Brewing Rauchbier
TroubleShooting
Dave Hixson - Manchester, Missouri asks,
During a recent stop at Springfield Brewing Company I tried the Rauchbier. I had never tried this style before and was a little scared of the smoke but I really enjoyed it and had three. I would like to try my hand at something similar and would appreciate any tips you could give me. I don’t want it too smoky so I am wondering how much smoked malt to use. I have never brewed a lager so was thinking of possibly using a Kölsch yeast to get a cleaner profile.
Thanks for asking about our “I Wanna Rauch” rauchbier! This beer was brewed in collaboration with Keith Wallis as a Pro-Am entry at the Great American Beer Festival. Keith’s “I Wanna Rauch” was the Best of Show winner of the “To Helles and Bock” competition judged in March 2014 at The Home Brewery in Ozark, Missouri. As a result we worked with him to brew this tasty lager. This is our second Pro-Am beer and both have been brewed using Keith’s recipes. This year was especially exciting for Keith and the SBC brewing team as we won a bronze for our entry, out of a total of 89 beers.
The key to brewing a good rauchbier is balance between the smoked malt and the other beer flavors. While this beer is traditionally brewed with lager yeast, I think a great rauchbier could be brewed using a very clean ale strain, and your suggestion of using Kölsch yeast sounds like a viable plan. The only problem that this type of yeast may cause is cloudiness in the finished beer because these strains have low to medium flocculation properties.
In our beer we used our house lager strain and fermented the beer at 54 °F (12 °C) until the gravity was down to 1.016. At this point we capped our fermenter with a pressure relief valve and allowed the tank pressure to increase to 15 psig. We typically cool our lagers to 38 °F (3 °C) four days after the gravity stops dropping and hold the beer at this temperature for about 10 days and then cool to 32 °F (0 °C) for a few days before filtration. The same cooling curve was used for this beer, and we skipped our normal filtration step since Keith’s homebrew was not filtered. When we first put the beer on draught it was a little cloudy but cleared with time. I believe that if we had filtered this beer some of the body and mouthfeel would have been altered in a way that would have detracted from the finished beer.
The star of the show with this style is the smoked malt. Keith’s recipe derived about 25% of the extract from Weyermann beechwood-smoked barley malt, about 20% from Weyermann Munich I, about 15% from CaraMunich® I malts and the balance from American pale 2-row malt. The original gravity weighed in at 1.056, the final gravity was 1.010 and the beer was balanced with about 25 IBU of hop bitterness from a single addition of Northern Brewer added 15 minutes into the 75-minute boil. Some rauchbiers I have tasted brewed in the US have a notable bitter note. This beer really had a terrific balance with the hops hanging in the background playing a crucial supporting role and letting the malt characters really shine.
