MMM STORIES: TEKTONIK BREWERY

Let’s, for a moment, travel to the Ljubljana of the late 70s and early 80s. Into a time when Šiška kids tore up the streets around Ljubljana’s Union brewery with their skateboards, passionately devoured and collected comics featuring Alan Ford and other popular characters, and curiously explored the global punk scene while devoutly co-creating its Slovenian counterpart. These were the years when Marko and his friends found a beer recipe in a Croatian DIY magazine and made their first home-brewed beer. Let’s not concern ourselves with the fact that the beer wasn’t even close to anything drinkable – but the story nevertheless began right there. Could that have been the birthplace of the famous Iggy (Tektonik’s original punk IPA, now already passed into legend)? Will it ever return to tell us another story of the good old days?

Marko soon refocused his mastery of the skateboard into photography, media, marketing, and design, while the stories of his professional life, his love life, and his life as a beer-enthusiast led him across the European continent.

Back in the years when Yugoslavia still existed, during his travels in Belgium, he fell in love with the exceptional varietal spectrum of the Belgian beer brewing tradition. Was it then that he subconsciously sparked the idea for creating the elegant Herculea – Tektonik’s Belgian champion?

When he discovered the blooming Italian craft scene in the eternal city, he ordered the first pots for home brewing to his Roman flat, and later went off to England to gain practical knowledge, which he honed by reading lots of expert literature and performing countless beer-brewing experiments in order to slowly discover a new medium of expression. Was he then perhaps already dreaming of putting his limited edition Open League experiments on tap at the Tektonix in-house pub years later?

Interesting that three decades after Marko’s first brewing experiment, Tektonik’s founding crew launched their brewery in the former mess hall of the Delo newspaper on the Bežigrad “bank” of the railroad, but still just a stone’s throw from the building of the now abandoned brewery that was once Ljubljana’s pride and joy.

As if all these stories were meant to intersect just there, in the heart of craft-beer-thirsty Ljubljana; as if the industrial building that was an important hub of Slovenia’s media landscape for so many years finally gave way to a new medium, through which Marko and his team of punk-rock beer brewers, salespeople, designers, copywriters, and striking, hops-and-malt characters now tell sophisticated Ljubljana stories in a remarkably comprehensive way.

And now that the colourful company has its home in Bežigrad, the story can come full circle. At the Tektonix in-house pub and shop, the latest chapter in Tektonik’s story, the crew can now finally offer a place at the source to other storytellers, too – the walls to visual artists, the stage to musicians and poets, and the comfortable tables to every one of us, to enjoy strictly serious discussions about beer, or simple chit-chat with some good food and drink. You don’t have to go far to arrive at the beginning.