With 30 years of brewing in Cayman under his belt, Andreas Moerl is celebrating – and luckily he knows just the place in which to celebrate.
This Saturday afternoon, the taproom at the Cayman Islands Brewery in Prospect will be packed with friends and colleagues past and present as well as beer aficionados coming together to mark three decades of Moerl’s brewing work.
Fittingly, Moerl has even brewed a special beer for the occasion – a 5% ABV Munich-style helles lager with specially-imported Bavarian yeast, appropriately named ‘Helles of a Career’.
Brewing origins
While Moerl has worked in Cayman’s brewing industry for 30 years, he has spent his whole working life in pursuit of the perfect pint. Born in the Bavarian capital of Munich, Germany in 1964, a city whose history is inextricably linked with beer, Moerl did military service after high school and then an apprenticeship at a local brewery located in a half-ruined castle.
After a few years learning the craft of brewing there, the opportunity to work in a brewery just outside Los Angeles in California came up.
“They were interested in German-style beers, which were really popular there at the time,” Moerl recalled. “It was pretty experimental though, like the Wild West. In Europe, everything was regulated, but there, not so much.”
It was while working in the US that Moerl heard that a brewery in the Cayman Islands was looking for a brewmaster. After meeting up with the owners at a brewers’ convention in Texas, Moerl accepted the role and flew out to the Cayman Islands for the first time, with his Californian wife following him a few months later.
“The first thing I wanted to do was see the brewery,” he said. “Well, it was barely built! I said guys, there’s no brewery here! Well, they said, ‘We’re a little delayed …’ I said, so long as you’re paying me as agreed, then I’ll stay.”
Having arrived in August 1995, it wasn’t until March 1996 that Stingray Brewery began production.
“It was a much smaller operation than the current one,” Moerl remembered. “It produced about 10, 20% of what we’re producing now.”
Change in ownership
The beers were very different too, more like English ales than the current line-up of lager beers. Stingray became Caybrew in 2007 when the previous owners were bought out and the brewery has been owned by Dart since 2019.
Brewing in the Caribbean comes with its own set of challenges, of course, with the hot climate being one factor and another being creating a brewery from scratch rather than one with hundreds of years of history.
Changing beer tastes also have to be taken into account, as the main beer sold in the Cayman Islands 30 years ago was Heineken.
“A lot of people were used to the taste of Heineken, so when we launched Caybrew in 2007, everyone was like, ‘What is this?’” Moerl said. “It took more than half a year to convince people to try it as we knew that they’d like it.”
Caybrew Light came along because people wanted a lighter alcoholic lager and then the range expanded to include different styles, including its biggest-seller, session lager 345, and the more hoppy Island Hopper and Hopnosis, both of which started off as guest beers.
There have been a couple of initiatives which didn’t work out over the years – attempts to export to Florida floundered and some beers didn’t last long – but Caybrew is now well settled into its role in island life, making and selling more than a million cans a year. It even now has domestic competition in the form of newer, smaller rival 19-81 Brewery.
“It’s always good to have competitors and see what beers they come up with,” Moerl said.
Guest beers
Moerl and his fellow brewers take it in turns to come up with the guest beers every month, with the current offering being an English-style Island ESB at 4.8% ABV and a Belgian dark ale, Tetra Hedron, which comes in at a punchy 10.6% ABV.
So, how does Moerl feel as he celebrates his three decades in Cayman brewing?
“I feel great!” he said cheerfully. “I love Cayman and that’s why I’m still here.”
Things have changed significantly over the years, he adds, especially after Hurricane Ivan. “Overnight it went from a sleepy Caribbean island to a more corporate island,” he said.
“After Hurricane Ivan hit and destroyed almost all the island, it was rebuilt and a lot of foreign money came in, which created a whole corporate structure and the bigger developments you see now.”
Moerl pops back to Germany to see family and friends at least once a year and has travelled a bit around the Caribbean with his wife Virginia over the years, but not as much as he would have liked.
“There used to do a package trip to Costa Rica over the long Easter weekend which was such a great idea,” he sighed. “That needs to be brought back.”
For now, Moerl is looking forward to Saturday’s celebration.
“I’ve invited all my old colleagues over the years, so it will be lovely to see them again,” he said. “You know, I’ve worked for three different breweries in the Cayman Islands without moving at all.”
Celebrate 30 years of brewing with Andreas Moerl at the Cayman Islands Brewery on Saturday, 30 Aug. from 2pm to closing.
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