Michele Tieghi (above) is a King’s Business & Management alumnus. He reflects on the challenges he and his co-founders had to overcome when starting their business – a brewery that enables Londoners to enjoy the taste of pure German craft beer.
T
hroughout my degree, I developed a strong interest in how businesses are run and became fascinated by the many entrepreneurs who reject the nine-to-five rat race to start their own ventures. Being my own boss and doing something I’m passionate about was the biggest motivation for starting German Kraft Beer (GK). My co-founders Anton Borkmann and Felix Bollen and I met in high school, and we’ve been best friends since. They are two Germans who love a good honest beer, and are also the brains behind GK. Felix worked in Steinbach Brau (now our partner brewery) in Erlangen, Germany, and was adamant that you couldn’t find fresh beer like theirs in London – he was right. Exporting fresh German brews to the UK was out of the question; fresh beer doesn’t travel well and it wasn’t sustainable. So, we thought, ‘F**k it, let’s make our own fresh German brews in the heart of the capital, and we opened our own London brewery!’ A big challenge was it not being possible to recreate such pure and balanced beers in London due to the difference in the quality of water between London and Germany. This was a problem, as beer is made of 95 per cent water! We figured the only way to overcome this was to recreate the water quality found in Germany. Fortunately, Felix’s father was running a charity
48 Start! Issue four 2018–19
