Born Fighters — People Like Us in Copenhagen, Denmark

Bjarke Østergaard is still, ready, his face a study in concentration, his weight shifted forward onto the balls of his feet. In his pale blue denim coat, yellow round-neck sweater, navy trousers, and white plimsoles, he has the look of an early ’70s singer-songwriter, but he’s preparing to dance, not croon. 

Waiting across the floor of the Sparta Hallen in Copenhagen is Carling Talcott-Steenstra of the Royal Danish Ballet, identically dressed. It’s just after 5:30 p.m. on Friday evening, March 6, 2020, and their performance, Spontan Goes Spontan, the centerpiece of the Social Revolution By Beer festival, is about to begin.

Dancing at beer festivals is not unknown. When enough Nut Brown Ale has been drunk, it’s late, and a tribute band is hitting the right notes, Great British Beer Festival attendees will frug with abandon. Oktoberfest can be a table-stomping riot. Even craft-beer festivals sometimes play host to dancing, albeit of a more self-conscious variety.

This is not like that. As an extended introduction ends, the music, composed for Spontan Goes Spontan by Aaron Dessner of rock band The National, begins. It falls like raindrops, gentle and repetitive, insistent, sweeping one way and then the other. As it begins, Østergaard and Talcott-Steenstra race towards each other and, for the next three minutes or so, are an elegant, energetic whirl of entwined arms, focused minds, and feet in perfect union. A crowd of perhaps 250 watches in silence, and then erupts in delighted applause.

It’s a moment of wonder, not least for Lars Carlsen, the co-founder and CEO of People Like Us, the brewery running the festival. Østergaard, the in-house dancer for People Like Us, has autism and ADHD. “Wow, wow!” Carlsen says when I catch up with him the day after the performance. “I cried afterwards, I don’t know for how long. It was so emotional. I have known Bjarke for five or six years. To see the person here and compare it to the person five years ago, it was amazing.”

Not many breweries employ a dancer, but People Like Us is unique. Founded in August 2016 by Carlsen, a former teacher, and his brother Jesper, its stated aim is to change perceptions about autistic people in the world of work. Before the COVID-19 crisis began, People Like Us employed 65 people in a variety of roles, from dancers to bartenders, brewers to accountants, more than 90% of them with a diagnosis of autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, or PTSD. Most employees are not involved in the brewing process, which takes place under contract at three breweries—De Proef Brouwerij in Belgium; Flying Couch Brewing in Denmark; and To Øl’s new facility just outside Copenhagen, which produces the majority of it.

In its five-year tenure, this small Danish brewery has had an outsize impact in Europe and beyond. That’s evident from the range of breweries at its festival, from the Brussels Beer Project to Goose Island and To Øl. People Like Us has helped to usher in an era when social activism is as much a part of the craft beer discourse as hop varieties. Over the last year, though, it has faced perhaps its biggest challenge of all.

WORKING IT OUT

People Like Us was born out of frustration. By 2016 the Carlsen brothers had spent seven years running LevAs, a provider of education and training for autistic people, but were becoming disillusioned with their inability to have a long-term impact. “We had been getting more and more frustrated because when our youngsters leave [LeVas], nothing happens,” Jesper Carlsen told me in the spring of 2017. “It’s impossible for them to find a job.”

Brewing seemed to offer an opportunity to change that story. As Lars Carlsen put it at the time, given that pretty much every job in a brewery can be done by an autistic person, setting up such a business would serve as a clear case study. Right from the start, placing autistic talent in other businesses was a big part of the plan.  

“I had my doubts in the beginning. Was it going to be a petting zoo for autists, where everybody who worked with us would do it to get PR benefit? I was worried that people would buy our beers as a charity act. It took me two years to see that wasn’t going to happen.”

Mikkel Borg Bjergsø, founder and owner of Mikkeller, was also involved during the brewery’s early phase. Approached in the hope that he might brew a promotional beer, he convinced the Carlsen brothers to think bigger, and to launch a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for a brewery in early 2017. Although that fell significantly short of its goal ($21,965 was raised out of a target of $150,000), Bjergsø remained a key source of support and assistance, taking to the stage at the Social Revolution By Beer festival to exhort Danish companies to do more. 

“There is no financial support, but People Like Us has been able to use staff at Mikkeller HQ, their network, know-how, social media, and much more,” says Lars Carlsen. 

I first came across People Like Us in 2017. A year before, my son Fraser was diagnosed as autistic and, among many other revelations, I was becoming cognizant of the difficulties faced by autistic people in the workplace. People Like Us, and its clarity of vision, hit me like a hammer. In an act best filed under “enlightened self-interest,” I pitched and then wrote a story for the Guardian, published in April 2017, about People Like Us, which helped the brewery move beyond the disappointment of the crowdfunder, the founders said. 

I interviewed Rune Lindgreen, the brewery’s recipe developer and brewer, for that story. Although Bjergsø designed the recipes for the brewery’s core beers, collaborations are the responsibility of Lindgreen, who has been with People Like Us since its early days. Lindgreen left his previous job at Copenhagen’s Bryggeriet Djævlebryg when he was diagnosed as autistic in his late 20s (he is now 42), and found out about People Like Us through an old brewing contact and friend, Lars Buch, at the time the company’s project manager.

“I had my doubts in the beginning,” Lindgreen says now. “Was it going to be a petting zoo for autists, where everybody who worked with us would do it to get PR benefit? I was worried that people would buy our beers as a charity act. It took me two years to see that wasn’t going to happen.”

A TASTE OF SUCCESS

His worries assuaged, Lindgreen stayed on, and says he’s flourished in the role. “I’ve always been developing recipes for People Like Us, but most have not been our main beers,” he says. “I feared that I was being used as a token, a poster child for autism. But now I’ve done 25 collabs at least, and with 20 of them I’ve made half of the recipe. I’ve gained a lot of confidence in doing that.” 

Before the pandemic, Lindgreen spent much of his work time traveling to take part in brew days around Europe, a process that he believes has helped him grow as a brewer. There have been fewer opportunities in the past 12 months, but he’s still worked virtually on a number of beers. One was the recently released Brut Pilsner, made with Jens Magnus Eiken and Christian Andersen, authors of the Danish book The Naked Beer (Den nøgne øl), after they were guests on a People Like Us online tasting.

“It’s daunting getting hooked up with [breweries like] Magic Rock, or Northern Monk [both in the U.K.],” Lindgreen says. “I don’t have the same credentials. I was happy taking the underdog role—now I’m more confident, saying, ‘Let’s try this.’ In the beginning I feared that I was going to be replaced at some point, but I don’t feel that anymore.”

Lindgreen says that the financial empowerment that has come from working at the brewery, the reality of making a living from his work, has been deeply satisfying. “There’s a huge benefit from working, psychologically. It’s about having some worth, having someone care that you are there. When I walk into our bar, and I see 10 cans that I’ve been a part of, that makes me really happy. I’m proud people like the product, I’m proud I’m doing sensible things in the real world that are making money.”

Lindgreen’s role has expanded during the pandemic. He and Lars Carlsen began hosting Facebook beer tastings shortly after lockdown began. Their popularity has grown so quickly that they are now central to the brewery’s business plan. Hosting corporate tastings—a recent event was broadcast to 500 employees at a Danish company, for example—is now a significant part of Lindgreen’s job.  

“One day before Easter I had five tastings, two [of them] half an hour apart,” he says. “That was a little too much, maybe. It is actually pretty hard work. The approach we take, which is why I think people like them, is we are always kind of just hitting the floor, seeing whatever happens. It’s spontaneous [but] it can be a challenge to keep it fresh.”

He clearly enjoys them, to the extent that the return of in-person tastings is not as appealing a prospect. “When you have people in the bar, it gets much more fragmented. Some people just want to drink beer and talk to their friends,” he says. “I really hope that they’re going to continue doing these online tastings. And I think we will actually, because there are many benefits.”

MILITARY SERVICE

People Like Us’ mission now also encompasses veterans, who can face difficulties upon their return to civil society. Jon Nielsen, the brewery’s logistics manager, was injured while serving with the Danish army in Afghanistan in 2009, and struggled to find his way in the job market afterwards.

He first encountered People Like Us in 2018, when it launched a project to help veterans that culminated in the beer Vet 364. Nielsen, who was looking for a way to get into volunteering, responded to an appeal for veterans to head up the campaign. “I wanted to be part of that project because I like beer and it sounded interesting,” Nielsen says. “It wasn’t really like this was a job opportunity, but more like this could be a volunteering [opportunity]. And then, when I actually heard how [People Like Us] work and their mission, it was like, ‘Okay, this is pretty cool.’” 

“The greatest challenge is in the workplace. You have to fit into this box. Sometimes veterans just hit the wall and then they break. They might need to say, ‘I had a bad day and I can’t come to work.’ At People Like Us, we say it’s OK. We understand that war veterans or people with PTSD can have these issues. So our response is: ‘That’s fine. Just come back whenever you’re good again.’”

The name of the beer, 364, refers to September 5, a commemoration day for soldiers in Denmark, and the fact that their problems—with PTSD, in particular—are forgotten for the other 364 days of the year. 

“The greatest challenge is in the workplace,” says Nielsen. “You have to fit into this box. Sometimes veterans just hit the wall and then they break. They might need to say, ‘I had a bad day and I can’t come to work.’ At People Like Us, we say it’s OK. We understand that war veterans or people with PTSD can have these issues. So our response is: ‘That’s fine. Just come back whenever you’re good again.’”

That flexibility is what Nielsen most enjoys about his role at People Like Us. “It binds us better together,” he says. “We form a stronger bond thanks to this acceptance. We can just be more the way we are instead of having to pretend to be someone else or pretend to feel okay. We don’t have to hide and feel like shit if we have a shit day.”

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

The pandemic has tested breweries around the world. In the U.S., small and independent breweries declined in number by more than 7% in 2020, according to figures from the Brewers Association. The picture is unclear elsewhere, but unlikely to be any more positive.

For cause-based breweries, where providing work is the point, the pandemic has hit particularly hard. People Like Us was founded to get autistic adults into the workplace, to demonstrate what they can achieve and to build self-confidence and self-worth; the pandemic meant many were forced to sit at home. It also meant other businesses—who had benefited from talent nurtured by People Like Us—were less likely to be able to take on more workers, or to even begin the process. 

The brewery’s problems began before its festival started last March. On the first Friday of the two-day event, the Danish government announced that gatherings of more than 1,000 people were to be banned. A week later, the country went into lockdown. The rest of Europe soon followed, some countries more belatedly than others. Denmark’s speed was rewarded when it emerged a month later, blinking into a harsher daylight. 

But things got worse for People Like Us before they got better. By June, the number of people employed in full- and part-time roles at the brewery had fallen to 42. Outsourcing talent to other companies, a huge part of the brewery’s raison d’etre, was on hold. Alberte Jannicke, People Like Us’ popular, energetic head of communications, was let go as the business’s once-international focus narrowed to Denmark. A brewery that had always challenged itself, that had always sought to run rather than walk, was now facing its biggest hurdle.

“We were struggling just to have enough money to pay salaries,” says Carlsen. “From June to November, we were struggling. It was quite horrible.”

They weren’t alone. Other cause-based breweries were facing difficulties too, like Browar Spółdzielczy, in Puck, a town of around 11,000 people on Poland’s Baltic coast. Founded in 2014 by Agnieszka Dejna, chairperson of the town’s DALBA social cooperative, and occupational therapist Janusz Golisowicz, it employs around 30 adults with learning disabilities. It had been an unqualified success: By early 2020, production had expanded from 4,000 to 18,000 liters (roughly 150 barrels) a month, and three pubs had opened across Poland. Lots of jobs had been created.

“I don’t know how we are going to survive. I hope that COVID-19 is going to end, but to be honest, I don’t know when—but I know that we are not going to lose the brand. I know that we are going to brew.”

2020 was set to be a huge year for Browar Spółdzielczy, which was among those invited to serve beer at People Like Us’ festival, but then the pandemic arrived. Plans for a new brewery were canceled after a bank loan fell through. Even worse, the closure of Polish pubs meant the brewery lost its main route to market, leaving Dejna and her team with an unenviable choice.

“In Poland, it’s illegal to sell beer by post,” she says. “We had to decide what we were going to do, and we decided that we are going to sell [by post]. We know it’s illegal, but it was the only thing which would allow us to keep people employed. We don’t want to just give up.” So they didn’t—although monthly production has fallen to “2,000 or 3,000 liters [17-25 BBLs].”

Dejna and her team can take some comfort in the impact they’ve had. When they began, she says, people couldn’t believe that they weren’t going to hire a brewer to oversee the process. “For many people, it was really hard to understand how disabled people were going to be able to do it,” she says.

Half a decade on, attitudes have shifted—and when they haven’t, Browar Spółdzielczy has an army of supporters at its back. “In January this year, someone was abusive in the comments on a Facebook post: ‘Who is going to drink that shit? Look at them, they look horrible,’ and so on and so on,” she says. 

“So I recorded a film, saying what I think, and posted it on Facebook. And people started commenting, it was amazing [the post now has 1,000 likes and over 100 comments]. In 24 hours, we sold 1,000 boxes of beer, which people ordered to show those stupid morons that they disagree. We have a lot of people who care about us.” 

The future remains difficult; just 10 people are currently employed at the brewery. Uncertainty reigns. “I don’t know how we are going to survive,” she says. “I hope that COVID-19 is going to end, but to be honest, I don’t know when—but I know that we are not going to lose the brand. I know that we are going to brew.” 

A similar resilience can be found at Ignition Brewery, based in Sydenham, South London, which employs seven people with learning disabilities. The pandemic meant sales dropped 20% year-on-year, but a pivot to takeaway and delivery, allied to grants and a fresh injection of cash from old investors, saw the brewery through the worst. 

“We had that ability to deploy different routes. We’ve been very lucky,” founder Nick O’Shea says. “And the community has been brilliant. People helped us deliver leaflets, they’ve delivered beer for us, they’ve asked after the team the whole time. They’ve come and bought beer in the middle of a COVID testing center, which is what we are now—the taproom is a COVID testing center. We’ve realized that we are a bigger part of the community than we thought.”

Not only has Ignition survived, but it’s about to multiply. O’Shea says he’s in touch with groups in Bristol, Liverpool, and Essex who are aiming to found similar breweries. He could be forgiven for patting himself on the back, but he knows that the project’s fundamental aim—to provide jobs for those locked out of the conventional system—is not currently being fulfilled. 

“The pandemic has reduced our ability to provide jobs,” O’Shea says. “Our people are not working. They’re being paid, but they’re not working. And that’s so difficult, and there’s nothing we can do about that. If we were just a standard business, we might be thinking, ‘Do we pivot? Do we do this, do that?’ There’s a lot of work in running the taproom, but actually, it’s such an important factor in how we provide work that you have to say, ‘Well, no, we’ll open the bloody taproom.’ The question for us is, how do we get back to that safely in a world where this kind of thing may not be possible?”

GREAT DANES

If the past year has seen unprecedented hardship and difficulty for these businesses, the promise of brighter days is beginning to dawn. December marked a turning point for People Like Us, courtesy of a bank loan. Since then, good news has flowed: A deal with Coop, Denmark’s biggest supermarket chain; the return of outsourcing (Voi, a manufacturer of electric scooters, recently got in touch); a bottle-shop collaboration with Mikkeller, the Social Beer Shop, in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro neighborhood; the brewery’s best-ever month in terms of sales in March. The re-opening of Danish hospitality in April and May took the number of people employed up to around 45, the vast majority of them with a diagnosis.

“This group of people … are strong as hell, and I think the reason why they are strong, it’s because they have been struggling all their lives,” says Carlsen. “So, there’s not so much new in this way of living. It’s just a new way to manage problems. We are just getting on with it.”

This expectation—that there will always be difficulties to navigate, so they must be navigated—has served People Like Us well during the pandemic. They proved far quicker to act, and more nimble in what they did, than many other Danish breweries. “Acting so quickly on the online part was a game-changer,” says Lindgreen. “I’ve watched a lot of other tastings, and I get this feeling that it’s about sales, which is obviously important, but from an entertainment perspective, a two-hour-long commercial is not what you want to pay for. I believe we have authenticity.” 

They’re now building on the breakthrough that 2020’s festival provided in their domestic market. “It has been quite difficult to get the story out, to get the message out,” Carlsen told me in the summer. “People in Denmark think it is a socially progressive place but for us—it’s not. We are struggling for our lives, we are struggling to have a place in society. Danes think that [because] we have the welfare system, and we are paying our taxes—50, 60% of our income—then the government has to take care of it! But it’s starting to change. We were on national TV two times the week of the festival, and there have been [Danish] newspaper articles. That’s new.” 

This year he had hoped to open a new school, Stjerneskolen, alongside Mikkel and his partner Pernille Pang. It is designed to cater to all children, in an environment free of the one-size-fits-all approach that Carlsen sees in the Danish system. (“We believe that everyone is born equal, but with different abilities and potentials, and that we can all learn from each other’s differences, challenges and ways of acting,” the school’s website puts it.) COVID-19 means the opening has been pushed back to September 2022.

The future may be uncertain, but for People Like Us it always has been. The pandemic wasn’t its first challenge, and it probably won’t be the last. But the brewery continues to look ahead. A second festival is planned for 2022, this time spread across seven or eight sites in Copenhagen because, as Carlsen puts it, “We do not trust the corona[virus].”

His belief is undimmed. “When we started, I couldn’t say out loud what I wanted to happen because people would say I was crazy,” he told me at the festival in March 2020. “But I have met a lot of people during the 20 years I was a teacher and I knew they had huge potential. I have met so many children and young people, I couldn’t understand why there was such a problem … but the only thing we are thinking [in society] is, ‘How are you doing in school, how is your maths, how is your Danish,’ and so on. 

“But here they are. A lot of potential and talent is flowering.” And, even after a year like no other, it still is.

Words by Will HawkesPhotos by Cory Smith
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