Craft beer in Bulgaria: Cohones Brewery

Published: February 6, 2023

During our summer in Sofia, Bulgarian microbreweries kept impressing us. Artisan beer is still a young phenomena in Bulgaria, but the level of enthusiasm is high, and things are changing rather quickly. In late august, we had a pleasure to visit Cohones Brewery as well as their taproom Sofia, and had great talks about craft beer culture, brewing and overall about making bold decisions in life.

Cohones is built on entrepreneurship and courage

The founder of Cohones, Mihail Durchev, started as a home-brewer, after falling for craft beer during his studies in Germany in late 2010’s. He is a lawyer by education, but found his calling in the world of craft beers and entrepreneurship. The idea of founding an actual brewery was born after some years of home-brewing and developing own beer recipes, and the planning phase started in 2017. Building a brewery was a bold move that ate all the savings and then some more, but Mihail had made his mind. He saw establishing a microbrewery as founding a startup company, as a scalable business with a lot of potential.

Bureaucracy, permissions and setting up the brewery took quite some time and nerves, and also testing and modifying the equipment took its time – starting with new brewing equipment is always a learning process. After almost two years of planning, building, waiting and trialing, the first Cohones beers were finally launched in the autumn of 2019. Since then, Cohones Brewery has been creating tasty beers and growing, eve though corona of course slowed the business down. When we visited in summer 2022, they were just in the process of updating the brewing equipment to a bit larger scale, and the new Paraguayan brewmaster Alex had just recently joined the team.

The mission of Cohones is, besides brewing delicious craft beers of course, to encourage people to be brave instead of being afraid of failure, and to encourage others to be bold and entrepreneurial, to think outside of the box. Oh and the name and logo of the brewery, translittered to Bulgarian language from Spanish word cojones, as you may have guessed already, reflects the attitude towards life and entrepreneurship – be bold, stay cocky.

Ballsy craft beers from Sofia

Cohones brews in an industrial area a few kilometers out of the city center of Sofia, and is actually almost a next door neighbor to Sofia Electric Brewing. The new brew house of 16hl is almost the double of the size of the previous brewing kettles, and the current monthly capacity of the brewery is around 12 000 liters.

The best place to taste Cohones craft beers is their taproom in Sofia downtown, called Cohones Bar. This centrally located pub with a small beer garden is a wonderful venue to try Cohones beers different styles, and also to meet with other craft beer enthusiasts, both local and from abroad.

Tasting Cohones beers

The beer selection of Cohones includes brews from light Pale Ales to strong Stouts and Fruit Beers. The first Cohones beer that came in the market back in 2019, was a nicely hoppy, refreshing American Pale Ale called Family Jewels. This lovely beer is still in production and has become the flagship brew of Cohones.

For the winter Cohones always brews a series of special Imperial Stouts, aged with different alcohols. We got to taste the Black to the Bones series from 2021, and oh boy those dark, strong beers were delicious! The latest edition of the series is called Balkan to the Bones, and it includes four Rakia Oak Aged Imperial Milk Stouts (rakia/rakija/rakiya is a fruit spirit from the Balkans, typically made of plums or grapes, but also from apricots, pears, cherries or raspberries).