Reykjavík Grapevine - 19.06.2015, Síða 60

Breakfast
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K-Bar is a gastro pub with a Korean, Japa-
nese, Icelandic inspired kitchen and quirky
cocktails. We have eight icelandic craft
beers on tap and over 100 types in bottles.
Open all day from breakfast to late night
snacks. K-Bar is located at Laugavegur 74.
Ask your reception how to find us or find us
on facebook.com/kbarreykjavik
FOOD
FOR THE SOUL
Bringing your own din-
ner to the table
The Erpsstaðir creamery and the adjacent
farm are managed by Þorgrímur Einar
Guðbjartsson and his wife Helga Elínborg
Guðmundsdóttir. It’s a small operation,
with only about 60 dairy cows and a pet-
ting zoo’s worth of horses, sheep, rabbits,
cats, dogs, and pigs to complement the
cattle. When we arrived, we saw rabbits
scatter underneath the plastic hay bales.
Inside we came just in time to see the
calves get fed.
The cowshed was neatly organized
and clean but we were hit by the familiar
smell of three distinct cow excretions,
only the whitest of which is commonly
considered bankable.
Erpsstaðir are about as self-sustained
as it gets, using a private source of geo-
thermal water to heat up the milk for the
calves before feeding them. The farm is
small and produces about 1100 litres a
day, a portion of which goes towards an
ambitious and independent production of
a wide range of dairy products.
I wonder if it isn’t rare to see farm-
ers launching an advanced dairy product
operation like this, as almost all milk pro-
duced in Iceland is sent to the dairy con-
glomerate Mjólkursamsalan (MS) which
operates a de facto monopoly in Iceland.
Þorgrímur is not overly concerned
with the reach of big business or govern-
ment.
“Dairy is an obsession for me,” he says.
“It’s been predominantly a private enter-
prise as I feel you shouldn’t always have
to wait for the government to step in. I
saw that the valley needed some more
entertainment and rest stops for people
traveling through and people were always
asking the county to start something. You
don’t need to always wait for others to
bring dinner to the table. And as I am edu-
cated as a dairy technician, this seemed
like the most natural way to go. Had I
been an electrician, I probably would
have started something to do with that.”
In the loving arms of
robots
For a city slicker like myself it was a bit
of a jolt to see just how automated dairy
farms had become, watching cows line up
before the milking robot, jostling to have
that dairy-craving Optimus Prime pull at
their nipples.
The creamery and the small kiosk
are located in a separate section of the
cowshed. If you’re imagining some rus-
tic farmstead then think again. Rick-
ety wooden structures and ramshackle
charm went out of fashion with cholera.
Aside from the computerized milking
equipment for the cows, the creamery
itself is tightly organized and sterilized.
People complain that we haven’t caught
up with the Space Age future predicted in
the 20th century but when a small inde-
pendent creamery looks like it could host
Sigourney Weaver prying a facehugger off
one of her crewmembers, I think we’ve
arrived.
Þorgrímur gestures proudly towards
what he called his “shit robot,” an auto-
mated manure-collecting machine which
hovered in and out of view on the cattle
floor: “It’s all mechanized now with the
voluntary milking system, although the
last dairy farmer to milk cows manually
actually stopped only four months ago,”
he says. “As recently as sixty years ago the
majority of all milking in Iceland would
have been done manually. We were over
thirty years behind milk farmers in Amer-
ica, where the first-generation commer-
cial milking machines had become the
norm in the 1920s.”
Pine-on-pine cabin and
live births
Þorgrímur and Helga also offer accom-
modations for interested visitors, which
we decided to check out. We stayed in a
proper Icelandic summer cabin: it looked
like a wooden bomb had gone off in there,
with every nook and cranny covered with
pine. The showers had low water pres-
sure, the board games on the table had
pieces missing Icelandic teen romance
novels from the 80s stocked the shelves,
the TV reception was unstable, and the
view was beautiful, over the rolling hills
dotted with newly-planted pine trees
soon to join their cabin brothers and sis-
ters—in other words, “perfection.” And
of course no Icelandic cabin is complete
The Erpsstaðir creamery has been building up a steady reputation for artisan ice
cream and a range of other small-batch dairy products. The farm is located in middle
of a small valley in the west of Iceland. Together, the west of Iceland and the Westf-
jords kind of resemble a giant moose punching westwards—Erpsstaðir would be right
on the moose’s shoulder. The fastest way there, coming from Reykjavík, is to take the
Brattabrekka side road, which connects Dalasýsla and Borgarfjörður.
Photos Provided by Erpsstaðir
Words Ragnar Egilsson
A Visit To The Erpsstaðir
Ice Cream Valley
20
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 8 — 2015