be a teacher.

03:41
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I had taught a little bit in America as a side job when I was living over here. And I liked it. I got my teaching degree and a teaching job at a school in Valby called Solbakken, which is a school for kids with special needs. In Danish it is called dagbehandlingsinstitution, which is a hard word to translate.

03:59
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I taught there for about eight years. We had kids with ADHD, Tourettes, Asperger's, stuff like that. I taught all subjects, and I enjoyed it. It was teaching, but it was also just giving the kids a good time, and making sure that they grew up to be, I don't wanna say normal people, because what is that?

04:17
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
But learn how to act in normal society, which was hard for them, obviously, with their special needs. I liked it a lot. I actually like being a school teacher a lot. I always joke that if this whole beer thing fails, I could always go back to being a teacher. We always need teachers in this world.

04:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes, very important job. You started the beer business Ølbutikken while you were still teaching in Denmark. It closed in 2017, but it was alive and kicking for 12 years. How did you evolve from a teacher into a beer expert?

04:48
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So I am by nature a huge nerd. When I go into something, if I find an interest, I really go all in on it. It was actually when I went to seminarium back in the late '90s that I started going out and drinking beer. And I found it to be boring that we always got the same beer. You couldn't get that many beers back then in Denmark. Carlsberg was the monopoly.

05:07
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I went to a British pub and drank different beers. And from there I started home brewing and I formed a beer club for 15 friends. And it just became more and more nerdy. We made a magazine and all kinds of stuff. And when I got a teaching job, I was home brewing on the side. And I actually opened, while I was still teaching, my next company, which was a distribution company or an import company, importing American craft beer to Denmark.

05:27
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I was young and I was enthusiastic and had a lot of energy and I really liked beer and it was such an early stage of the beer scene. I just saw an opportunity and I liked it.

05:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And by the way, Ølbutikken means the beer shop in English. So one could describe you as a self-taught beer professional who also started your own company called Drikkieriet. What made you decide to do that, to import beer?

05:52
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
We had Ølbutikken, and at one point, it was a small shop, but it got named the best beer shop in the world, I think in 2008, or something like that, because we had such a specific variety, and we had beers that you couldn't get anywhere else. And we spent a lot of time just seeking out all the rare stuff.

06:10
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
And the micro brewery scene or the craft brewery scene in America had started to move and do good stuff. And I was reading about it and I was trading with American beer nerds and I couldn't really get the beers that I wanted in Europe. So I was like, hey, if nobody else wants to import it, I might as well just do it myself.

06:28
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
It all came from my desire to just go all in on this thing and get the best of the best. That's just my type. I really go a long way to get what I want. I don't wait for other people to do it for me. I just do it myself. So that was why we started the import company in 2008, mainly to import for Ølbutikken.

06:44
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
But then again, you have to ship a certain amount over, so we took a couple of pallets and started talking to other shops and it pretty soon, pretty fast, grew and became very popular. And at one point, it was definitely the most, I think it still is, the most specialized beer distribution in Europe. We sell all over Europe.

07:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And how did you decide what to import? Did you go on adventures and, for instance, go to meet the monks in Belgium, and go to —

07:10
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
All the time —

07:11
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
— and go to pubs in Ireland or —

07:14
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So, a funny story. I was a big beer nerd. I was rating beers on a beer site, called RateBeer.com, which was the leading beer rating site back then. I became an administrator also. Super nerdy stuff.

07:24
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
And my wife and I, we did an American road trip in 2004, where we rented a car in Miami and drove to San Francisco. I had planned the whole thing out with breweries to visit, and I also knew that she wasn't into it the same way that I was.

07:37
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So the way she told people about it, is that often on this trip we were in some town and we walked down the street and all of a sudden I was like, hey, we should go down this way and blah, blah. And then by coincidence, there was a brewery there. I had obviously planned the whole thing out, what breweries to go to. But that was the way to learn more about American craft beer.

07:54
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I met some brewers back then, that ended up being some of the leading craft brewers in America. And with monks and all that, I used to drive down to Belgium all the time. It's actually exactly 1,000 kilometers from the center of Copenhagen to the center of Brussels. I know that because I've done it many times.

08:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's a good fact to know.

08:12
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
1,000 kilometers.

08:14
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And finally, you opened the company Evil Twin Brewing. What made this different from the businesses you had before?

08:23
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I was actually still a school teacher. I had this bottle shop, and I had the import company and I was home brewing. It was still so early in the craft beer scene that there was a lot of excitement around it. And at one point, I was just like, hey, maybe I should try and make the beers that I make at home on a little bit bigger scale and see if other people would actually appreciate it.

08:43
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I know how to sell beer. I had a shop and a distribution company, those are two important steps in making beer. I had the idea for a while, but I was also so busy with the school teaching job and the other two companies. It was just, again, a desire to try it out and see if I could make something work. It wasn't a plan for Evil Twin to ever become a real thing. I didn't plan to quit the school teaching job. Again, I liked being a school teacher.

09:05
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
The first year we had Evil Twin, and I started the company April 1, 2010, which I remember because my second son was born the same day. I always try and remember why I did it that day. Maybe I was just sitting home waiting for him to pop out or something. So the first year we only did about 500 liters or something. So nothing special, just a few small batches at different breweries and then sold them in Denmark. But then I met a guy from America and it all blew up from there.

09:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You've always been able to create fun names for your beers and your businesses, like a restaurant called Himmeriget which means heaven or the heavenly kingdom. How did Evil Twin come about? What made you pick that name? It does not seem to have anything to do with beer necessarily.

09:48
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
No. It doesn't, but it has actually a story. So, I have a twin, I have a twin brother who also has a brewery in Denmark, and we started home brewing together back in the early 2000s, and we actually made a beer that we entered into the Danish Home Brewing Championships that we called Evil Twins.

10:07
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
"Evil twin" is something that everybody can say, you say everybody has an evil twin, right? Something that you can relate to, it sounds cool, I think it looks cool in writing. It's something that is catchy. After we made that beer — and I only started the company 18, 19 years later, something like that — I always had that idea that if I ever started a brewing company, I would want to call it Evil Twin.

10:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned your brother is also brewing beer. Was there something in your common history growing up that made you become beer lovers? Was there a lot of Carlsberg and Tuborg drinking, or Odense Pilsner in your family?

10:40
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Not really. I've talked to my mom about it since, and she always wondered how both my brother and I became entrepreneurs, because we come out of a family that's the opposite. Both my mom and dad had eight-to-four jobs. My mom, it would be her worst nightmare to ever not have a normal job and had to stand on her own legs in terms of making money and stuff like that.

11:00
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So I don't know where we got it from. I think being a twin, identical twin, having somebody you can compare yourself to, I think, not for every twin, but at least for us, it made us very competitive. And it made us wanting to achieve something in the world. Maybe it made us wanting to stand on our own legs and prove ourselves.

11:20
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
We were both runners when we were young. We were the two fastest junior runners in Denmark. And we're both very successful in the beer world. I think the fact that we are identical twins and we must have been born with some kind of competitiveness. I think that says a lot.

11:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
There is a book written about you by Rasmus Emborg, it's called Ølbrødre, also a great title, Beer Brothers. You were both interviewed for it. Did you like the book? Was it correct in its depiction of you and your brother and your relationship?

11:48
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I'm gonna say something crazy now, and Rasmus knows this. I actually never read the book.

11:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Oh!

11:54
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Well, obviously I read some of it while he was writing it. I don't wanna be weird about it. I just don't like reading about myself. I also never drink my own beer. It's just, I'm very —

12:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You don't drink your own beer?

12:02
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I don't. I'd say, some from time to time, but it's very rare drinking my own beer. I'm very competitive and being so competitive, I look for flaws more than I look for the good things. I'm very hard to satisfy when it comes to my own things. I think that's also what makes me good at what I do, that I always try to be better at it.

12:18
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Every time I taste my own beer, I find flaws, even though I don't think there are flaws, but it's like I always think, oh, I could have done this a little bit better. And same with reading about yourself. There's something about it. I'm uncomfortable. Anyway, my wife has read the book and we have talked about it obviously, and I'm actually good friends with Rasmus.

12:33
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I've become good friends with him since. We still see each other. There's always something I wanted different in everything that's ever been written about me. I always want to change a little bit, but overall, I think, it came out good. Rasmus is a very nice guy and he's a good writer, he knows what I would've wanted to change.

12:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And it's no secret that you don't get along well with your twin.

12:52
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
No. We grew up together. We were best friends for 20 years, and we were extremely close. We had a very, pretty rough childhood. And we were exposed to a lot of not so good things. And we stuck together a lot. We are very different personalities, weirdly enough, even though we are identical twins. And we just grew apart. That just didn't work out when we became older and had to form our own lives.

13:15
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So unfortunately it ended up being more of an un-friendship or whatever you call it. There's stuff about him I don't like, and I'm sure there's stuff about me that he doesn't like. And it is what it is. I don't dwell on it anymore. For a while, obviously, you wish you could get along with your family. I'm also the type, I move on, I create my own happiness and that's the most important to me.

13:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You moved to the US in 2012. What made you decide to make this move and why New York?

13:43
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
This is a longer story. In 2010, we started Evil Twin and I was a school teacher. We had a house in Valby, we had just gotten our second child and my wife is a copywriter. And we had a good life. We always traveled a lot ever since we met each other. And we always brought our kids. I remember when our oldest kid was a year and a half, he had been to ten different countries.

14:01
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So we've always liked exploring the world. But in the fall of 2010, through a mutual friend, I met a guy and he had, he has, an import company in New York, importing European craft beer. And back then it was such an early stage, he knew about me from Ølbutikken. He had heard about Ølbutikken, which was legendary already in the beer world.

14:18
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
And when I told him about Evil Twin, I just remembered his eyes lit up. He knew that I was legit from Ølbutikken. And then now I was also brewing. And he was like, Hey, if you ever want to ship beers to America, I would love to try it out. And I remember thinking back then, this is not what I want to do. I like being a school teacher.

14:37
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
But anyway, we kept in contact, and he kept asking me and saying, hey, I think we can do something here. Long story short, he convinced me to make two beers. And I remember asking him, how much do you want? And he wanted 10,000 liters of each. And up to that point, Evil Twin had made maybe 1,000 liters total.

14:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's a lot.

14:55
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Through our distribution company, we were working with a new Scottish brewery called Blue Dock that ended up being, I think it's the biggest craft brewery in Europe now. I contacted them because I didn't know where to make 20,000 liters of beer. So I contacted him and I asked them, Hey, do you have the capacity? And back and forth for a while and then they said, yes, we can do it.

15:10
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
My wife and I went to Scotland in February 2012. We made the two beers, 10,000 liters of stout, 10,000 liters of an IPA. We shipped it directly to Brooklyn from Scotland and Brian received it. Brian was his name. And the day after, I got an email from him and he said, I sold the whole thing. And that was the first time I realized, hey, maybe there's an opportunity here that would be stupid not to jump on.

15:37
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I was always already so deeply involved in the beer world. I already had created a name for myself through the import company and through the bottle shop. So I was like, hey, it'll be stupid not to. And my wife and I talked about it. I lived in America in the middle of the '90s, so I knew the country a little bit.

15:52
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
And he was based in New York, So that was the main reason why we wanted to go to New York. And then again, we had been there on vacation, and it's such a fascinating city. It was just natural for us to pick New York, because he was there. And of course New York is New York, it's so attractive, and has such a draw, especially if you want to achieve something.

16:08
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
We applied for a visa, which was super complicated because we didn't have a job, we didn't have a sponsor, so we had to do the whole thing ourselves. We had to form an American company. And we ended up selling our house in Valby before it was all settled. So we had two months actually where we were homeless. We had to sleep on people's couches. But we knew that this is what we wanted.

16:24
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
We put all our stuff in a container. And then we got the visa, and then five days later, we left with two suitcases and two kids, two nights in a hotel in Brooklyn, and that was it. We had no place to live, we had no schools, we had nothing. It was exciting times, to say the least.

16:39
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was that like, and what was your impression of New York? And how did you get settled?

16:44
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I don't know if I wanna say it was scary because I don't get scared that easily. And luckily my wife likes to take chances also. We took it as a chance and an opportunity and we were just like, hey, let's just jump into it with both feet and see if it works. We just felt that the oldest was five, so he was just before school age, so now was the time to take that chance or whatever you call it.

17:03
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
It was a big chance. Evil Twin was pretty much nonexistent. We had to figure the whole thing out. And of course, because I am who I am, I had planned a trip to Virginia to brew beer two days after we arrived. So Maria was alone in Brooklyn with two kids having to find a place to live, having to start going to apartments and talk to landlords and look for schools and all kinds of stuff.

17:25
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
But we were young enough and we've also moved around a lot since we moved over here and we take a lot of chances. And we've learned that I would rather take a chance and deal with it after than think about it too much and end up not taking it, as most people do. And that's just how we live our life.

17:38
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
And we moved to California's like, hey, let's just move. And we did it. We didn't know this area. We had no friends. It was just like, let's just do it. So that's just who we are.

17:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Well, with two young kids—

17:48
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
One and five, that didn't speak English, obviously. It was a challenge.

17:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You jumped right in.

17:53
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
We did. We did.

17:56
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So it sounds like a great dream to start a company in a city like New York. Everybody dreams of New York, I assume, but I'm sure that there are challenges too. What were they and how did you deal with them as they came along?

18:13
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So the biggest, again, Evil Twin was pretty much nonexistent, so we didn't have any plans as such, which may sound a little crazy, but I actually think that ended up helping us because we didn't have an idea of how things were gonna be. And so we couldn't really be disappointed. Everything that we achieved was a bonus.

18:33
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
It could have ended up not working out and we would've gone home a year later or a half year later, and it would've been fine. It was just a fun opportunity or fun experience or whatever. But we jumped into it and the challenge is obviously to get to know the American system, which is extremely complicated. And I think New York is probably the most complicated city in America.

18:51
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Luckily we had Brian, who was extremely helpful because for him this was a big opportunity. Also Evil Twin, right after we moved, started to make a lot of waves in the beer world. He was very helpful. Without him, it would've been extremely complicated. But everything was a challenge. Getting a car, getting insurance.

19:09
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I remember the first insurance we got, we were sitting at an office in Williamsburg, a Hasidic office with a Hasidic lady, trying to talk to her about insurance, which was, when you come from Denmark, a very strange experience. But, we took it, as everything, as a fun challenge.

19:24
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
And again, New York is such an amazing, fascinating place. I remember ten years after moving there, I still walked down the street sometimes and looked around. I was like, this is just crazy. It's such a crazy city. It's hard to say what was the most challenging because everything was a challenge. Finding a place to live, finding a school, figuring out that whole system.

19:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And probably also getting a lawyer, because everybody needs a lawyer in this country.

19:45
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Yeah, yeah, we have had a couple lawyers over the years and accountants and all that stuff. You learn a lot when you're forced to do it on your own. And we've probably made some mistakes, but you learn from mistakes too, so it's all good.

19:58
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Learning by doing.

19:59
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Yeah, exactly.

20:00
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You opened a bar called Torst and a restaurant called Luksus. How did you pick the location, which was Greenpoint in Brooklyn for these places?

20:10
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
We moved there in 2012, Evil Twin started up, and we didn't own a brewery. So we were a contract brewery or gypsy brewery, meaning that we rented space from other breweries. Before we moved to America, I was brewing in Europe — Norway, Holland, Spain, Denmark. We had a brewery now in Connecticut that we had got in contact with and one in South Carolina that we had started brewing at.

20:31
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
And moving to New York and being a part of the beer scene and not owning a brewery, we were like, we need somewhere where we can showcase what we do, and take people that come to New York and want to know about Evil Twin. And that was the reason why we decided to open a bar. We had no plans for opening a restaurant. I had zero experience opening a restaurant, but we wanted to open a bar.

20:51
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
We were living in Williamsburg, which is close to Greenpoint, and Williamsburg was super hot. Greenpoint was up and coming and obviously a little bit cheaper, but we are also looking at Williamsburg actually. We found the space and liked it a lot and we liked the location and that's why we picked Greenpoint.

21:08
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I also remember, I liked the challenge of going into an area that wasn't super developed like Williamsburg was, just because if you can create — again, the whole thing about creating something yourself and show that you could do it on your own. I like that challenge. So the space we got was an old Polish restaurant, Greenpoint is an old Polish area, and it was an old Polish restaurant that had gotten evicted.

21:26
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So when we got the space, it had a full kitchen. I remember there were still fries in the fryer. They had just put a new lock on. We were gonna take the kitchen down and just open the beer bar. But one day, I was in Manhattan doing an interview and I had some time to kill and I just got this idea all of a sudden: why don't we open the restaurant?

21:44
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Back then New York had restaurants with secret bars behind restaurants, like secret cocktail bars, speakeasy bars, which I loved. And then I was like, why don't we open this beer bar and then we turn around and we make a secret restaurant in the back? I called Maria. She was like, what the hell are you talking about? But when I put my head to something, I go all in.

22:04
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Also, when I moved to New York, I was working with Noma at the time. I made house beers for Noma. And I was close with René and I told them I was gonna move to New York, and we might not be able to continue the relationship and it was all good for them, obviously. And René, one of the last things he said, hey, if you ever meet a guy called Daniel Burns, you should say hello.

22:22
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Daniel Burns was the guy that started the pastry program at Noma, a Canadian guy, and he had moved to New York a couple years earlier to start a career over there. And funnily enough, the first beer event I did with Evil Twin in New York, a couple weeks after we moved over, a guy comes over to me and says, Hey, my name is Daniel, I used to work with Noma. And I'm like, Hey, René says hello. So we hit it off.

22:43
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So when I got this idea about opening a restaurant, I thought about Daniel, who was in between jobs at the time. We had become friends, and I was like, hey, if I can open a restaurant, a secret restaurant, and if I can get a chef that used to work at Noma that I knew is good, and we can show that beer can be elevated to a high level like wine — I wanted to do only beer with the food.

23:04
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I ended up convincing him to do this with us. And I remember telling him, Daniel, you have to know one thing. We can only serve beer and I want at least one Michelin Star. That was the thing I told him. And he was like, okay, I'll think about it. He thought about it one day and then he was like, all right, let's do it. Let's give it a try.

23:20
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Luckily we ended up getting a Michelin Star with only beer. I think even today we are still the only beer-only restaurant ever to get a Michelin Star, which is cool. I like to jump into things and then check the consequences after instead of thinking too much about it. And this was a perfect example of that. I had no restaurant experience. I didn't know if this was even doable.

23:40
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
And back then, Michelin was not something that would normally give out Michelin Stars if you couldn't get wine, because it was a fine dining kind of thing. I'm happy we achieved it and we showed the way in many ways and we ended up getting a chance to write a cookbook with the leading cookbook publisher in the world, Phaidon, the same ones that put out the first couple of Noma books and all the big cookbooks in the world.

24:01
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So it gave us a lot of opportunities for sure. Never made us any money. You don't make money on a 24-seat restaurant hidden behind a beer bar. But that wasn't the purpose anyway, so it was all good.

24:11
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How do you promote a restaurant that's supposed to be a secret? How does the secret become known to people so they go there?

24:19
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
The bar on its own got a lot of promotion when we were building it. I call it the perfect storm. We moved to New York in 2012. Denmark is hot just because there was a lot of talk about Danish design and Danish culinary this and that. Noma was super hot. Craft beer was the hottest thing in America. New York is always pretty hot, and Brooklyn was hyped up. So it was the perfect storm.

24:42
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
We were opening a high-end beer bar. I used to work with Noma, craft beer was so hot. So we got an insane amount of attention. We actually ended up getting so much attention that I started asking some of the online publications to stop writing about us because I started seeing comments about, oh, now it's enough, we don't need to hear more about these guys.

24:59
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
We did get a lot of attention. We kept the restaurant secret. But we already got so much attention for the bar, I knew it was gonna be easy to put that out there whenever we wanted to do that. The restaurant only opened a year later after the bar. It wasn't a plan to open it together. We wanted to focus on the beer bar and then when it was up and running, we wanted to launch the restaurant after.

25:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Where did you keep the plague, the Michelin plague?

25:19
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Somebody stole it, I don't know if you read that story.

25:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
No, I did not read that.

25:23
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
It was on our wall. We had a secret door in the back where you walked into the restaurant and we ended up putting a Michelin Star next to the door and somebody ended up stealing it. I actually posted about it. I don't know if it was Instagram or Twitter, whatever it was back then. And we got a lot of attention from different newspapers from it being stolen.

25:38
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
We got a new one from Michelin. I actually don't know where it is. That's a good question. I should have kept that. Huh? Where is that Michelin Star? Maybe the chef took it. I hope he did.

25:49
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Somebody who deserves it, at least.

25:51
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
He made the food. Obviously, he was the guy that created the restaurant. I didn't cook the food.

25:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What is your favorite beer at this moment? What would you pick?

25:59
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
See, that's a very good question. It's actually a question I get asked often. When I started my whole beer adventure, I was a young kid in Denmark and the specialty beers that we could get were German, English, or Belgian. I grew up in that scene, I used to go to Belgium all the time, I used to drive through Germany. That's how I learned what beer could be besides Hof and Tuborg and stuff like that.

26:22
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Getting older, you find yourself going back to where you were. I still listen to the same music I listened to in the '90s, and now I find myself drinking the same beers I drank back then. I drink mostly Belgian beers, which can sound a little bit weird because what we make is so the opposite of Belgian beers, but again, it's probably a nostalgic thing where I'm like, this is what I grew up in and I loved them.

26:43
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So if I have to name one beer that's my favorite, I don't wanna say it's the best tasting or the best made beer. But the beer I find myself drinking the most is a beer called Duvel, which is made by a big brewery actually in Belgium. It's an 8% blonde, Belgian-style ale. I like it because it's super refreshing. It's still 8%, so it still has a lot of body, still pretty powerful. It's always well made. It always tastes good. To me, that's the perfect beer that pretty much has it all.

27:13
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Besides Duvel, which is a light beer, I drink a lot of very dark beer. I like 15% imperial stout, stuff like that. That one beer, if that's your death row beer, you have to pick the last beer you ever drink before they take your life, that's probably the one I would pick.

27:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I would pick Chimay, also from Belgium.

27:33
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Chimay? Which one?

27:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Ah. I forget if it's the blue or the red, actually —

27:37
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Okay, So one of the dark ones.

27:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
— but definitely a strong percent.

27:40
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Chimay is one of my favorites too. And Rocheforte is a different one that I absolutely love. Those are all Trappist beers. Duvel is not, but those are Trappist beers. They're so well made. Chimay's made for hundreds of years. And no matter how much I love the innovation and the craft beer scene and how much I love all the new stuff that's created, you just can't deny that it's well made.

28:01
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
It's like you can't deny that the Beatles made good music. A lot has happened in the music scene since the Beatles, but they still made classic good music. And it's the same with beer. I love Chimay. I love Chimay.

28:12
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah. There's a lot of tradition behind it, and an interesting history too. Let's go back in time a little. Before you started drinking and brewing beer, you grew up in Nivå.

28:22
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Yes.

28:23
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was your childhood like? What were you dreaming of becoming when you grew up, when you were a little boy? You mentioned running, of course, but was there something else?

28:31
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I wanted to be a civil engineer. I've always been into math and physics and stuff like that. That was my dream. I don't know why. When you go to school in Denmark, in I think, eighth or ninth grade, you have to go to, what is that called — praktik — an internship kind of thing, it's a couple weeks where you go out and try the real world.

28:48
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Most kids in Denmark choose fun stuff like the military or candy shops or something like that. I went to a civil engineer's office, which I liked. My mom and dad got divorced when I was young, eight years old, and we were very poor. I didn't know wealth and I didn't know money and I didn't know what it would be like to be rich.

29:07
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
But I had this dream of getting a job, where you can actually make a good amount of money. And I thought that civil engineering was that. So that probably had to do with it also. I think all kids dream about being rich one day. I liked math and I wanted to get a job, where I could actually make some money.

29:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Did you have a favorite teacher in school that inspired you and who was your role model to become a teacher yourself?

29:30
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Not necessarily to become a teacher, but I did have a teacher that I remember very fondly, and that actually inspired me, I think a lot, in how I ended up living my life. My math teacher from first grade, Gert Hvedsman. I don't mind naming him because I have only good things to say about him.

29:47
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
He was very, very tough, lots of principles, but he was also very passionate. I was wild when I was a kid. Probably had to do with coming from a divorced home and all that stuff. I was a troublemaker big time. He knew it and he accepted it. He was very tough on us, but good at dealing with it. He was a super good teacher and he was one that made me love math, for sure. He's somebody I still think about from time to time.

30:13
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I'm tough in what I do, but I know that you can be tough and you can still be personal and passionate. You don't have to just be tough to be tough. You can combine those two things. And even when I became a teacher, I put myself in the same line that he showed me, in terms of my teaching. I was pretty tough on the kids, but I did it in a very personal way, where I think they actually ended up liking me.

30:31
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
The most important thing about being a teacher is that you can put yourself on the level of the kids. It doesn't mean that you should be a child and you should be childish all the time. You need to be able to also be an authority to them. If you can do both, I think that's the best way to be a teacher, at least that's what I tried. So, yeah, definitely, he inspired me a lot.

30:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Now that we are talking about Denmark and your childhood, do you get slightly sentimental? Do you ever long for Denmark, miss Denmark, ever dream of going back to live there? And you mentioned your three kids. Would you like them to go back to Denmark or do you see their future here?

31:05
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
That's a pretty hard no, actually. I don't dislike Denmark at all. I like Denmark for what it is. I truly understand why a lot of people find Denmark very attractive. It's just not for me at all. The mentality is not for me. I have five siblings in Denmark. I have no connection to any of them. I have no connection to my dad. I haven't had that for many years. The only one I talked with my mom.

31:28
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So Denmark is just not a place — I go once a year. I like the idea of going, but after two days, I get uncomfortable.

31:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you know why you get uncomfortable?

31:37
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I don't know. I just think there's too many bad memories of being in Denmark for me. And again, that being said, I understand why Denmark, it's an awesome, there's no doubt about it, especially with what's happening now in America. It makes you rethink. But I would, and my wife knows this, I would move to another country before that. I would go to Japan or somewhere else, before Denmark.

31:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you think there's anything particularly Danish about the way that you do business?

32:03
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
That's a good question. It's just one of those things that you move to America — it's just one of those things where there is something about coming from a different country and going to a different culture where you stand out. I'm sure some people would look at Evil Twin and the way I do things and say it's different than how Americans would do it. Maybe it's because I'm Danish, or at least because I'm from a different background, different culture.

32:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And now that we are in California, maybe you can explain to us what made you move across the country from the very big city of New York, with so much going on, to the suburbs of Los Angeles here in California.

32:41
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So, many different reasons actually. So right before Covid, we had lived in Brooklyn for seven years and we had opened a brewery and it was all going great. We were a little tired of living in the city, raising three kids. We just had our third kid. It's just super tough in New York. It's expensive, it's complicated, you have to take them to sports, and driving two miles takes 45 minutes.

33:03
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So we were like, let's try something different. We had a house two hours north of New York, a vacation home. And we liked that area a lot. We went up on the weekends. So we talked about let's try and move, not to that house, but to a house a little close to the city. We found a house one hour north of New York, and in the summer of 2019, we moved up there, commuted into the city for the brewery, and then COVID hit.

33:26
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
And COVID was very rough in New York. It was at one point the hardest hit area in the world, I think. And we were told that if we didn't have to go to the city every day, we should stay away. We also had to change the whole setup of the brewery because we had to close and we had to sell everything online and all that stuff. But it forced us to set up our business in a different way where we didn't have to be there.

33:47
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Up until that point, I had been there every single day. I had made all the decisions. I had been involved in everything from cleaning the sewers to making the beers and all that stuff. So we were sitting up there, and we changed the business and it worked out well. And then COVID went on for a couple of years.

34:00
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
And since we moved to America, we had always talked about, wouldn't it be cool to live in California one day? I hate the cold and I hate rain. This is maybe also why I don't want to go back to Denmark. I hate the climate in Denmark. I love the sun and I love 30 to 40 degrees. So we always had this dream, but obviously it wasn't the best time because opening a brewery in New York and all that, then moving six hours away by plane is not the most obvious thing to do.

34:25
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
But with setting up the business differently during COVID, and it was working out really well at the brewery, we were just like, if we ever want to do this — our oldest kid had also started high school, he was a freshman, if he was too far into high school, it would be more and more difficult — now it's just the time.

34:40
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
It was like when we moved to Denmark, we have to do it now. So the story is we flew out in May. My wife and I flew out early morning. We had set up seven showings at houses. We had 15 minutes at each house. We ended up buying this house the same day after seeing it for 15 minutes.

34:56
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
We talked to our kids about it, obviously, and I remember we talked to our oldest son. That was the most difficult. The other ones were smaller. I remember asking him how he felt about it, and his answer was, doesn't matter what I feel about it, 'cause I know we're gonna do it anyways, which was saying a lot about how we lived our lives. When we moved upstate New York, it was just a decision we made.

35:14
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
He knows his dad.

35:15
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
He knows his dad and his mom. We're both that way. He knows his parents and I think that makes our kids a lot stronger also. But obviously, it is what it is. The reason why we specifically chose Thousand Oaks, was we knew we wanted to live close to Los Angeles, we knew we wanted to live up here in this area somewhere. I wanted to get into winemaking and I wanted to do that in that area up by Santa Barbara.

35:35
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
We actually were looking at Ojai, which is a small mountain town close to here, about an hour from here, and decided not doing it for different reasons. It's a little too remote and I think the winters out there can be a little boring. But our son, middle son, the 15-year-old, he was 12 at the time, he had become a runner like I was when I was a kid, and he'd become a very good runner, one of the fastest in America, actually.

35:57
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I was training him and he was really good. And the school in Newbury Park, at that time, was known to be the best high school for runners in America, actually. So we want to move out here, we don't know the area that well, we don't know where we're gonna live, so why don't we just move to this school district? We might as well do that than anywhere else out here. So that's kind of why we did it.

36:14
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And how is business out here?

36:16
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
We don't do beer out here. We still do the beers in New York. We sell beer in California. I'm not too involved in that part of it. Not being in New York, it actually helps a little bit in terms of how we do things. I get a lot more done because I don't have to go to the brewery all the time.

36:29
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Our staff, I feel, has stepped up a lot. I feel they are way more independent. The thing is, when I went to the brewery all the time, it was always me they had to go to. I always had to make all the decisions. And actually we are way more efficient now. And then we also started making wine in Los Olivos. It's two hours north of here.

36:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Maybe people know it from Sideways, the movie.

36:49
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
That's right, and Solvang.

36:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And Solvang, the Danish Village.

36:52
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Right outside of Solvang.

36:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's in that area. Yeah. So watch Sideways, and you'll know what we are talking about.

36:57
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
That was one of the other reasons why we moved to California. I had been making beer for 20-plus years. I'm not bored with making beer, but I've pretty much tried everything in beer making. I needed a new challenge and I love wine and I collected wines. I'm still collecting wines and I wanted to learn how to make wine, and I want to create something new. So now we are creating a small wine brand called Jarnit Family Wines.

37:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
A more normal name than all the others.

37:20
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Yeah. Wine is a different product. There's a lot of attention on the wines that we make because people know me from the beer world. I don't believe in just taking a known name, Evil Twin, and just putting it on something else because wine is such a different product. And I also like the challenge of creating something new. So our labels are gonna be different. Our names are gonna be way more normal.

37:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes.

37:39
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Wine is such a different product. It is very traditional. And we make traditional wines and I want to show that. Evil Twin is very creative and very innovative. I don't wanna do that in wine. It's not like the natural wines that are crazy tasting and all that stuff. It's been fun and it's been a lot of work. It's been a big challenge to create a new brand that's so the opposite of Evil Twin.

38:00
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
My wife, she's very much involved also, in the label and the naming of all this stuff. We have spent more time on creating three wine labels than we have on creating a thousand beer labels so far. In wine, you don't get any chances. In beer, you can make a beer and then if it fails, you can always make another one the week after. In wine, you have one chance, it's a whole year of production and if you mess that up, it's hard to redo.

38:21
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
But I feel it's come out really good and it's way more traditional. We actually have taken some of Denmark in. Since we don't have a history in wine, it's hard to put in a tradition. How do you put tradition into something you don't have history in? This is why we call it Jarnit Family Wines. By putting in the family name, you create a tradition. Do you wanna see the label? I have it right here.

38:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Definitely.

38:42
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
The old stamp, the Danish stamp, it's a discontinued stamp that was extremely popular when I was a kid. So you recognized it right away, right? People at our age will recognize these things. I don't think young people recognize it, but it's something that shows where we are from, Denmark, and has a story. It was so important for us to put a story into something that didn't have a story. That was the whole idea.

39:05
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
The middle of the label — that was my wife's idea — it's a family crest. It has a hops plant, which is from the beer world. It has a Panton design, I used to sell Verner Panton and I was very much into Verner Panton back in the days. I think it has a running shoe or something because we are family runners and stuff like that. So bringing something in that's more like family, more history.

39:23
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
A lot of identity.

39:25
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
A lot of identity. I think it came out really good. I'm very happy. We have talked about this, we have redone it and changed it over the last year plus. But I think it's important, especially because people know us and we only get this one chance. And it's not like we're starting a wine brand that nobody's gonna know about. There's already a lot of people asking about it, and a lot of people want to sell it, want to buy it and all that stuff. It's been very intimidating in many ways, but also —

39:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Anything intimidating you? Because you don't seem like a person who's easily intimidated.

39:56
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
No, it's more of the acceptance of it. And again, I'm very hard on myself and as I explained, that's why I don't drink my own beers, but intimidating in terms of, is it good enough? I know people are gonna like it, but is it good enough for what I feel it's worth for me to present, kind of thing.

40:15
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
But I'm happy with the result. We've only bottled this one. This is 2023 Chardonnay. We have 2023 Syrah and Grenache we need to bottle in about a month. And then we have '24 on barrels, obviously, and now we are planning '25. Small scale still. We still haven't sold a bottle, so we have to be able to do that also.

40:31
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I think we'll manage, but it's like we started Evil Twin, very small and just grew it organically. It's the same we want to do with this. And I absolutely love it. I'm learning a lot. I'm working with a winery up in the Los Olivos area called Demetria, a family-owned small winery.

40:45
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
The winemakers, Emily and Ryan, are superb people. I love them. They are very knowledgeable. So for me, it's two things. It's about creating a brand and showing how I like wine. It's my own style of wine, but they teach me a lot about it and I learn so much about it, which is awesome.

41:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I think you are going to drink your own wine. I have a feeling that that's gonna be the case.

41:06
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Yeah, I think so. We'll see. I actually think this one came out really good. And I don't say that about a lot of things that I've —

41:13
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Because it has your stamp all over it.

41:15
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Maybe, maybe. I'm very proud of it so far. So that's good.

41:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So my final question to you, where do you see yourself spending the rest of your life? I have a feeling I know the answer. Are you going to be forever in the US or do you have other plans?

41:30
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So if you know the answer … the answer is, I don't have the answer.

41:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Exactly. That's why.

41:35
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
So, again, both me and my wife, as I explained, we like to jump into things and take the consequences after. I love Evil Twin and where it is. I love making wine and where it is. I love living in California. I don't think we're gonna stay in this area. I think we wanna move to the city.

41:49
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
The short answer is I don't have an answer. I love America, even with what's happening right now. I still love the country. I still get very inspired by it. If you take the good and not the bad, it's still an amazing country and there's so much I want to do here. We have a house in Palm Springs, where we go out a lot. I love Palm Springs. It's such a different vibe. It's such a beautiful, crazy place in some ways.

42:11
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
But I definitely have dreams and plans of going somewhere totally different one day and my wife knows it and we started talking about it. I'm very inspired by Japan. We sell beer over there, so I go quite often. I love the culture. I love how hardcore they are about everything. I can identify with that.

42:28
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Houses are very cheap in Japan. They have the population declining like crazy. They have ten million empty houses, so you can buy a house for no money.

42:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
They have ten million empty houses?

42:37
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Yeah. It is the second fastest declining population after South Korea in the world. You can buy a beautiful house an hour out of Tokyo for $50,000. I started looking into that actually. I would love to buy a house over there. I would love to spend more time over there. I would love to maybe build up some kind of a business over there at some point.

42:53
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I love Asia in general. I just came back from China. I'm super fascinated about China. I love Thailand and Vietnam. The big challenge is we have a five-year-old. I'm always telling my wife that hey, she can go to school in Asia.

43:05
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So obviously you are gonna move around, you're gonna be in Asia. We are going to meet you in China in ten years. But where would you like to be buried? Where would you like to be forever, for your body to settle in the world?

43:18
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I'm not nostalgic about things like that. Probably New York City. New York is what has changed my life the most ever and what has given us the opportunities that we have gotten. I can't keep saying that, but I used to say the first ten years we lived here, every time I met people I was like, it's so crazy to think that I was a school teacher in Denmark ten years ago.

43:40
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
We had so much success after we came over, we were making a lot of money, we got so much attention. I was eating at three Michelin star restaurants all over the world for free because the chef was just honored to get me and stuff like that. Besides the hard work that I put into it, and besides maybe the luck that I had doing it at the right time, New York was such a big part of that.

44:06
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
I really think, I've said this before, if we had done the same in another city, I don't think we'd have gotten the same amount of attention. So New York has a special place in my heart. I don't think I want to move back to New York. I love going there, but also love to leave. It's just such a crazy city. It's very draining.

44:21
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
But yeah, I think New York would probably be my choice. That was a dream and that was what changed our lives so much. And to be able to finish it all there, that'll be cool.

44:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
On that note, thank you so much for being part of Danish Originals. We really appreciate being in your house in California.

44:39
Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø
Thank you. It was fun.

44:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø chose Asger Jorn's Grædeøjne or Tearful Eyes from 1940 from the collection of the National Gallery of Art.