Rauchbier
I have had some memorable experiences with beer, and some of the best have been with my wife, Elizabeth: drinking bitter and playing gin rummy at Spinnaker’s (she cheats!); smuggling bottles of Ballard Bitter onto the inter-island ferry in the San Juans; and simply watching her expression when she takes the first taste of my latest brewing experiment.
One of the most memorable moments was on a rare childless Easter weekend in a motel room in Astoria, Ore. Sitting by a window overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the mouth of the Columbia River, we ate dinner and shared a single bottle of Alaskan Smoked Porter given to us by beer writer Fred Eckhardt. I have never been able to find another bottle (at least one that wasn’t empty), and even visitors to Alaska report that the beer is frustratingly rare.
At one time a lot of beers undoubtedly had a smoky tinge. There are only a few ways to dry barley after it has been malted. Any wood used to heat the malt would have imparted some smokiness to the grain, which in turn would have added some smoke flavor and aroma to the beer. Given the rough edges early beers undoubtedly had, the smokiness may not have been particularly noticeable, and it’s unlikely that the smokiness was deliberate.
Few of these beers have survived changes in technology. But in the area of Germany surrounding the city of Bamberg, a few stubborn brewers have retained the style, kilning their malt over beech-wood fires.
The Bamberg brewers demonstrate the flexibility of smoked beers. The classic Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier (1.054 original gravity) is dark, rich, and smoky, brewed entirely from smoked malts. But paler versions are brewed with smaller portions of rauchmalz (smoked malt) included in a more “normal” grist. Years ago in Portland, Ore., Widmer Brewing Co., which shares a building with B Moloch restaurant, smoked a fraction of its malt in the restaurant’s brick oven and produced some experimental batches of a wonderful Rauchbier. The smoked malt gave the beer an intriguing, almost citric quality — very refreshing.
The Alaska Brewing & Bottling Co. in Juneau, Alaska, smokes all the malt (including caramel and roasted) for its smoked porter over alder fires. They smoke it down the street in a salmon processing plant. The beer is rich and warm, the smoke adding just the right level of complexity and mystery.
Smoked beers cry out for food to accompany them, especially foods that also have been smoked (salmon, cheese, meat). Perhaps cigar aficionados would find them a good match for their vile (oops, strike that), pernicious (better cut that, too), fragrant habit.
There are two distinct approaches that can be taken to produce a Rauchbier. The “purest” is to smoke the grain during the malting process, as the Bamberg approach demonstrates. The barley (or in the case of one unusual Polish beer, the wheat) is soaked thoroughly in cold water, then allowed to germinate. When this process is well along, the green malt is kilned, or gently and thoroughly dried. Rauchmalz are created by kilning with the heat of smoldering wood, usually beech.
The extremely ambitious homebrewer can, of course, malt and dry barley from scratch, but German maltsters provide delicious rauchmalz, available from well-stocked homebrew supply stores. Rauchmalz may be substituted for all the lager malt in a basic lager recipe; märzenbiers, with their slightly higher original gravity, seem particularly appropriate.
Beech, of course, isn’t the only wood that can be used (hickory beer?), and smoke doesn’t even need wood. Scotch whiskey begins as a sort of beer (before distillation), and malt, kilned over peat fires, is an essential ingredient. Peat-smoked malts are available to the homebrewer and have been used in some commercial beers. Samuel Adams Scotch Ale is widely available and contains peated malt. An unusual French lager, Adelscott Smoked Malt Liquor, has a delicate smokiness from peated malt, and beer critic Michael Jackson reports on a couple of Seattle brewers who have used peat to special effect in barleywine and Scotch ale.
Peated malt, however, should be used with plenty of caution. More than one homebrewer has created undrinkable “Scotch” ales, and a brewpub produced a version (with a conservative addition of 5 percent peated malt) that it not only couldn’t sell but couldn’t give away. Much of the same effect could have been achieved by pouring kerosene into the serving tank.
The second approach, used by Alaska Brewing and Widmer Brewing among other craft breweries, is to smoke the finished malt, either all (pale, caramel, and roasted) or some portion of it. Anyone with a home smoker and some wood chips can run any number of experiments, varying the types of wood (ah, here’s that hickory-smoked ale, just right with a pulled pork sandwich), and the proportions of malt. Or consider a Chinese tradition in which duck is smoked over coals covered with black tea. The possibilities are truly endless.
One other method of adding a smoky taste to beer is a radical departure, indeed. At one time kettles were made of wood rather than copper or steel and impossible to fire directly. Some breweries boiled the wort by heating stones in a separate fire and then tossing the rocks into the kettle, bringing the wort to a boil, and caramelizing wort sugars on the stone’s surface. One German brewery reintroduced stone beer; makers of Rauchenfels Steinbier not only add hot rocks to the wort but later introduce them into the lagering tanks, where the caramelized sugars are slowly re-dissolved into the beer.
In the days when Chuck Skypeck, vice president and head brewer of Bosco’s brewpubs in Tennessee, homebrewed, he and a friend duplicated the Rauchenfels method. They heated quartzite stones and added them to the kettle and later to the secondary fermenter. Skypeck eventually took the technique to another level, brewing his Flaming Stone beer at two Bosco’s brewpubs. The stones are now heated in the brick pizza ovens, and Skypeck usually doesn’t reintroduce the rocks to the fermenters but allows the caramelized sugar to build up over successive batches, eventually producing one intense Rauchbier.
Just as there are a number of approaches to smoking beer, there are no hard rules about the brewing process. Schlenkerla, like other beers in the Bamberg region, is a lager. But steinbiers are top-fermented (appropriate to a style that pre-dates lager yeast). Skypeck’s research into stone brewing produced a method that had survived into this century, in which the hot stones (and the hops, which acted as a filter bed) were added to the mash. The wort was never boiled separately.
American craft brewers generally follow their standard brewing practices for their rauchbiers, with single-step infusion mashes and top-fermentation.
Smoked beers can be golden or dark, dry or rich. Seemingly, any wort is a suitable base, and the brewer can adjust the level of smokiness according to taste. German rauchmalz has a distinct but not overpowering smoke flavor and can substitute for all of a beer’s base malt. Brewers experimenting with home smokers might want to taste their malt side by side with some Rauchmalz before adding it to a brew. Some very intense smoked malts might best be used at levels of 15 to 20 percent initially or in particularly rich beers.
Hopping rates, too, depend on the brewer’s discretion, but I would tend to start conservatively so the bitterness or hoppiness doesn’t conflict with the smokiness.
Steinbier
(5 gallons, extract)
Ingredients:
• 6.6 lbs. German light malt extract
• 1 lb. extra light dry malt extract
• 1.5 oz. Mt. Hood hops (3.2% alpha acid), for 60 min.
• 3 lbs. metamorphic rock (such as quartzite), scrubbed, boiled, and thoroughly rinsed
• 1-qt. starter of Wyeast 1007
Step-By-Step:
You will need a kettle large enough to boil 6 gals. of wort, a very hot fire, and a stainless steel basket or colander for the stones (something that won’t completely warp when heated). Best results are achieved by keeping the stones out of the firewood, on a grate over the heat. Some sort of bellows or fan should be used to get the flames as hot as possible.
Dissolve the malt extract in hot water, then bring to a boil. Add the hot stones after 30 minutes, and leave them in the wort until the intense steaming has died down. Remove the stones from the wort, allow them to cool. Place them in sanitary containers and store in the freezer. Meanwhile, add the hops to the wort and continue boiling for a total of 90 minutes.
Cool the wort (place the kettle in a large sink and run cold water around it) to 70° to 80° F. Transfer to a fermenter, aerate thoroughly, and pitch yeast. Follow normal fermentation procedures, but rack into a wide-mouth fermenter (a soda-pop keg is ideal) for secondary fermentation. Add the rocks to the fermenter, and keep them there for several weeks. Follow normal kegging or bottling procedures. You can re-use the stones for your next steinbier.
OG = 1.052
Rauchbier
(5 gallons, all-grain)
This recipe is from Jim Busch, a fine amateur brewer with one foot well in the professional door. He suggests that if the lagering schedule is too difficult to achieve, a clean substitution can be made with Wyeast 1056 and a primary fermentation at 62° to 64° F.
Ingredients:
• 9.75 lbs. Weyermann rauchmalz
• 1/3 lb. Belgian cara-Vienne malt
• 1/3 lb. Belgian cara-Munich malt
• 1.25 oz. of German Northern Brewer hops (7.2% alpha acid), for 60 min.
• 1-gal. starter of lager yeast (Yeast Lab YCKC L31)
Step-By-Step:
Mash in at 131° F for 15 minutes. Pull decoction and rest decoction at 152° F for 20 minutes before boiling for 20 minutes. Combine mashes and hold at 152° F for 30 minutes. Raise to 158° F for 15 minutes. Raise to 170° F for mash-out, and lauter.
Add hops and boil for 30 minutes. Boil 60 minutes more. Cool to 48° F, aerate thoroughly, and add yeast. Ferment for seven to 10 days. Rack to secondary and lager at 31° F for five to six weeks. Follow normal kegging or bottling procedures.
OG = 1.052
