No Masters, No Gods, Good Lager: David Perry’s Slow Burn
From doom-metal stages to label art to the director’s chair of Denmark’s first cooperative brewery, David Perry has been building the same bridge for years: the one between heavy music and great beer.
When Fermented Metal last visited Slowburn Brewing Co-op, we came for the beer brewed inside a decommissioned 19th-century prison in Albertslund. We left curious about the man behind the brewery’s deep ties to the metal underground.
That man is David Perry. He’s a British musician who has played with Conan, Dead Void and Ungraven, a graphic designer who drew his way into the beer business, and Slowburn’s director. That’s a title Danish law requires, though at a worker-owned co-op it carries no throne. We sent him some questions. He answered with the dry humor of someone who has spent a lot of time in tour vans and taprooms.
Music First
Perry’s heavy-music résumé starts in Liverpool. He played bass with Conan, the city’s famously crushing doom trio, joining around 2011. That was in time for the band’s split 12” with Northern Irish doom outfit Slomatics and the UK and Ireland tours that followed, according to the Riffipedia lineup history.
After relocating to Denmark, he turned up in Copenhagen’s death-doom underground with Dead Void. He also has an earlier band, The Laez, listed in his credits.
Today he’s half of Ungraven, a heavy drone duo with Conan founder Jon Davis. Perry handles synth, organ, keys and vocals. Their album Hollows Made Homes in Their Sunken Cheeks came out on Heavy Psych Sounds on April 18, 2025. Everything Is Noise wrote that Perry’s “synth, organ, and piano add gorgeous layers of texture and subtlety to Davis’s glacially paced riffs.”
Perry doesn’t think it’s strange that a touring musician ended up in beer. In fact, he says it’s a natural progression:
“When touring, musicians are exposed to a wide variety of beer styles in different countries and regions, and often their understanding and appreciation of good beer expands. There is a lot of spare time before gigs to explore the great grain juices of the locus and plenty of opportunities to further indulge in it after the gigs. Naturally you become an experienced chugger and amateur expert. Some take the next step in beer love and start working with it.”
Drawing His Way Into Beer
Perry moved to Copenhagen in 2012 and did what plenty of new arrivals do. “Like many immigrants that can’t speak the language, I started working in a bar,” he says. That bar was Charlie’s Bar, and it pulled him into the city’s beer scene for good.
He went on to manage a craft beer bar while running his own freelance graphic design company. “Naturally one of my first customers was a brewery, for whom I designed their labels,” he says. That client eventually hired him full-time as its in-house designer, and later moved him into export sales.
Each step brought him closer to the job he actually wanted. “It all led to the opportunity to join the Slowburn team,” Perry says, “an opportunity that I had been hoping for since the brewery was established.” The designer’s eye still shows. Slowburn’s merch has become part of its identity, from shirts to the infamous “Fermented Human Remains” art. That design started as an April Fools’ joke and ended up as a real bone char smoked lager, as we reported last time.
A Brewery With No Boss
For Perry, the co-op model is the point, not a footnote. “Being worker owned means we make decisions together, with no masters and no gods,” he says. He adds that for drinkers who understand the model, “it is also a big part of why they support us.”
His advice to anyone thinking of trying it is blunt: “Read about the structure and the different ways it can manifest, then take the jump. You don’t need to have a boss or be the boss, you can work as a team and meet challenges and successes together.”
Beer Made With Friends
Slowburn’s metal connections aren’t a marketing plan. They come from Perry’s own life as “a musician and keen attendee of gigs and festivals.” Most of the festivals the brewery works with “are run by my friends or are festivals that we really want to go to or have been to.” The bands are “friends, associates and/or bands we love and have reached out to.”
A collaboration usually starts at the bar. “We drink together and discuss the various styles and directions we can go in,” Perry says. “It should be fun, sensory and ultimately collaborative.” Depending on volume and exclusivity, the result can be fully bespoke or a wider release. A couple of small tanks give the brewers room to experiment.
The latest example is a Helles brewed for Odense Metalfest. It exists only in cans at the festival and in limited kegs at Slowburn’s Oktoberfest.
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The bar doubles as a venue. It hosts “not exclusively metal, but plenty of heavy shows,” with bands like Ædel Fetich, GAM and Unavailing Void playing “at face melting volumes in an intimate space.”
Visual artists are part of the circle too. Icelandic artist Skaðvaldur has exhibited in the bar and collaborated with Slowburn on two “putrid metal t-shirts.” Team member Jesper screen prints them in the basement.
What’s Next
Slowburn’s Oktoberfest lands “late” on October 24, with “smoked live music, smoked BBQ and smoked lager.” Beyond the rauchbier, there will be 10 taps of lagers from Slowburn and guest German breweries. That’s also your chance to try the Odense Metalfest Helles on draft.
The brewery is also teaming up again with Copenhagen death metal band Strychnos for the band’s upcoming Copenhagen gigs.
Perry’s last word is an invitation: “You should come and visit us in the old prison and taste what we have to offer. It is easy to get to from Copenhagen and is a different experience to the norm.”
For the full story of the prison, the founders and the beer list, read our earlier feature, Doing Time, Drinking Well at Slowburn Co-Op Brewery. Slowburn is online at slowburn.coop.
Fængselsvej 43, 2620 Albertslund, Denmark
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