Like Sweden, Finland and Denmark? Beer was a "big thing" prior to the industrial age.
Why ? You cant move your army without beer. (Hell, you could not travel at all.)
And Sweden used to be a superpower you know. (Yes, it's pretty funny when you think about it.) Drinking from a well was punished by death, no exeptions.
Unfortunately the styles that was brewed have been lost to time. The only remnant afaik is sahti.
A more recent classic swedish beer is Sweet Porter.
faber you might want to read up on scandinavia and beer in general, you'd be surprised.
I studied Old Norse in grad school (among other things). Pretty cool stuff.
There was something called "ol", and its composition/recipe is completely unknown. Attempts to recreate it are based on analogy to other early medieval ales from northern England or Ireland--Vikings were great assimilators, when they found something they liked. It's very likely that Scandinavian Norsemen got their ale from Norse communities in these places. We also know that farming in (early) medieval Scandinavia was pretty poor (one of the reasons they kept building trade empires, whether other peoples liked it or not
) Not a lot of extra grain of any kind lying around, if any in those days.
And on back-analogy from Scandinavian farmhouse ales, ancient "ol" probably had a lot of assorted berries and leaves in its recipe, tasting more like barley tea with acrid berries and vegetal bitterness: an acquired taste! Yet, like beers anywhere, it preserved nutritional value over the winter in a form easy to store and ship. But archaeologists haven't found any definitive proof of what Norse ale would have been, and there is nothing specific in the literary record. (Unless something's been found in the last few years...). We know they imported mead, too.
Yup, Sweden used to be a superpower up till about two hundred years ago... not hard to believe! It was the legacy of the Norse/Viking states that coalesced into a kingdom. That trade empire that brought in more grain/barley and up-to-date brewing practices, AFAIK (though, honestly, my knowledge of history after AD 1100 is not so good).
If you have a ref about the evolution of post-Viking Scando-beers, I'd love to read about it.