Doing Time, Drinking Well at Slowburn Co-Op Brewery
- Randall Wilburn
- 6 days ago
- 13 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
How does an American spend the Fourth of July in 2026, the 250th anniversary of the country's founding? Not with the usual hollow celebration via flag-waving, dog terrorizing explosions, and gluttonous consumption of food, but with the freedom to ignore it completely and go drink some damn good beer inside a decommissioned prison.
That was the plan on Saturday, July 4th, one day after I'd spent a night working through The Zeppelin Bar and Left Hand Path downstairs, where I'd discovered a canned IPA called “Suburban Rot.” The label said it was brewed by a co-op called Slowburn, just outside Copenhagen in the town of Albertslund. It was time to follow up on that lead...
The short train ride out led to a quiet suburban neighborhood and a short walk to a brewery housed inside a recently shut-down prison. Given the situation, “Suburban Rot” could have made an oddly fitting name for the place itself — except what was actually happening here wasn’t rot, it was rejuvenation. Signs posted outside the walls laid out the redevelopment plan for the site, along with a bit of its past:
For more than 160 years, the area surrounding Vridsløselille State Prison has existed as a secluded enclave in the middle of the town, where only the prison’s inmates and employees went about their daily lives.
The large area before you is equivalent to six football pitches — or 16 hectares — and offers unprecedented opportunities to create a new place which, in keeping with the spirit of Albertslund, will be green, safe, sustainable and vibrant.
The redevelopment, called Vridsløse, is aiming for DGNB Gold certification, expects roughly 10,000 new residents once it’s finished, and plans to reclaim some six million bricks from the old walls rather than send them to a landfill. Three principles guide the whole project: the district has to open itself to the rest of Albertslund, it has to make room for community, and the existing buildings — with their unmistakable character — have to stay central to whatever comes next.
Walking outside the prison walls to the front gate, the building itself didn’t look like it had changed much, save for a couple of signs pointing toward the brewery and an escape room. Inside, tables were scattered around the inner perimeter of the old prison walls, people were casually drinking beer and trying to stay cool on a hot summer day, and bicycles were parked near the entrance, as is customary in Denmark. The building is Vridsløselille Statsfængsel, a nineteenth-century Danish state prison in Albertslund that’s been repurposed as Porten Vridsløse — a cultural hub of raw brick walls, light wells, and, improbably, a sunny beer garden where inmates once had none. Slowburn moved in and opened its doors in August 2019.
What makes Slowburn worth a feature beyond its address, though, is who owns it. This isn’t a brewery with an investor deck and a head brewer drawing a founder’s salary. It’s a worker-owned cooperative, currently run by a team of nine people who collectively own the business and govern it by general assembly on a “one head, one vote” basis — no shareholder gets a bigger say for putting in more money, and shares in the co-op can’t be sold off to outside investors. It’s a structure Slowburn describes as being built around “the seven cooperative principles,” the international standard for co-ops, applied here to fermentation tanks instead of a farm or a credit union. The stated goal is blunt about who the business is supposed to serve: “a sustainable and inclusive workplace that is more than just a brewery, and where profits and activities benefit the workers and our surrounding community.”
Exterior of Porten Vridsløse At the gate Recreation area between brews Bikes: typical to Copenhagen Another view Taproom entrance!
A Drink in the Clink
I walked into the taproom, sat down at the bar, and ordered a beer.
My bartender was Aurora, a friendly Italian who’d come to Denmark for love and stayed to work at the co-op brewery. I told her what Fermented Metal was about, and she pointed me toward a recent release by the brewery: a canned beer brewed for the upcoming Kill-Town Death Fest, just another beer that points towards Slowburn's continuing relationship with heavy music. Aurora was one of two people working that day; the other, Jesper Jønsson, was downstairs in the basement printing shirts, who is known as being one of the spokespersons at the brewery.
Strangely enough, while at the bar with my beer and talking to Aurora, a customer came in to order and recognized my "Brujos" hat . I was somewhat shocked to find he was familiar with the Portland brewery. Sometimes, metal and beer make the world feel like a lot smaller place.
Art by @zez_eah A tasty IPA The Info
While I waited to talk to Jesper, Aurora showed me around. The taproom’s art rotates regularly — done at the moment by a local artist named Kim Heyst — part of the brewery’s ongoing mission to support the surrounding creative community. She also walked me back to where the beer is actually made: what used to be Vridsløselille’s prison laundry, a space once dedicated to the everyday machinery of incarceration, transformed into a working brewery.
What’s in the Tanks?
Slowburn’s catalog runs wide rather than narrow — more of a working laboratory than a one-trick flagship brewery. Its house style leans on “quality, consistency, and drinkability,” and the rotating lineup bears that out: crisp lagers (Vridsløse Pils, the premium pilsner Slow Down, the Czech-style dark lager Mørkeræd), a run of hop-forward IPAs (the New England-style Vox Populi, the West Coast double IPA King Sequoia, the session IPA Kintsugi, and Samka, brewed with pine, juniper, and walnut leaves), stouts (the coffee stout Metamorphosis), sours (the raspberry sour Keep On Dancing), and even a Best Bitter (Workhorse) and a Scottish wee heavy (Staggard) for drinkers who want nothing to do with hops at all. Across its history, the co-op has brewed something on the order of 130 distinct beers — a number that says this is a team more interested in constant iteration than chasing a store-branded favorite.
Brew it Can it Label it New keg styles
If Slowburn has an actual flagship, local reputation says it’s the Albertslund Terror Pils, which has reportedly built something like cult status in the neighborhood — a nod to the local experimental electronic/noise duo Albertslund Terror Korps, or ATK.
A Conversation with Jesper
After returning to the bar and ordering a Vridsløse Classic, a Vienna-style lager (4.6%), Jesper Jønsson finally emerged from the print shop downstairs, sweaty and looking wiped out. He’s not just a screen printer, though — he does a whole lot more. He’s among the group of people helping define the day-to-day beer identity of Slowburn Brewing Co-op, which publicly identifies him as its “ølansvarlig” — literally, the person responsible for beer. That puts Jønsson close to the heart of what Slowburn does: maintaining the quality, selection, and presentation of the beer that reaches drinkers at the brewery and its events. He also shows up regularly as the brewery’s beer representative at outside events.
Once he had a beer in hand, I found him easy to talk to, and we did, for the better part of an hour. We talked music and found common ground on punk bands like Fugazi, Rites of Spring, and Descendents, even though he admitted to some Iron Maiden on his playlist downstairs. The conversation drifted toward the art on Slowburn’s beer labels, which he pointed out doesn’t fall into the stereotypically “masculine” line of metal-adjacent art. Instead, it celebrates nature and animals with a lighter tone than beers like “Kill-Town” and “Suburban Rot” might suggest.
Which brought us back to the merch on the walls — shirts, in particular. He pointed one out.
Fermented Human Remains: When a Slowburn Joke Became Merch, and Then Beer
There are brewery T-shirts, and then there are brewery T-shirts depicting decaying human bodies floating inside a fermentation vessel.
Slowburn’s “Fermented Human Remains” design falls firmly into the second category. What began as an April Fools’ Day joke became one of Slowburn’s most memorable pieces of merchandise — and, fittingly for a brewery with strong ties to Copenhagen’s metal underground, looks more like extreme-metal artwork than conventional craft-beer branding.
The illustration was created by Icelandic artist Skaðvaldur and shows decomposing bodies packed into what appears to be a brewery fermenter. Slowburn turned the artwork into a black long-sleeve shirt: the image printed in yellow and white across the front, a metal-styled Slowburn logo on the back and sleeves, and the words “fermented human remains” running down one arm.
The joke got even better from there....
Slowburn later turned Fermented Human Remains into an actual beer — a Bone Char Smoked Lager. The brewery’s announcement emphasized the beer’s unusual use of bone char, a black, porous carbon material produced from animal bones, not, despite the name and artwork, from unfortunate former occupants of Vridsløselille.
That progression — from grotesque brewery joke, to underground-style shirt, to a real beer whose ingredients make the name just plausible enough for some people to actually believe it, according to Jesper — is what makes Slowburn pretty damn cool, in my estimation. I left the shop with that exact shirt.
A Funeral Beer for Death Row
Jesper also talked about Slowburn’s involvement in creating the “Gravøl” beer for the metal festival Dødsgangen, Danish for roughly “Death Row,” an outdoor festival staged inside the courtyard of the former Vridsløselille State Prison. Rather than treating the abandoned prison as simple scenery, Dødsgangen built its entire identity around the location. Festivalgoers entered the old prison yard, were invited to eat their “last meal,” drink prison-themed beer, and listen to some of Denmark’s heaviest bands within walls that had confined prisoners for generations.
For Slowburn Brewing Co-op, which operates its brewery within the former prison complex, the festival was a natural partnership. Slowburn brewed Dødsgangen’s official festival beer, Gravøl — a particularly clever Danish name, since gravøl traditionally refers to beer or drinks served following a funeral: essentially a funeral ale, or wake beer.
Dødsgangen ended after its 2025 edition, making its three-year run relatively brief, but over that stretch it gave a stage to acts including Konvent, Katla, Strychnos, Rotting Christ, Decapitated, Undergang, Temple of Scorn, and Henret, alongside international acts 1914 and Urne. For Slowburn, Gravøl and the festival became another example of what makes the brewery unusual: beer, heavy music, and the history of an old prison becoming intertwined rather than simply sharing an address.
Marcus Melo desinged the labels
Back to the Beginning
Who runs the show, and how? Coming from the States, I was intrigued by the idea of a “co-op,” and my conversations with Aurora and Jesper kept circling back to that topic.
Founded in 2019 as Denmark’s first cooperative microbrewery, Slowburn was created as an alternative to the conventional craft-beer business model. Its founders wanted to make technically accomplished, highly drinkable beer while building a company in which the people doing the work also owned the business and determined its future — a brewery where fermentation, workplace democracy, and community development were treated as parts of the same project.
Three Daydreamers and a Second-Hand Brewery
Slowburn was founded by three people the brewery affectionately calls its “daydreamers”: Amalie, Stefano, and Andrew. Each arrived at professional brewing by a different route.
Amalie came from the culinary and fermentation world. She’d helped establish one of Copenhagen’s early kombucha breweries and later worked as a beer bartender and in craft-beer importing and distribution. At Slowburn, her early responsibilities included sales, brewery work, and the considerable bureaucracy involved in launching a new drinks business.
Stefano, a biotechnologist from Italy, had already worked as a brewer before relocating to Denmark. He became Slowburn’s original head brewer, overseeing recipe development, brewing, fermentation, packaging, and the frequent mechanical problem-solving required in a small brewery.
Andrew moved to Denmark from the United States in 2010, when the Scandinavian craft-beer movement was still developing. Unable to find enough of the intensely hopped American-style IPAs he missed, he began homebrewing them in the kitchen of a shared student residence. His background in technology and engineering fed naturally into his interests in recipe development, barrel aging, and fermentation with mixed cultures of yeast and bacteria.
The three pursued the idea without conventional outside investors, on what they’ve described as a shoestring budget. They signed the lease on their first brewery, in Avedøre, in late May 2019, moved in a few weeks later, and hauled a used brewing system into the building in June.
The equipment was inexpensive for a reason. Tanks leaked, electrical problems appeared, and supplier errors slowed the installation. When the founders finally completed their first brew, in mid-July, the result was disastrous. They left the brewery at roughly 2:30 in the morning, exhausted and uncertain whether the second-hand system they’d poured their savings into could produce commercially viable beer.
Instead of abandoning the project, they learned the peculiarities of the equipment. Gradually, they began hitting their temperature, acidity, and gravity targets with more consistency. Slowburn held its opening celebration at the Avedøre brewery in August 2019, only a few months after taking possession of the site.
That difficult first summer gave the brewery its defining character. Slowburn wasn’t built as a polished, investor-backed brand. It was assembled through persistence, reused equipment, technical improvisation, and a considerable amount of unpaid labor.
Why a Brewing Cooperative?
The word “Co-op” in Slowburn’s name isn’t decorative branding. Slowburn was organized as a worker cooperative, meaning the brewery is owned and democratically governed by its working members rather than by passive shareholders or outside investors. Each member has an equal voice through the principle of one person, one vote. Major decisions run through the cooperative’s general assembly, rather than handing greater control to whoever has invested the most money.
At its founding, Slowburn identified three central priorities:
Producing beer of the highest quality it could achieve
Supporting and developing the surrounding community
Creating meaningful, long-term employment that benefits workers personally, professionally, and financially.
The brewery has been careful not to present cooperative ownership as a rejection of financial reality — Slowburn still needs to operate as a healthy, profitable company. The difference is that profitability is treated as a means of sustaining the brewery, its employees, and its principles, not as the sole purpose of the business. The structure also provides an unusual form of protection against acquisition. Because Slowburn is owned by its workers and doesn’t have conventional ownership shares that can be sold to an outside party, the brewery argues that it can’t simply be purchased by a multinational drinks company. Independence is built into its legal and organizational framework.
That makes Slowburn an intriguing counterpoint to a recurring pattern in craft beer, where independent breweries begin as expressions of individual creativity and end up dependent on investors, rapid expansion, or acquisition by large conglomerates. Slowburn’s founders set out to build an institution capable of surviving personnel changes without abandoning the principles it was built on. In other words, the objective wasn’t merely to create jobs for the three founders. It was to build a brewery that could eventually exist without them.
From Avedøre to Vridsløselille Prison
Slowburn’s most significant transformation came with its relocation from Avedøre to the former Vridsløselille Prison in Albertslund. After the prison’s closure, portions of the complex began evolving into Porten Vridsløse, the cultural and community development project I’d walked past on my way in. When Amalie saw the notice, she moved quickly to secure the space, and Slowburn eventually established its brewery within the former prison, opening the taproom alongside the production space in spring 2023.
After eventually reaching burnout, Amalie and Stefano left, and Slowburn found new help in David Perry.
Another Brewery Tie to Music: David Perry
He’s one of the clearest links between Slowburn Brewing Co-op and Copenhagen’s heavy-music community: David Perry, a British-born musician, designer, and beer-industry veteran who’s become a central figure in the brewery’s development.
Perry’s involvement in Danish craft beer predates Slowburn. He previously worked with Dry & Bitter Brewing Company, where his role crossed sales, events, design, and collaborations, and contemporary festival material from Metal Magic Festival and Nordic Noise shows him representing Dry & Bitter at metal-related events and discussing beers brewed specifically for those festivals.
That combination of beer, visual design, and music carried naturally into Slowburn. Today, Perry isn’t simply an employee of the cooperative — Danish corporate records list David Perry as director of Slowburn Brewing Co-op, a role he assumed in August 2025, but a title he reluctantly took. ( Danish law requires every business to have a named "Director")
His musical background helps explain why Slowburn’s relationship with "metal" feels unusually organic. Before moving to Denmark, Perry played bass and vocals with the Liverpool doom-metal band Conan, joining in late 2010 and appearing on the band’s 2011 split release with Slomatics. Conan founder Jon Davis later credited Perry with making an important contribution during his time in the group. After settling in Denmark, Perry became part of the Copenhagen extreme-metal underground through Dead Void, playing bass and contributing vocals; the band’s 2022 album Volatile Forms placed his bass beneath a particularly bleak mixture of death metal and doom, and he remained associated with the group until 2024.
His current musical outlet is Ungraven, where he contributes keyboards and vocals. Metal Archives credits Perry with synthesizer, organ, piano, and vocals on the band’s 2025 release Hollows Made Homes in Their Sunken Cheeks, as well as recording and design work.
Perry’s history makes Slowburn’s metal connections easier to understand. Collaborations with underground festivals, concerts at the brewery, and beers tied to heavy bands aren’t the result of someone in marketing deciding that metal fans drink craft beer — one of the people helping run Slowburn has spent years on both sides of that relationship, pouring beer at metal festivals while also playing bass on stages like them. That gives Slowburn something difficult to manufacture: authenticity. For Perry, brewing and heavy music were never separate worlds brought together for a promotional campaign. They’ve been overlapping parts of the same life for years, and at Slowburn, those worlds now meet inside the walls of a former Danish prison.
Last Call
Which is why he wasn’t around the day I visited — he was off in Sweden, playing with his band.
Jesper headed back to the hot basement to keep working, and I finished up with an Octopils, an Italian-style pilsner (5.1%). Another fantastic beer. Aurora had clocked off shift, and I was left to sit with my Fourth of July for a minute and take in the contrast of where I was: a facility once designed around confinement and institutional control, now housing a worker-owned company organized around participation and equal voting rights.
That reversal gives the location significance beyond visual novelty. Slowburn has effectively placed a democratic workplace inside a former symbol of state authority. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting home for a brewery founded on the belief that workers should have direct control over their working lives. And the taproom itself has changed Slowburn from a production brewery into a public gathering place — not just a destination for beer enthusiasts, but a meeting point for the local community and for traveling metalheads passing through Copenhagen.
What started as a tip chased down from a bar tab — a can of Suburban Rot with an unfamiliar brewery name on the label — turned into one of the more unlikely 4th of Julys I’ve spent: an American celebrating independence, an ocean away from home, inside a building that used to strip people of theirs. Slowburn’s whole story runs on that same kind of inversion. A joke about fermented human remains became a shirt, then a beer, then a conversation starter that gets strangers at the bar asking questions. A prison laundry became a working brewhouse. Nine people who could each just as easily be collecting a paycheck somewhere else instead vote on how the place is run, one head at a time, and put a British doom-metal bassist in the director’s chair. None of it would matter much if the beer weren’t good — but 130-some recipes deep, from the cult-status Terror Pils to the Octopils I closed the night with, Slowburn makes the case that a cooperative can out-brew the competition, not just out-organize it. Metal has always had a soft spot for turning confinement into something worth celebrating, and Vridsløselille’s old walls, now full of tables, bicycles, and people in no hurry to leave, make as strong a case for that as any prison-turned-brewery I’ve come across (one, so far). I’ll take that kind of rejuvenation over fireworks any year.
Slowburn Brewing Co-op: Porten Vridsløse, Vridsløselille, Albertslund, Denmark. slowburn.coop
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