Brothers are a great thing: you can steal horses with them, you can play a game of football or wrestle with them, you can compete with them and have an outlet for excess energy. And brothers are also very useful in adulthood because you always have someone by your side that you can rely on blindly. There are three brothers in the Digwa family and they work together.
The adventure began with Christoph and Stephan Digwa. The two of them made their first attempts at brewing more than ten years ago. At the time, they didn't have their own brewery, so they had to make do with their grandmother's preserving pot. The first batches were made in the laundry room and the duo were hooked. After two years, the brothers had gained enough experience and recipes to take the leap into commercial brewing. They chose the Rethmar estate as the location for their first brewery. Because Stephan is a trained brewing engineer, they were able to put together and build the entire system themselves. In this way, they learned their brewing system down to the smallest detail and were able to handle its peculiarities wonderfully right from the start. While the brewhouse was still being built, the brothers were already networking and landing valuable orders that catapulted them into the beer market with immediate effect. Brewing could begin and the third brother also got into the business!
The unusual name of the estate brewery goes back to the Middle Ages. At that time, the citizens and farmers of the region fought for their rights. One of the freedoms fought for was the right to brew tax-free. In the Great Free, the area between Hanover, Hildesheim and Peine, people were allowed to brew without paying taxes. Today, the brewery unfortunately still has to pay taxes on its goods, but the name remained. Das Freie still swears by traditional craftsmanship and carries out every step from the selection of regional raw materials to bottling itself. The team knows all of the suppliers and uses only the highest quality ingredients for their beer. In order to get the most out of the fruits of their homeland, every component is used according to the ecological circular flow principle: after the brewing process, the spent grain serves as food for the estate's lambs and is used for fertilization, and the yeast is used in the kitchen. With care, dedication and sustainability, the brewery has created a wide range of special brews and is now an integral part of the German beer market.
Gutshof Rethmar Betriebsgesellschaft mbH
Gutsstraße 16
31319 Sehnde
Deutschland 
