All about KVEIK at the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020

This is part 5 in a series covering the brewing of farmhouse ale during the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020.

Session 1: https://youtu.be/eTDX6fds7EU  
Session 2: https://youtu.be/LNIbYj_J2QI

Saturday, October 10^th, the brewing world was treated to a special event: the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020. First happening in 2016, the festival quickly grew a fine reputation for the place to be for anyone interested in farmhouse brewing and the phenomenon of raw ales. In 2020, instead of canceling, the festival went virtual and for a whopping 12 hours anyone interested could follow the brewing of three different styles of farmhouse beer at three different farmhouse locations online.

During the 12 hours, three farmhouse ales were brewed using three slightly different processes. Hornindal brewed a raw ale, Stjørdal a 1-hour boil ale, and Voss brewed a 4-hour boil ale. Each group of brewers did things in a slightly different way: as they said themselves, where you have 50 brewers, you will find 50 different methods, and each brewer thinks their beer is the best! I spent a wonderful Saturday glued to the TV watching these different brewers chat about beer, while taking copious notes. The videos of the live festival are by now released on YouTube and to make navigating the two 6-hour sessions a little less overwhelming, I have annotated each process, step by step, as they appear in the videos (the times listed can be plus or minus a few seconds).

This is the final blogpost in the series and I left the best for last: kveik! This part covers the transcripts of the general questions regarding kveik, as well as the yeasty highlights during the brewing of the three farmhouse ales. I will also include a brief intro for the kveik-specific yeast presentations, as well as links to further resources, including the Farmhouse Kveik Registry, and research, historical background and practical techniques by Lars Marius Garshol of Larsblog and Mika Laitinen of Nordic Brewing.

The YouTube screen grabs are used with permission from the festival organizers.

Part 5: All about the KVEIK!

During downtime Lars Marius Garshol and Amund Polden Arnesen take questions from the live chat from the general public, including several about kveik.

2:43:20 (session 1) How does kveik react to aging, both barrel aging like Lambic, and bottle aging, or other types of aging like stainless steel, concrete etc?

Amund: “We have a brewery in Oslo that kind of does this so I will answer this question from our perspective. We have a house culture, which is a mix of three Hornindal kveiks at this moment, and we basically use this to make sour beer. The guys in Hornindal? They don’t want to make sour beer. We are basically going against tradition. And the reason why this works is that there are bacteria in some of these kveik cultures especially lactobacillus and we primary ferment to get the fruitiness from the yeast fermentation, and then we age to get the sourness. The longer you wait, especially in an oak barrel, the beer will sour. I have had Hornindal beer which was over a year old, from a bottle, that wasn’t sour. I guess there is a lot of influence on how you brew if the beer turns sour or not. But it is definitely possible to make sour beer with these kveiks, and it is also possible to make un-sour beer. This Lactobacillus seems quite sensitive to hops so we have done some whiskey wash brewing where we do not add hops and we measure the pH and it drops quite quickly, but when we use hops and make a hop tea or mash hop, it takes longer for the beer to go sour. It usually goes not as sour, but it goes sour. This is a complex question and it depends on which kveik you are using. If you are using a Voss kveik for instance, chances are less that it will go sour. But there is a lot of factors here, depending on how you brew, what you age it in, and how lucky you are, I guess.”

2:51:36 (session 1) What do we think about using kveik in mead and cider?

Lars Marius: “Kveik, you saw what Stig in Hornindal was preparing to do: he‘s got the first wort that came out of the mash and he wants to put the yeast in to that to grow. This yeast is really used to having lots of nutrients, when it grows but also when it ferments. Analysis by microbiologists shows that it has really high expectations for how much free amino nitrogen, as it is called, it needs, probably also other things. Experiences with fermenting mead and cider is that sometimes it works fine and there are no problems and other times it almost won’t start at all or it stops before you are finished fermenting. So, if you are going to ferment mead or cider with kveik – which you can do, it works just great – it is a really good idea to add yeast nutrient. And the same goes if your wort is not very strong. In Hornindal the beer is about 6.5% to 8.5% and in Voss, Sigmund Gjernes makes 8.5% but the guys in Dyrvedalen make 11-12% beer. This yeast is not used to wort that doesn’t have a lot of sugar and other nutrients in it. In fact, if you are fermenting relatively weak beer it may also be a good idea to add nutrients. There is not really any strong reason not to add nutrients, let’s put it that way.”

2:53:38 (session 1) Is there a difference between a boiled word and a raw wort, in that sense?

Lars Marius: “There probably is a difference, unfortunately, we don’t know that much about it. I don’t know if anybody has ever studied the chemical composition of raw wort. Obviously, it must have more protein, for example. Does it make a difference to the yeast? We don’t really know. We need some scientist to finally figure that one out!”

5:46:58 (session 1) What do you think about kveik being sold all over the world?

Stig: “It’s OK with me. I think if you should have the original kveik, you have to brew it in the original way. Otherwise, it would be weaker and weaker every time you use it. I think it is OK, I think the interest in it will be bigger when people can use it. People are interested in it all over the world, and then, I think we cannot just keep it for ourselves. I don’t think that is the right way. I think it is better people can try it, and if they are really interested maybe they will try [and brew] it original!”

5:48:17 (session 1)  Do you think the commercial kveiks, the ones they sell from the labs, are different from the ones you are using in any way?

Stig: “I think they are, and will be more and more different because we don’t do it [brew] in conditions where we have control over everything. You have seen how we do it today and I guess there will always be, maybe, a flower or two in, we don’t have control [over that] sometimes. But I think that is the strength of the kveik, we don’t have the same temperature, not the same sweetness, I think that is why kveik can handle so many different worts with different sweetness and different temperatures.”

5:49:40 (session 1) How do you dry the yeast?

Stig: “We usually put it on paper, a baking sheet or whatever, and put it on a dry slightly warm place for two weeks or so and then it is [dry]. I don’t think it is smart to have it too hot, too long, because then I think you can kill it. But it has to be warm, and dry. And then, 14 days, three weeks, then I think you can freeze it.” Lars Marius: “Yes, you put it in the freezer in a plastic bag, right. This thing with it being too hot, in Hardanger, Jacob, he puts aluminum foil over one of these shoe racks that have heating in them to dry the shoes. And if he puts on [level] 1 then the yeast will dry quite quickly. And if he puts it on 2 then he kills the yeast. When we were brewing there for Norwegian TV he had put it on 2 and the beer didn’t ferment [both chuckle]. Stig: as I say, there are many different ways to do it.”

(random note) Was wort chilled?

Traditional farmhouse brewers in modern times use home-made modern immersion wort chillers and (home-made) milk container collar chillers. Metal milk containers were popular to use for wort, and as milk needed to be cooled down rapidly just like wort, its use and already available equipment lend itself well to the farmhouse brewing tradition. Perhaps earlier it was placed in cold stream. Whichever way, the faster the wort is cooled, the safer it will be for the yeast. Kveik is a fast and hot ferment, it will really quickly make alcohol and then beat the competition. At first, hot wort will real quickly drop in temperature, but the last wait is the longest. With the high pitching temperatures of kveik that last bit is quicker: the brewer doesn’t have to wait as long to pitch as with normal yeasts.

4:00 (session 2) How are pitching rates determined in traditional brews?

Lars Marius: “You saw how they did it, right? They just take a certain amount of [dried kveik] chips, or a certain amount of liquid kveik and add that. There isn’t any measurement or anything like that. Stig for example will do the “mariaue” [yeast starter; see session 1 at 5:23:36 – 5:36:06] and use that to check his yeast is fresh and so on. Sigmund, as I understood it, he usually looks at the yeast, he opens the jar and if there is a lot of CO2 and it seems like it is fresh, he will just use it. If not, he will make a starter. They kind of play it by ear, see how the yeast is doing and determine it that way. We don’t really measure very much. Sigmund will typically pitch half his jar for example, and then, if it does not start, he will pitch the other half, as well. Tests on under and over pitching have been done by Escarpment Labs. They did a poster presentation at one of the brewing conferences where they looked at this, and what they found was that the Voss and Hornindal kveiks give more aroma if you under pitch them and less aroma if you overpitch but they found that for some of the other kveiks that was not the case. That’s really quite interesting. There isn’t a single rule that works for all the kveiks, basically.”

Amund: “From testing at the brewery, we experienced that the temperature is more important than the pitching. Even when we were under pitching less than the Escarpment Lab recommendation, we saw that as long as we had the high enough temperature on a 1,000-liter batch it did not matter. The temperature turned out to be more important than the pitch rate, for us. This was with our house culture, which is a mix between three Hornindal kveiks. We ferment 1,000 liters without temperature control so we have to pitch at a lower temperature in the summer months and a higher temperature when winter becomes strong. The brewery is from 18°C in the winter to 23-24°C in the summer. Of course, there is a big of a longer lag phase before the fermentation vessel has enough temperature to rise by itself. If it is colder in the environment, we have to pitch higher to have more temperature [buffer] to go down on.”

Escarpment Labs on the impact of pitch rate on kveik ferments

5:04:05 (session 2) Have you ever tried to combine Brettanomyces yeast with the kveik?

Amund: “Yes, we do that quite often. The way it usually goes is that primary ferment with our house culture, which is Hornindal kveik based, and then we put it into oak barrels or oak tanks which contain Brettanomyces yeast among other stuff. And what we see is that, especially the fruity ester profiles that the kveik make, get pretty much picked apart by the Brettanomyces and you get a more familiar Brettanomyces [?]. It seems that these huge ester profiles that the kveiks are famous for don’t really survive Brettanomyces over time. In that way, it is not really recognizable as a kveik” [he gives more detail, as well on his Brewery].

5:25:10 (session 2) Hornindal kveik had bacteria, does that contribute to taste?

Lars Marius is not sure, there has not been any research in that area. There are specialists working with brewing bacteria, like Lactobacillus, but in isolation, not as a mix working together.

5:31:58 (session 2) What does Sigmund know about the history of the kveik he has?

Lars Marius: “He got kveik from a neighbor when he moved to the farm where he lives now and started brewing there. That kveik apparently came from Bordalen but then he mixed in kveik from the family farm Gjernes and at Gjernes they used to get the kveik from the farm Veka in Dyrvedalen (I don’t know exactly who lived there at Veka so that is a hole in my research, I’ll try to find that out later). It is interesting, what he said was kind of the summary to all of this, kveik has forever been traveling around, circulating from person to person.”

5:35:00 (session 2) Is there a limit to how long a raw ale can be stored, apart from the normal aging issues?

Lars Marius: “Many people have said that long-term storage of raw ale does not work, but he has stored raw ale for six months and it kept going getting better, slowly souring and funking up. At the festival, I think last year 2019, Ståle served us his beer he brewed for the festival the year before. It was perfectly fine, normal storage issues but otherwise just great. And then there was the home brewing competition […] there was only modern beers in the home brewing competition. But the locals knew I had written this book about Norwegian farmhouse ales so they asked me to say some words and, I could not help it, I had to tell them I felt it really weird they did not have any of their own beers, all they had were copies of foreign stuff. And then when I sat down, the guy next to me turned around and said, would you like to try some raw ale? He had this huge plastic canister with beer that was two years old and it was fine. Different but fine. What is the limit? I don’t know.”

5:38:06 (session 2) Were any of the beers in the [Kornol Festival] competition carbonated?
Lars Marius: Three were carbonated, one made third place, but other than that, no – generally no.

(random note) Is the Oslo strain a real kveik?
The Oslo strain is a single strain. It is isolated from a kveik house culture, by Bootleg Biology and has very clean flavors. It was isolated from the house culture at Eik & Tid (Amund’s brewery), and is genetically in t kveik family.

Brewing the farmhouse brews
During the Norsk Kornølfestival the volunteer brewers brewed three different farmhouse ales. Especially Stig Seljeset from Hornindal shared valuable practical information on how to work with kveik. It was interesting to observe how matter of fact the brewers treated their kveik, as well as with obvious reverence; clearly kveik has a deep connection with the Nordic farmhouse brewing culture.

Links to the blogposts of the farmhouse ales brewed during the Norsk Kornølfestival.

• Stig Seljeset and friends brew a traditional Hornindal kornøl as part of the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020; October 26, 2020
• Kjetil Dale and friends brew vossaøl as part of the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020; October 30, 2020  
• Roar Sandodden and friends brew a stjørdalsøl as part of the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020; October 27, 2020  

Brew #1: Hornindal
Stig Seljeset and friends demonstrate the brewing of a traditional Hornindal kornøl.

1:33:17 (session 1) How many generations of Hornindal or Voss kveik can I cultivate before is unviable or produces off flavors? Can it be harvested indefinitely? Stig: “When we harvest the kveik we dry it and stick it in the freezer and then you can have it for… I don’t know… I have been using kveik that is twenty-five thirty years old. Which has been in the freezer. If you dry it well, I think it will stay for a very long time.”

Does it sometimes happen that you have a bad year with the beer and that you don’t use the kveik from that year? Stig: “I only take care of the kveik when I have good beer, because we have so plenty of it, and friends, we just harvest the kveik when we have good beer.”

2:19:34 – 2:42:21 (session 1) At the beginning of the lautering stage the brewer started a kveik bowl by drawing out some hot wort in a kveik bowl to cool it down. He uses a large glass bowl as it will be put near the fire to keep warm, no more than half full to leave room for expansion.

2:35:44 (session 1) About the pronunciation of kveik: is there a definitive pronunciation of kveik? From Norwegians alone I’ve heard “kveik, kvie-ke, kvy-kee.” Most UK and North American people have opted for “kvy-kee.” Basically, how do you pronounce kveik?

Stig: “We just say kweik (with a slight rounding of the v, almost but not quite like a w). Lars Marius: You have a slightly different pronunciation than I do as I am from the east side of the country, I say kwejk (more emphasis on the “ei,” almost like an “ej”). But I don’t know that an English speaker would even notice. Stig: I myself, my language is very much like the old people here in Hornindal were talking, so I think the way I pronounce it is like they did for seventy years ago.” (2:36:49 for a loud and clear pronunciation)

Lars Marius: “When there is a vowel after the final “k” that’s a grammatical inflection. People say “kveika”, but it means “the kveik”. So it’s easy to be fooled here.”

4:20:05 – 4:31:09 (session 1) Stig placed the kveik bowl near the fire, guided by experience, and moves it closer or further away depending on how he gauges the temperature. Hornindal shows a beautiful traditional beer bowl with the text “you are welcome to the beer” around the rim in which the dried kveik flakes are stored. When the kveik wort reaches 29°C, they usually look for between 28-32/34°C, the kveik flakes are shaken into this wort. A bit cooler does not matter too much right now, but when added to the beer wort it should be 30-32°C as then it would start to ferment quicker.

Kveik raises the temperatures several degrees after pitching, from 29°C to 42.5°C. Natural high krausen occurs at 42.5°C and kveik keeps fermenting quite vigorously for a while after high krausen. Ferment in a good insulated fermenter to try and maintain the high temperatures so they do not go down to quickly to support this vigorous ferment (this is what makes kveik ferment so fast).

5:23:36 – 5:36:06 (session 1) Hornindal is congratulating the yeast starter, regionally called the “mariaue,” as it has “really done a good job, it is all foamy.” The kveik starter is 32°C and they are ready to put it all in the “gil,” here meaning a fermenter. They normally have the fermenter in the basement as it is warmer there, but they found down there they have no video, so for the sake of the festival the “gil” is set up in the garage. The fermenter needed some insulation as otherwise the kveik would not be warm enough.

And then it is time for the Yeast Scream! [5:27:30]

“We have done the brewing, now it is up to the kveik to do the rest of the job. We have to wait 40 to 48 hours and then we will know how it is.”

Brew #1: Hornindal

Brew #2: stjørdalsøl

There is a traditional kveik ring hanging indoors, obviously used before and setting the stage nicely. Stjørdal saves kveik only from good beer, traditionally dried yeast was stored in bags, rings, sticks, but now it is stored in freezer where it stays good forever. The locals all switched to bakers yeast, a store bought yeast, as they live in a humid area close to the fjord and they find it hard to save yeast.

Read more on traditional Norwegian bakers yeast, often sold as a solid block wrapped in parchment paper, at Lars Marius Garshol’s blogpost “Does bread yeast exist?” (2020)

And then there is the “most important part of brewing”: the Yeast Scream! (4:31:40)

To quote Roar: “many dark forces wanting to destroy our beer, the peoples that dwells below. So, we don’t dare to… don’t do it. Ready? SCREAM!!!… and skål!”

Brew #2: Stjørdal

Brew #3: vossaøl
5:17:58 – 5:46:38 (session 2; with some sound issues) The yeast is kept as a slurry in a rubber-ring jar. He draws the yeast from the bottom of the fermenter and stores it in the cold cellar; with its stone walls and earth temperatures, he been able to repitch it for several brews. He pitches the whole jar into the three buckets – he does not think kveik can be over-pitched: “it’s kveik!”

But before pitching he first takes a sip of it, to make sure it is fresh.

Lars Marius: “Is it customary to do the kauking (yelling) here in Voss?” “No… we never do that in Voss…[giggle]” Brewer: “We don’t do it every time, but sometimes we do it, in secret, if we are alone: then we may scream some black metal tunes into the beer! [laughing] Makes the beer extra good, and evil!” Another: “And that is the purpose of the beer!”

5:43:08 (session 2) Black Metal yeast scream!
Can you make out what he tells the kveik?

Brew #3: Voss

But wait, there is more!
Presentations on Kveik

In the downtime between the three different brews, which could take from 6 to 12 hours depending on the recipe, the festival scheduled several talks and presentations. The following should give you a general idea of what was discussed, where to go to see the full talk, and how to download their PowerPoint presentations.

2:46:43 – 2:50:18 (session 1) Lars Marius Garshol talks about Looking for yeast in Telemark (see image).
He brought back samples but due to Covid they have not been tested yet, so it is not clear yet what type of yeast it is. Lars Marius has tracked down all of the farmhouse yeasts he had heard about, including their origin stories, but as of yet there is no progress on the analysis.

29:04 (session 2) Traditional beers as a source of new yeast biodiversity
Mohammed Tawfeeq is a student at the Kevin Verstrepen lab at the University of Leuven which published the Gallone 2016 paper, showing that brewer’s yeast is divided into two major genetic families, called Beer 1 and Beer 2. Tawfeeq discusses his project where he characterized and compared 26 different farmhouse yeast cultures of a total of 1250 strains to typical ale yeast strains. The fermentation was done in common industrial conditions and in kveik conditions. The fermentation performance, as well as its metabolites and the tolerance toward different stressors (temperature, ethanol, sugar and salt) were tested to investigate the diversity of the farmhouse yeasts. More.

Link to the PowerPoint presentation
Press <tawfeeq-2020> to open the PDF of his PowerPoint, or the <Last ned> button to download the PDF directly.

2:30:00 (session 2) Beyond Kveik: 3 Unexplored Hotspots for Heirloom Brewing Yeasts
Martin Thibault has been seeking out farmhouse brewers all over the world and writes about his experiences. He finds traditional farmhouse beer cultures thrive to this day, hiding in plain sight from the Western world. Over the years, Thibault has visited farmhouse brewers in Lithuania, Norway, Estonia, Finland, Peru, Bolivia, Bhutan, and Ethiopia. Although their ingredients and recipes vary from ours, one thing unites these three hotspots with Norway’s own deeply-rooted brewing culture: they each have unfathomable quantities of their own heirloom yeast blends. More.

Martin Thibault has a blog where he writes about farmhouse brewing (in French).

Talk by Martin Thibault

Link to the PowerPoint presentation
Press <martin-thibault-talk-2020> to open the PDF of his PowerPoint, or the <Last ned> button to download the PDF directly.

Further information on kveik
There are myriad websites, blogs and YouTube videos discussing the performance of kveik in modern beers and how to use it. For this blog I only listed those with direct links to traditional farmhouse brewing, which pretty much limited the playing field to the blogs of Lars Marius Garshol, Larsblog, and Mika Laitinen, Nordic Brewing. Garshol also wrote about kveik in his book Historical Brewing Techniques: the Lost Art of Farmhouse Brewing (2020) as did Mika Laitinen in his Viking Age Brew: The Craft of Brewing Sahti Farmhouse Ale (2019). If you would like to learn even more, the Facebook group Milk the Funk is a good source for mixed fermentations, especially their online resource Milk the Funk Wiki. If you would like to know more about traditional and historic brewing then the Facebook group Medieval Brewing would be for you.

Farmhouse yeast registry

“Traditional Norwegian Kveik Are a Genetically Distinct Group of Domesticated Saccharomyces cerevisiae Brewing Yeasts” by Richard Preiss, Caroline Tyrawa, Kristoffer Krogerus, Lars Marius Garshol and George van der Merwe. Microbiol., 12 September 2018

YouTube

• All things kveik yeast with Special Guest Lars Marius Garshol – Lallemand Brewing • May 6, 2020
• Lars Marius Garshol on kveik at Burnt City Brewing’s Kveikfest 2019 in Chicago • Sep 15, 2019

Larsblog, by Lars Marius Garshol

• Brewing with kveik (2014)
• Analysis of farmhouse yeast (kveik) (2016)
• Kveik – what does it mean? (2017)
• How to use kveik (2018)
• When did people start reusing yeast? (2018)

Brewing Nordic, by Mika Laitinen

• Practical Guide to Kveik and Other Farmhouse Yeast: Introduction
• Practical Guide to Kveik and Other Farmhouse Yeast: Fermentation
• Practical Guide to Kveik and Other Farmhouse Yeast: Reusing and Maintaining Yeast
• Farmhouse Yeast Descriptions

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Smoking malt in Stjørdal with Roar Sandodden and friends as part of the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020

Part 4 in a series covering the brewing of farmhouse ale during the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020.

Session 1: https://youtu.be/eTDX6fds7EU
Session 2: https://youtu.be/LNIbYj_J2QI

The whole day on Saturday, October 10^th, the brewing world was treated to a special event: the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020. First happening in 2016, the festival quickly grew a fine reputation for the place to be for anyone interested in farmhouse brewing and the phenomenon of raw ales. In 2020, instead of canceling, the festival went virtual and for a whopping 12 hours anyone interested could follow the brewing of three different styles of farmhouse beer at three different farmhouse locations online.

During the 12 hours, three farmhouse ales were brewed using three slightly different processes. Hornindal brewed a raw ale, Stjørdal a 1-hour boil ale, and Voss brewed a 4-hour boil ale. Each group of brewers did things in a slightly different way: as they said themselves, where you have 50 brewers, you will find 50 different methods, and each brewer thinks their beer is the best! I spent a wonderful Saturday glued to the TV watching these different brewers chat about beer, while taking copious notes. The videos of the live festival are by now released on YouTube and to make navigating the two 6-hour sessions a little less overwhelming, I have annotate each process, step by step, as they appear in the videos (the times listed can be plus or minus a couple of seconds).

Haven’t read about the farmhouse ale demo’s yet? Check my blog for Brew #1: Hornindal kornøl, Brew #2: stjørdalsøl and Brew #3: vossaøl of the three farmhouse ale brewing demonstrations.

Part 4: cold-smoking malt by the brewing team at Stjørdal.

Brew #2 is orchestrated by Roar Sandodden, who brews a stjørdalsøl on his farm Alstadberg, Stjørdal in central Norway. He is assisted by Jørn Anderssen (brewmaster and maltster at Klostergården bryggeri), local farmhouse brewer and maltster Håvard Beitland and local farmhouse brewer and maltster and winner of the 2017 brewing championship Jørund Geving. What sets stjørdalsøl apart is that the locals make their own malt which is massively smoked with alder wood.

Link to my blog post which describes how “Roar Sandodden and friends brew a stjørdalsøl as part of the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020”

Because malting is such an important part of the brewing of stjørdalsøl, Roar Sandodden (sporting a baseball cap) and Håvard Beitland (wearing a white sweater) demonstrate the drying of a batch of malt in Roar’s malt kiln at the same time as the brewing demonstration. Roar concedes they do this for the festival: this is not what he normally would do, as both the malting and the brewing are large jobs better tackled without other distractions.

Lighting the kiln.

30:22 – 38:51

The malt house, called the såinnhus, is traditionally built a little way away from the rest of the houses as they would occasionally burn down. Historically, the grain would be put in bags in a creek for steeping but Roar does not have a creek close by on his farm so he uses plastic drums. He runs hoses from the drums through the malthouse wall to exchange the water easily; this allows the grain to breath during the steeping.

Roar demonstrates how his germination bed folds down when needed.

On the left side of the såinnhus Roar built a foldable germination frame. He can germinate about 200 kilos per batch using this. The grain will sit on the germination frame for about 5 days, depending on the temperature of the surroundings. Because germination produces a lot of heat, the grain is turned four times a day to get an even temperature throughout the germination bed resulting in even germination throughout the malt. Roar moves the grain malt from the germination bed to the malt kiln, the såinn, by hand. Below the grain, the såinn has a wooden floor punctured with many holes: “13,000 holes, actually,” Roar says, “I remember because I drilled them. Took a lot of time.”

The freshly germinated malt ready for drying.

The malt will be dried for about 20 hours, and it will be turned only once. Håvard chimes in and says that it is very important to hit the right moment of the malting process. The sprouting process should be stopped at just the right time, when there are the most sugars in the malt but the grain has not started to use the sugars for itself yet. Roar further mentions that when the kilning is finished the rootlets and “some other stuff” from the malt, which should not go in the beer, needs to be removed. For that they use another locally-made machine, which looks like a large tumbler.

The tumbler used to clean the dried malt.

Roar shares there are about 40 malthouses in his county, and that at least 38 of them are operational. He goes on to say, “As I hear, more people are planning to build new ones, actually. This tradition is in no danger of disappearing. We make some jokes about newer, modern brewers because some feel that it can be a threat to our traditional methods. I don’t think so. These methods will survive, and if people want to brew on kitchen apparatus or that is the only way they can brew, that is fine with me.”

Even though Roar’s kilnhouse is sturdily built, it is not necessary to house the kiln in a modern house: it can actually be an advantage to use an older construction as there would be more air flow. Most malthouses are not as ornamental as Roar’s either – the front pillars are carved and look amazing – or built out of logs; most are more like shacks with a kiln inside, he says.

The name of the fireplace is a woman’s name (I think meaning wife) – a very important name, for an important part of the malting kiln. By now, it is smokey and moist in the malthouse as the fire is started and smoke and moisture is being driving through and off the malt. They malt year-round, in the summer it is nice to sit outside but in winter inside is better. Sitting down, the smoke is not too bad. “Actually, this is nice work, you can sit here for twenty hours, don’t do anything, just watch the kiln” interjected with “And you have to have a beer!” “You have to have a beer, of course!” “Are we having a beer now?!” Roar, grinning, “We’ll soon have beers…”

Stoking the fireplace with grey alder wood.

The Stjørdal maltsters use only one type of wood for their kiln: they prefer dried grey alder wood. They do have to be careful with the open fire as the bottom of the malting kiln is also wood. If the fire is too large, escapes the fire box, it can easily burn the malthouse down.

The malt house and chimney as seen from the outside.

2:10:29 – 2:19:19

There is quite a lot of moisture leaving the malt. In the first couple of hours it is mostly moisture that is being driven off by the kiln heat, not so much smoke. Roar indicates the temperature under the wooden planks of the floor is quite high, but there are still many, many hours left to go. There is a large chimney vent right above the kiln bed venting the moisture and smoke to the outside.

Most of the smoke is moisture being driven out of the damp grain bed.

Lars Marius Garshol asks: “Does anyone sprout grain on the floor in Norway?” The maltsters agree that that is quite common. The use of the wooden frame for malting is not so much because it is colder in Norway; in the old days there were no dedicated buildings for malting, they’d use the same place as they stored the equipment. What they did not have were concrete floors to germinate on. If you go back far enough, the buildings had dirt floors and as Roar says, one cannot germinate on dirt floors. Wooden frames would be used instead, which also made it easier to control the heat and contain the grain bed better. Plus, floor germination only works in summer as the ground would be too cold the rest of the year.

“In Stjørdal it is common to call the fire department before we start. There have been some examples that people are drying their malts and neighbors see that, and it looks like the house is on fire. So, the fire department was having some calls regarding this, and the fire department chief made a written letter he stuck up in [posted on] the såinnhus that stated “call me if you are going to make some malt here!” [chuckle]

Lars Marius mentions an old brewing video from the seventies. (This video is also mentioned in “Brewing in Hardanger” https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/392.html and can be found here. https://tv.nrk.no/program/FOLA00000273/-drik-venner-kjaere-mitt-oel-velunt-skal-vaere-drikk-venner-kjaere# Unfortunately, the link does not work at the moment but perhaps it will again someday in the future.)

In this video, the malt is put into sacks which are put into a stream for soaking, except when they took the sacks out of the stream, they left the malt in the sacks. Lars Marius describes how one could see how it germinated in the sacks, and that the rootlets were even coming through the sack fabric. Then they spread the sprouted grains on stones in the sauna, where it would be dried, which worked perfectly as they could control the temperature. Håvard wonders if the sprouting is done in the sacks if it would be difficult to keep an even temperature, to keep the same temperature in the middle of the sack as at the outsides. Modern maltsters know to keep the temperatures even throughout the grain bed as otherwise some malt would not have converted completely yet, and some malt would already have started to consume their own sugars.

Lars Marius notes that the modern quest for even temperature is interesting as he found that in some places the maltsters did not stir the malt during germination at all. “In fact, in Ol, the rule was that it should all stick together, and then, at the end, you should be able to lift it up, and it should all stick together, and you should be able to put it on your back, like a back pack, and carry it. Which is really weird, as it would not have an even temperature!” The maltsters muse that could be due to lack of knowledge: it was done as tradition had taught. Back then, they might not have known even malting was a good thing, or perhaps, it added something we don’t realize.” Håvard: “They had several hundreds of years of brewing tradition before them, so it must have functioned for them, in some way. I guess otherwise they would not have kept doing it.”

It is time for dinner for the Stjørdal brewing team.

Part 2

1:31:51 – 1:44:44

It is dark outside; dinner is finished and the brewers go to the såinnhus to check the malting process. The kiln is getting increasingly hotter and most of the moisture is gone from the malt. Roar explains that he usually does ten hours of kilning and then goes to bed. The kiln will keep drying whether or not the fire is going as the stones of the kiln structure are hot, act like a heat sink, and this heat will keep drying the malt during the night. This means he can go to bed safely, with the fire out, and when he gets back up in the morning it is time to stoke the fire, turn the bed, and get ready for another 10 hours of drying. The actual drying time depends on the weather, the humidity, and how much grain is on the frame – sometimes it is done at 17 hours and sometimes it takes up to 21 hours.

Jørund the Viking makes an appearance: “It’s fascinating to see, this is the way that we, the Vikings, have been making the malt for thousands of years.  And nothing, nothing has changed during these years. Maybe the kiln changed a bit, we have new [modern] bricks, but the stone walls have been there, and the kiln is the same, and the way of producing excellent malt, smoked malt, is the same. And this is the only place I know of in the world that we are still making the malt like this, twenty thousand kilos each year, and five hundred brewers are making very, very good beer and a famous malt. So, I hope this is a tradition that will last for many, many decades and I am sure it will.” Then he cheers with his beer horn, and several of the brewers start munching the smoking malt.

Smoked malt: a truly Viking snack!

After discussing the use of juniper, and if alpine juniper is any better than ordinary wild juniper, Roar steps up to the malt and explains a bit about the temperature control of the malt kiln. When he built the såinnhus he used probes to measure the temperature on different parts of the floor. He found it is pretty even, and he also learnt that it is easier to just feel by scooting his hand under the grain bed to feel the wood floor. He touches his fingers to the wooden boards that sit directly over the kiln’s fire box, and as long as he can keep his fingers there without getting burned it is OK. When it starts to get uncomfortable, he has to ease down a little on the fire. “That, combined with some experience, is enough.” Håvard shares that “after a while, when you are sitting here, you can hear some cracks; the malt is talking to you! It’s like that, it is completely quiet, so you can sit here and talk to the malt, and when the malt says ‘now you’re a bit hot’ then you have to slow down a little bit.”

Roar explains in a bit more detail how the såinn is designed: the inside basically is an empty rectangle lined with brick walls. The fire box is a steel frame, some use stones, with holes or slits along the sides. The top of the fire box has steel plates and stones, which spread out the heat and protect the wooden floor. In this way the direct heat from the fire does not go straight up to the wooden frame. It also deflects some of the heat and air to the edges of the box so the kiln is (more) evenly heated. Roar says, “The essential thing is to get air going through. Therefore, I chop the wood fairly small, so you get a nice big flame here, and you get air sucked through and up through the malt and out.” He goes on to say that this is different in other communities; some use bigger wood to create more smoke, some deliberately use wood that is not completely dry, to get the wood to simmer and produce more smoke, to get a more smokey character on the finished malt. Roar, like other maltsters from his region, prefer a lighter malt.

Håvard shows how the sugary malt sticks to his hand.

Håvard demonstrates most of the moisture of the malt has been driven off and that the malt is getting sticky: this is the sugars. Only a couple more hours and then it is time to turn the malt. He does not think turning it too soon or too often is effective: if the malt is turned before all the moisture is driven off it is just pushed back into the malt, and then it takes even longer to dry the malt through and through. Roar: “But we like that, don’t we?! [they all laugh] Maybe we should start turning it more often!”

5:11:31 – 5:17:36

It after midnight local time; the maltsters fired up one last time before going to bed. Roar is ready to turn the malt, but before doing so explains that there are many ways to do so: “Some maltsters turn it every second hour, some maltsters never turn it, but I turn it once during the kilning process.” He uses a coal shovel to pick up the malt, in portions, on a grid, and then turning that portion upside down to move on to the portion next to it. The turning exposes any raw malt sitting on top to the heat of the fire below, and in this way the malt should get more caramelization and more color. Jørn (brewer with hop-beard on his t-shirt) joins in: “One of the nice things, I think, of såinnhus malt is that every time gives a special flavor with only the [average] home-made malt, you get a special grist mix because you have the wooden boards with a lot of holes in them. The malt just above the holes gets caramelization, some are even roasted, and then the bulk of the malt is pretty light. You get a real nice mix of caramel malt, and light roasted malt, and that is different from såinn to såinn, so that is a nice part of the process.” The malt is still quite sticky on top, and by turning the malt the moisture goes underneath, to then dry off through the malt and create some more caramelization.

Roar turns the malt.

Lars Marius wonders about the color of the malt and is shown a nice close up of the different shades. He then asks if the malting is pretty consistent, brews fairly similar beer from brew to brew, and Roar agrees with that. He thinks his homemade malt makes a quite complex grist. Roar makes malt about ten times a year and he has gotten a pretty good feeling for the process. He does not measure temperature anymore and adjusts along the way. He now is experienced on how it should be; he can adjust for differences in the malt, the germinating temperatures and also the weather.

Leveling the surface of the malt for even drying.

After turning the malt, Roar takes a broom and, with it upside down, sweeps the little mounts of turned malt flat again.

Roar prefers 2-row over 6-row barley, because the kernels on the 6-row tend to be very small, with less body to turn into sugar. He thinks that is why 2-row is by far the more popular grain for farmhouse brewing.

The result: some fantastic smoked malt.

Roar shared a short video on his brewery Facebook page Alstadberg tradisjonsbryggeri (October 11 at 4:23 PM) to share how the malt turned out after the festival ended at:
“Akkurat ferdig med å rense maltet som vi meltet under https://www.norskkornolfestival.no i går.” [Just finished deculming the malt we made during yesterday’s festival.]

And if you would like to read more about Roar’s malting and brewing, check out Lars Marius Garshol Larsblog posts “Alstadberger” (https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/298.html)
 and “Stjørdalsøl — the tasting” (https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/369.html)

Kjetil Dale and friends brew vossaøl as part of the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020

Part 3 in a series covering the brewing of farmhouse ale during the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020.

Session 1: https://youtu.be/eTDX6fds7EU
Session 2: https://youtu.be/LNIbYj_J2QI

From sunup to sundown, just about, the brewing world was treated to a special event Saturday, October 10^th: the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020. First happening in 2016, the festival quickly grew a fine reputation for the place to be for anyone interested in farmhouse brewing and the phenomenon of raw ales. In 2020, instead of canceling, the festival went virtual and for a whopping 12 hours anyone interested could follow the brewing of three different styles of farmhouse beer at three different farmhouse locations.

 Lars Marius Garshol, of Larsblog fame, and Amund Polden Arnesen, brewer at Eik & Tid, hosted the slow-TV festival. When brewing activity would be minimal, viewers were treated to several talks: Mohammed Tawfeeq, from University of Leuven, talked about Traditional Beers as a Source of New Yeast Biodiversity, Mika Laitinen demonstrated the brewing of Finnish bread/beer taari and Martin Thibault looked Beyond Kveik at 3 Unexplored Hotspots for Heirloom Brewing Yeasts.

During the 12 hours, three farmhouse ales were brewed using three slightly different processes. Hornindal brewed a raw ale, Stjørdal a 1-hour boil ale, and Voss brewed a 4-hour boil ale. Each group of brewers did things in a slightly different way: as they said themselves, where you have 50 brewers, you will find 50 different methods, and each brewer thinks their beer is the best!

In a way, farmhouse brewers do use different house recipes for different live events. But the ingredients and process of traditional farmhouse brewing does not leave all that much room for large changes. The hops are grown by the house, the yeast is house yeast and many would use their own malt kiln to produce their malt. One could change strength – brew low ABV (alcohol by volume) for summer and high ABV for Christmas, or perhaps use sweet gale for childbirth – but with the single brew process there is not much room for each brewer then to brew their own unique type of (farm) house beer.

I spent a wonderful Saturday glued to the TV watching these different brewers chat about beer, while taking copious notes to fine-tune my own open-air medieval brewing demos. The videos of the live festival are by now released on YouTube and to make navigating the two 6-hour videos a little less daunting, I will annotate each brew, step by step, as they appear in the videos (the times listed can be plus or minus a few seconds). Third up is vossaøl by the brewing team at Voss.

Brew #3: vossaøl

The third brew is demonstrated by Dag Jørgensen, a professional brewer at Voss Bryggeri, and Kjetil Dale, farmhouse brewer and owner of the old brewhouse. They are assisted by Ivar Geithung, farmhouse brewer, Ivar Husdal, farmhouse brewer, Sigmund Gjernes, and Atle Ove Martinussen, of Western Norway Cultural Academy and responsible for the UNESCO application to give kveik world heritage status. Vossaøl is often grouped with the beers in the style called “heimabrygg,” which literally means homebrew. The beer is quite different from the beers from Hornindal and Stjørdal as the brewers will use a long mash and a very long 4-hour caramelizing boil. The process demonstrated at the festival can be found described in detail, and with a recipe, as “Sigmund Gjernes’s Vossaøl” in Lars Marius Garshol’s book Historical Brewing Techniques on page 311.

Kjetil’s brewhouse is a fantastic timber frame structure with a Viking-style slate flanked raised hearth in the middle of the room. The large copper brew kettle hangs suspended off chains from a large beam resting on the ceiling rafters. This beam actually is loose, to my surprise, and the brewers can lift it up to slide along to rafters to maneuver the kettle closer or further away from the wood fire.

Adding juniper tips to the kettle.

50:29 – 56:23 (indicating the minutes:seconds in the video)

Kjetil and Dag start the brewing day with making the juniper infusion. Their kettle holds about 150 liters and they add about 3-4 kilos of juniper sprigs to this (it looks to be the volume of about a 5-gallon bucket). They prefer the tips of the plants, the shoots, not the barked twigs. This infusion is used throughout the brewing process as a cleaning antiseptic medium plus it also gives a nice acid and a spicy taste. And as an antiseptic it gives preservative qualities to the brew and they don’t actually need to use hops. Plus, it acts as the sieve during lautering – a more versatile brewing ingredient you won’t easily find!

They infuse the juniper tips at temperatures of 75-80C, not too hot as otherwise you get different flavors. Other brewers use thicker branches and hotter water and get different flavors. This is reminiscent to the difference in taste between steeping black tea and boiling black tea, and no-one likes boiled tea. Ivar Geithung, who is wearing an (urban) 18^th century eastern Norwegian costume, says of making the juniper infusion that “it smells like the forest; we are boiling the forest!”  The infusion is steeped for an hour after which the brewers would start mashing in. They both agree that “Now it is time for a little beer. Just a little. We have to always make sure to stay awake at the end! That is important [laughing].” The brewing of vossaøl is a marathon, not a sprint: the process takes up to 12 hours, plus or minus 2 hours, from beginning to end.

A sample of the slate used to line the bottom of the mash tun.

1:37:05 – 2:00:51

At this point the brewers get ready to prepare the mash tun for mashing. The mash tun is a blue plastic barrel, similar as those used by Hornindal. It has a spigot at the bottom and is placed off the floor on top of a bench to leave room for a bucket to drain into. To prepare the mash tun, they move the already used juniper branches (reusing these instead of fresh minimizes the juniper flavor) from the kettle to the bottom to create a filter, and lay flat rocks on top to weigh them down. The wet juniper branches are lifted out of the kettle using heat-resistant gloves: “if you are a true Norwegian, you would just use your hands!” at which his fellow brewers all start laughing “no, no, never!” The flat rocks used are slates, normally used on the top of roofs (but thicker than the roofing slates I’ve seen in the US). Then they add a couple of buckets of juniper infusion to the mash tun to preheating it, the sample shown looks a bit like apple juice, and then it is time to add malt and infusion in succession.

The hot infusion water is transferred from the copper kettle to the tun with a stainless-steel bucket. The mash paddle used to stir the mash looks a bit like a boat paddle, but crooked – presumably carved from a juniper branch.  They use a pale malt, and, like with the other brewers, alternate the adding of the malt and water to help mix and dissolve the dry goods better to prevent clumping. This does not seem to be measured; they fill the mash barrel to the consistency that the mash paddle can stand up (reminiscent of Hornindal). We can hear the mash paddle scrape over the stone floor, indicating how well this seemingly simple addition works to keep the gnarly branch filter in place.

The mash takes no less than 1 ½ hours, on average 2 – 2 ½ hours but sometimes up to 4 hours – this differs from farm to farm. The plastic barrel mash tun is insulated with a fiberglass blanket which is wrapped around it, and is topped off with a towel. Voss uses the longest thermometer I have ever seen, at least a meter long, that can reach all the way to the bottom of the mash tun! The mash water (the infusion) was at 80-85C, the mash itself measures at 67.6C.

In the past they would not measure temperature, they’d stick in their finger; they would not measure the sugar, but taste it. The brewer’s reminiscence they did not depend on instruments but on their senses. As the two explain: “It’s kind of a different feeling, brewing in this traditional way and the micro-brew we do nowadays.” “It’s two different worlds.” “I have two kinds of mindsets when I do this. The modern brewing, I do in the kitchen, I measure, I have a formula, stuff like that, and I am kind of rigid. Here, I use my feelings, my experience. Two different kinds of thinking about brewing.” “When you are micro-brewing, it is important to know, it is smaller scale, and if you want to make these new modern beers you have to take measurements, to verify, to be able to make the same beer again and again. This is slightly different, from time to time, sometimes you can get it pretty much like last time …” “But it is not industrial, this is more like a feeling; how did my grandfather do it, how did my father do it.”

Both brewers then lament that neither know for sure how their grandfathers did brew, as they both come from families which had two generations without brewers. “We kind of have to start from the beginning.” They are happy to find that in Voss there are plenty of farmhouse brewers willing to share their experiences. But quickly ran into the age-old issue: “they don’t have the same answers! You have to pick one, and figure out your own way of doing it. But that is part of the fun about it: every brewer, they think they are making the best-ever beer!”

Heating the water for sparging.

3:59:49 – 4:11:47

The sparging water in the copper kettle has a blanket of steam flowing on top. As they will need the kettle for boiling the wort, and it is still full, they will lauter – drain the wort from the mash tun – into plastic buckets first. While the wort is draining, the hot water is sparged on top of the mash tun’s grain bed to help leach as much of the sugars out as possible. Voss also circulates the first run-off back onto the grain bed to have less particulates which aids clarity. The brewers remark “looks like the juniper filter worked well this time; it’s very clear.” The wort is yellow and almost clear, like a Hoegaarden, and it is commented it tastes very sweet. When the kettle is empty, the wort is put back in and heated for the boil. The brewers estimate they will lose about 50 liters in the boil.

1:23:45 [session 2]

The wort is at 85.4C and is approaching protein break. We can clearly see foam on top of the wort as the kettle is pretty full. To while away the time, Ivar Geithung performs some songs on his mouth harp.

Ivar Geithung performs on his mouth harp.

1:44:54 – 1:50:57

They put a handful of hops in the wort, and the wort is starting to approach the boil. They are looking at a 4-hour cooking time, and realize they perhaps will have to cut it a little short to fit the schedule of the festival, but are confident it should still be well-reduced and well-caramelized.

Lars Marius has a question for the brewers and asks why the Voss brewers used these very long boils? Of course, it is for reduction – the reduction raises the sweetness, the sugars, and thus the alcohol. They will have less volume of beer, but a higher alcohol content and thus a higher quality beer – just as in the Saga’s. If the other person does not stagger away in drunkenness after drinking your ale, then you did not do it right! Another reason, and one we’ve heard before, is that wheat beer malt did not modify very well and resulted in a lower gravity, less sugars in solution, as generally wanted. The brewers also know of another region close by which doesn’t boil for more than an hour, hour and a half, but it was said that was because they did not have as much wood to burn.

Adding hop flowers to the boiling wort.

3:47:26 – 4:08:58

Voss is still boiling, and they sprinkle some more hop flowers, grown on the farm, in the wort.

Atle Ove Martinussen, of Western Norway Cultural Academy, talks about the UNESCO application to give kveik world heritage status.

4:53:35 – 5:03:04

With only an hour to go in the festival – by now we are quite literally at the eleventh hour! – Voss is ready to start cooling the wort. Two of the brewers manually maneuver the beam from which the kettle hangs sideways away from the open fire. A wort chiller is plunged into the wort in the kettle, and gently maneuvered up and down for maximum cooling effect. The hot water from the wort chiller is used to clean the fermenting buckets, with added industrial disinfectant (an acid, I presume similar to Star-San). The fermenters are standard plastic buckets.

The kveik slurry safely stored in a glass jar.

5:17:58 – 5:46:38 (with some sound issues)

Voss is finished with cooling the wort and disinfecting the fermentation buckets. They have about 110 liters left after the boil, which are drained into the fermentation buckets with a piece of hose, and estimates that after bottling they will have about 80 liters. “And how much after [ub skokkur]?!” “5 liters!!!” [much laughing] The yeast is kept as a slurry in a rubber-ring jar. He takes it from the bottom and stores it in the cellar with its stone walls and earth temperatures, he’s had it for several brews. He pitches the whole jar in the three buckets – he does not think kveik can be over-pitched: it’s kveik!

Lars Marius Garshol: “Is it customary to do the kveiking here in Voss?” “No… we never do that in Voss…” [giggles all around] Brewer: “We don’t do it every time, but sometimes we do it, in secret, if we are alone: then we may scream some black metal tunes into the beer! [laughing] Makes the beer extra good, and evil!” Another: “And that is the purpose of the beer!”

5:43:08 Black Metal yeast scream!

Can you make out what he tells the kveik?

I hope you will enjoy this story and their video as much as I did, and that you too will be inspired to brew a traditional Farmhouse ale to feed your kveik. As I cannot think of better words to leave you with, I will give the last word to the brewers at Voss:

“I hope you all have enjoyed this stream tonight all over the world and I would say it was a pleasure to be here with you today so I hope to see you soon! Come on, Ivar, play on with your tunes!”

To brew vossaøl

Equipment:

• Open hearth with wood fire
• Copper kettle
• Plastic barrel mash tun, wrapped with fiberglass insulation
• Flat stones
• Stainless-steel bucket
• Thermometer (extra-long)
• Mash paddle, juniper
• Wort chiller
• 5 and 10-gallon fermenting buckets

Ingredients:

• Pale malt
• Juniper, homegrown
• Hops, homegrown

Process:

• The brewers start by heating a juniper infusion at 75-80C in the copper kettle for one hour.
• After the hour, the mash tun is prepared by layering the wet (pasteurized) juniper around the spigot at the bottom, flattened and kept in place by flat stones.
• Several buckets of hot infusion are poured into the mash tun to heat it up. Then the grist, the coarsely ground malt, is added, followed by more infusion, more grist, etc, until the mash tun is filled up.
• The mash is at 67C, the mash tun well insulated, and will rest for 1 ½ to 2 hours.
• Water for sparging is heated (I did not see them put juniper in this).
• The fermenting buckets are cleaned and used to temporarily store the wort.
• The wort is drained into buckets, the mash sparged with water from the kettle, and the kettle is emptied (I do not know for sure if they used all the water, or dumped any left-overs).
• When the kettle is empty, the wort is put in and together with three handfuls of hops brought back to a boil.
• The boil takes 4 hours, about halfway through another handful of hop flowers is added.
• When the wort is done boiling, reducing, it is cooled with a wort-chiller. The hot water from the outlet of the wort chiller is used to clean the fermenter buckets, combined with a commercial acid rinse.
• When the wort is cool enough, it is drained by hose into three 5-gallon fermenters.
• The kveik added is not proofed beforehand; it is the bottom slurry (lees) of the brew he did before, stored cool in a glass jar.
• Scream! And much drinking of beer.

The introduction of Brew #3: Voss on the festival website:

Brew #3: Voss

The YouTube screen grabs are used with permission from the festival organizers.

Roar Sandodden and friends brew a stjørdalsøl as part of the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020

This is part 2 in a series covering the brewing of farmhouse ale during the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020. The YouTube video of session 1 can be accessed here.

The whole day on Saturday, October 10^th, the brewing world was treated to a special event: the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020. First happening in 2016, the festival quickly grew a fine reputation for the place to be for anyone interested in farmhouse brewing and the phenomenon of raw ales. In 2020, instead of canceling, the festival went virtual and for a whopping 12 hours anyone interested could follow the brewing of three different styles of farmhouse beer at three different farmhouse locations.

 Lars Marius Garshol, of Larsblog fame, and Amund Polden Arnesen, brewer at Eik & Tid, hosted the slow-TV festival. When brewing activity would be minimal, viewers were treated to several talks: Mohammed Tawfeeq, from University of Leuven, talked about Traditional Beers as a Source of New Yeast Biodiversity, Mika Laitinen demonstrated the brewing of Finnish bread/beer taari and Martin Thibault looked Beyond Kveik at 3 Unexplored Hotspots for Heirloom Brewing Yeasts. I was rather disappointed to find Jereme Zimmerman was bested by the demons of virtual technology and never got his sound to work. Perhaps we’ll see, and hear!, Jereme next year?

During the 12 hours, three farmhouse ales were brewed using three slightly different processes. Hornindal brewed a raw ale, Stjørdal a 1-hour boil ale, and Voss brewed a 4-hour boil ale. Each group of brewers did things in a slightly different way: as they said themselves, where you have 50 brewers, you will find 50 different methods, and each brewer thinks their beer is the best!

I spent a wonderful Saturday glued to the TV watching these different brewers chat about beer, while taking copious notes to fine-tune my own open-air medieval brewing demos. The videos of the live festival are by now released on YouTube and to make navigating the two 6-hour videos a little less overwhelming, I will annotate each brew, step by step, as they appear in the videos (the times listed can be plus or minus a few seconds). And second up is the stjørdalsøl by the brewing team at Stjørdal.

Brew #2: stjørdalsøl

The second brew is orchestrated by Roar Sandodden, who brews a stjørdalsøl on his farm Alstadberg, Stjørdal in central Norway. He is assisted by Jørn Anderssen (brewmaster and maltster at Klostergården bryggeri), local farmhouse brewer and maltster Håvard Beitland and local farmhouse brewer and maltster and winner of the 2017 brewing championship Jørund Geving. What sets stjørdalsøl apart is that the locals make their own malt which is massively smoked with alder wood. Because malting is such an important part of the brewing of stjørdalsøl, the brewers demonstrate the drying of a batch of malt in Roar’s malt kiln at the same time as the brewing. Roar concedes this is for the festival, and not what he normally would do, as both malting and brewing are large jobs better tackled without other distractions. (The malting process will be a separate blog post)

The stjørdalsøl brewed by Roar and his team is similar to the stjørdalsøl brewed by Jørund Geving, which can be found in Historical Brewing Techniques (p. 300-301). Lars Marius talks about Roar’s malting and brewing in his Larsblog post “Alstadberger” (https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/298.html). In here, Roar mentions that since the juniper taste is secondary to the taste of the malt, he does not use it anymore when he brews for himself. Roar also boils the wort for an hour where Jørund does not; he prefers to brew a raw ale.

Smoking the malt in Roar’s “firehouse.”

6:18 – 11:57 (indicates the minutes:seconds of the video)

The Stjørdal team is the first team we meet in the live festival feed. There is a traditional kveik ring hanging indoors, setting the stage nicely. The brewing takes place in an old 1820’s log farmhouse converted into a brewhouse and party room; I am guessing the Scandinavian version of a man cave. Roar started brewing when he was 18 – his son makes an appearance later on – and he grew up in Stjørdal where the farmhouse tradition is very much alive, with many active brewers brewing in the traditional way with traditional methods. He is quick to point out that what makes this region so unique is that the brewers make their own sterile smoked malt from local grains.

For this brew Roar uses 100% smoked malt from local grains, malted and smoked by him in the building next door. The copper kettle is heated on the wood stove, and they have started mashing in. The temperature is already at 50C, and they mashed in with water, not infusion – the juniper goes into the mash tun only. The mash tun is a very large plastic bucket with a rubber mat strapped around the sides to help insulate it. The temperature of the mash will slowly be raised by draining out wort to be heated in the kettle, to then be returned back into the mash tun with a large plastic scoop – they recirculate the wort from tun to kettle to tun until they get the temperatures right both on top and at the bottom of the mash tun. When the wort is heated in the copper kettle it partially caramelizes which adds to the flavor. These are old traditions; they might not have realized that back then. This re-circulation is a combination of decoction and step mashing: for about two hours the brewers draw out from the bottom to add back to the top to help equalize the temperatures from top to bottom (decoction), as well as heating the wort from the mash tun into the copper kettle in steps before adding it back in (step-mashing).

The area still brews for parties and weddings, but not for funerals anymore although that was part of the tradition a long time ago.

Jorn measures the temperature of wort in the kettle, Jorund stirs the insulated mash tun, with the mash scoop hanging off its side.

1:01:37 – 1:25:27

The wort in the kettle reached about 78C. It is put back in with the mash and stirred well with a mash paddle. When it reaches about 65C in the mash tun, the wort is drained and put back into the kettle again. In this way, the temperatures are slowly stepped up to about 72-73C, but never higher than 73C. They keep the mash at that temperature for about 2 to 3 hours, and then they will drain off all the wort and boil it.

The wort is tasted and deemed sweet and good, and about three handfuls of hop flowers (circa 35 grams) are added straight to the mash in the mash tun. The brew is not about the hops, the brewers agree, but about the malt. Jørund (wears a black T-shirt featuring a yeast ring) only uses a thermometer to brew; the other brewer, Jørn (wearing a black T-shirt featuring “Hop-Beard”) runs a professional brewery which brews traditional inspired beers.

Jørund talks about the region, and mentions there are 500 to 600 brewers in the valley. They brew on average 50-60 liters up to 100 to 150 liters in a year. He says “it is the biggest community in the world still making their malt like the Vikings did, a thousand years ago. And that is quite fascinating to think about. That nothing else changed in all those years. The sauna is approximately the same, the method is approximately the same. They are using barley; it is quite like what the Vikings did.”

2:01:21 – 2:10:10

By now the top of the mash is at the desired temperatures of about 65-66C. The wort is drained – called lautering; Sjørdal uses a combined mash and lauter tun – and it will be boiled in the copper kettle for one hour. I did not notice that the brewers sparged the grain bed (the adding of extra hot water on top to help rinse out leftover wort) but as they are quite concerned about brewing high alcohol beer this would make sense as the sparge would dilute the main wort and thus lower the amount of sugar in solution. The brewers in this region add extra sugar to the wort during the boil to raise the alcohol by volume even more. Roar adds brown sugar and mentions that some use white sugar, some use syrup. Some add nothing, and some use more malt. The intention is to brew to a high level of alcohol as the higher the alcohol, the better the beer, and the higher standing the brewer: “it is the tradition.”

They do brew different beers for different seasons: summer beer would be light, and Christmas beer would be strong. Roar wonders if the adding of sugar might have started with oat malt brewing, as oats does not convert sugars as well as barley and the wort would thus be weaker. By adding extra sugar, the brewer could raise the level of alcohol and still brew an inebriating manly beer, plus, this technique of fortification would also work when malt was scarce.

The next generation of brewers helps to scoop the boiled wort into the fermenting vat.

4:12:04 – 4:20:20

The wort has been boiled for one hour, and is transferred with the hand scoop and a bucket to the stainless-steel fermentation vessel to cool. The transfer by hand is manual labor but doing it this way also aerates the wort. In this segment, Roar has his tween son helping out with moving the wort – teaching his brewing knowledge to the next generation of brewers. Roar adds one fistful of hops to the wort for aroma; local hops grown by the brew house wall. The juniper in the mash tun only contributed some bitterness. The hop traditions and the way brewers use juniper varies a lot in the region, some use a lot, some use nothing, and it also varies when what is added. Roar says “the soul of the beer in this area is definitely the malt, this beer is pretty much all about the malt, juniper and hops don’t play a major role in this beer.”

One of the brewers added the copper-coil wort chiller to the fermenter and started cooling down the wort. He mentions that the one-hour boil caramelizes some of the sugars in the copper kettle; that this flavor is not affected by the yeast and lasts through the fermentation process. They use Sigmund Jarnes kveik and like the combination of the fairly sweet malty beer with the fruitiness of the kveik.

They cool the wort down to 39C. The wort chiller is moved up and down the wort to help cool the wort even quicker, to get the yeast in as fast as possible. Roar recounts that some brewers let the beer ferment quite long, but as most of the sugar is gone in a couple of days, they do not see the need to do so. They let the beer sit for 1 week in the fermenter before it is bottled, kegged or barreled. They could use wooden kegs or barrels in summer, and have used plastic bottles, but now mostly use modern kegs.

Screaming at the kveik.

4:31:09 – 4:55:05

The wort is cooled down to 39C. They made the starter a couple of hours ago with some wort cooled down to 29C (this seems to have happened off-screen).

Then there is the “most important part of brewing”: the Yeast Scream! (at 4:31:40)

To quote Roar: “many dark forces wanting to destroy our beer, the people that dwells below. So, we don’t dare to… don’t do it. Ready? SCREAM!!!… and skøl!”

The stainless-steel lid goes on top of the stainless-steel fermenter and is clamped in place, and the rest is up to the kveik. Like in Hornindal, the brewers retreat to the dinner table for a well-deserved hot meal and a cold beer.

Sodd: a traditional Norwegian soup-like meal with whole potatoes, carrots and beef & mutton meat balls.

The stjørdalsøl process is quite interesting, and I can see how the beer Roar brews does so well in competition. Not only does he smoke his own amazing malt, the combined decoction and step-mashing creates opportunity for even more malty flavors. And makes much sense when having limited brewing equipment (one kettle, one tun – and the mash tun could be cleaned during the boil to be reused as the fermenter).

The consistent use of copper kettles had me look a little deeper in the benefits of using copper – with the challenges of keeping copper clean and the ease of stainless steel, why are farmhouse brewers still using copper? They switched from using wood to plastic and stainless-steel tuns and barrels, so why not stainless-steel brew pots? I found that not only does copper have superior thermal distribution, it gets hot quickly and evenly; it increases the rate of Maillard reactions, a non-enzymic browning that adds color and flavor; plus it releases trace nutrients for the yeast to digest. And that does sound worth the trouble of keeping the brew pot nice and shiny for the next batch.

To brew stjørdalsøl

Equipment:

• Cast-iron stove fired with wood
• Copper kettle
• Plastic bucket mash tun, wrapped with insulation
• Plastic hand scoop
• Thermometer
• Wooden mash paddle (commercial)
• Stainless-steel fermenter
• Wort chiller

Ingredients:

• 100% Homemade cold-smoked barley malt
• Brown sugar
• Juniper, homegrown
• Hops, homegrown

Process:

• It is possible the Stjørdal brewers cold-soaked the mash the night before, as described in Jørund Geving recipe, described in Historical Brewing Techniques on pages 300-301. By the time the festival started, the brewers had already started mashing in.
• If that is the case, then the mash would have to be heated up from below 10C without the aid of heating the mash water beforehand to help raise the mash temperatures that way. This cold-start would explain the combined use of decoction and step-mashing to efficiently raise mash temperatures (and it is also quite reminiscent of using hot rocks).
• The temperature of the mash is slowly raised by draining off the wort, heating it in the copper kettle to about 78C (thereby slightly caramelizing the sugars) and adding it back to the mash. This step is repeated until the mash reaches circa 72-73C.
• When the mash is at about 72C but never higher than 73C, three handfuls of hop flowers are added to the mash tun, and the mash is left alone for 2 to 3 hours. Some of the wort is kept separate, cooled to 29C and used to proof the kveik.
• After the rest, the wort is drained off and boiled in the copper kettle for one hour. Depending on the sweetness, extra sugar is added, in this case brown sugar.
• After the one-hour boil, the wort is scooped into the fermenting vat (thus aerating the wort) and quickly cooled to 39C using a wort chiller.
• Another handful of hop flowers is added to the fermenter, this time for aroma.
• The kveik starter is added to the fermenter, and welcomed with a loud SCREAM!
• Which is followed by dinner, and a party.

The introduction of Brew #2: Stjørdal on the festival website:

Brew #2: Stjørdal

The YouTube screen grabs are used with permission from the festival organizers.

Stig Seljeset and friends brew a traditional Hornindal kornøl as part of the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020

Saturday October 10th, which happened to be my birthday weekend, the brewing world was treated to a special event: the Norsk Kornølfestival 2020. First happening in 2016, the festival quickly grew a fine reputation for the place to be for anyone interested in farmhouse brewing and the phenomenon of raw ales. But as the brewing is demonstrated at actual farmhouses, and the festival location is more or less central to those, this means traveling to the Norwegian outback to be able to see first-hand what this living history tradition is all about. Then came 2020, and with it the opportunity to go virtual.

Session 1: https://youtu.be/eTDX6fds7EU
Session 2: https://youtu.be/LNIbYj_J2QI

For a whopping 12 hours anyone interested could follow the brewing of three different styles of farmhouse beer at three different farmhouse locations. Lars Marius Garshol, of Larsblog fame, and Amund Polden Arnesen, brewer at Eik & Tid, hosted the slow-TV festival. When brewing activity would be minimal, viewers were treated to several talks of which only one was in Norwegian (thank you!). Mohammed Tawfeeq, from University of Leuven, talked about Traditional beers as a source of new yeast biodiversity, Mika Laitinen demonstrated the brewing of Finnish bread/beer taari and Martin Thibault looked Beyond Kveik at 3 Unexplored Hotspots for Heirloom Brewing Yeasts (all three in session 2). I was very sad to see Jereme Zimmerman was bested by the demons of virtual technology and never got his sound to work. Perhaps we’ll see, and hear!, him next year?

During these 12 hours, three farmhouse ales were brewed using three slightly different processes. Hornindal brewed a raw ale, Stjørdal a 1-hour boil ale, and Voss brewed a 4-hour boil ale. Each group of brewers did things in a slightly different way: as they said themselves, where you have 50 brewers, you will find 50 different methods, and each brewer thinks their beer is the best!

The different brewhouses did share the use of open fire and a copper kettle, as well as the use of locally grown dried hop flowers and fresh juniper sprigs. I spent a wonderful Saturday glued to the TV watching these different brewers chat about beer, while taking copious notes to fine-tune my own open-air medieval brewing demos. Videos of the live festival are released on youtube and to make navigating the two 6-hour YouTube videos a little less confusing, I will annotate each brew, step by step, as they appear in the videos (the times listed can be plus or minus a few seconds). First up is the raw ale by the brewing team at Hornindal.

Hornindal kornøl

Stig Seljeset and friends demonstrate the brewing of a traditional Hornindal kornøl. This is a raw ale, meaning the wort is not boiled, and is made with juniper infusion, fairly pale malts, noble hops and kveik. They work outdoors under a large pavilion and brew, of course, in a copper kettle over open fire. Stig uses a stick of juniper as a mash paddle and a stainless-steel saucepan for a scoop. The mash tun and lauter tun are both plastic barrels. The barrels seem smaller than standard US 55-gallon barrels but otherwise look quite similar – I am guessing a volume of about 35-40 gallons. The wort is drained into steel milk cans, and fermented indoors in another plastic barrel. The process is similar to the brewing description by Terje Raftevold in Historical Brewing Techniques (p. 283), as well as the Larsblog post “Brewing raw ale in Hornindal” (https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/342.html).

12:40 (indicates the minutes:seconds of the video)

Hornindal gets going with a general introduction of the brewhouse and the brewers. The brewers present are Stig Seljeset (owner of keik #22 Stalljen; wearing a blue pullover), Olav Sverre Gausemel (ownder of kveik #18 Gausemel), Lars Andreas Tomasgård (ownder of kveik #21 Tomasgard), Odd Steljeset, brother of Stig and owner of the brewhouse, and Arve Raftevold as well as a number of other local brewers apparently looking to replenish their diminishing store of beer. There is a kettle with a juniper infusion steaming in the background. The festival started at noon local time and the brewers have had some time to start preparations. The juniper used in the infusion is picked fresh, with or without berries, and is not really measured. Stig prefers to harvest juniper tips from the small weedy shrubs, not their nice large ornamental trees. Some of the branches go in the water for the infusion and some go on the sieve bed.

Stig checks the density of the mash with his juniper stick.

44:30 – 50:07

Half an hour later they are ready for the mashing. The brewers pour some juniper infusion from the kettle to a large, blue plastic barrel, the mash tun, then add some dry crushed malt, followed by more infusion, and more malt. The infusion and the malt are added alternatively, for better dissolving and to prevent clumping, while the whole is vigorously stirred with the mash paddle, a stick of juniper. Stig gauges how much liquid to add by how much resistance the mash gives to the mash paddle. He tests this by standing the stick in the middle and looking at how fast it falls sideways: he’s looking for a slow-motion slide. When he is satisfied, they leave the mash for an hour, at least, before they do anything more. More water is added to the kettle to replace what was used during the mashing. When the mash tun is full they put something over top, an empty bag in this case, “so no birds etcetera would do anything in it, that would be not so good” and weigh it down with some wood.

1:25:51 – 1:36:50

While waiting for the mash to convert, Stig talks about how wooden equipment is hard to store and clean. In the 70’s they started using plastic and recently they started using stainless steel. He shows an old stainless-steel hot-water boiler with a spigot, with its top cut off and three feet welded to the bottom. The top can be flipped over and is used as a slotted filter and will sit on the inside, on top of the juniper sieve.

2:19:34 – 2:42:21

It is time for lautering the mash, or draining the liquid wort from the solid grain bed. For this they use a separate plastic barrel which has a spigot at the bottom, the lauter tun. It is partially filled, then raised off the ground before it gets too heavy. Hornindal uses a wooden tool to create draining space for the spigot, a U-shaped channel riddled with holes (further explained in the larsblog post linked above). This is called the rustesko (lauter tun shoe), and is placed in front of the tap, around which the juniper is tightly packed. It is important the juniper is placed just right so there are no big gaps and the grain does not plug the tap. They use several handfuls of short branches.

The rusteko, a home made lauter tun filter. For a better picture click here.

The mash is carefully added to the lauter tun so the juniper filter does not slip away. This is easier to do when the barrel is still on the floor and the inside of the barrel easily visible. Before it is too heavy, the lauter tun is lifted onto a stand (another barrel with a board over the top) so the spigot is at a higher level than the wort canisters.

When all the mash is scooped into the lauter tun, they are ready for tapping. One of them uses a juniper branch to sweep the remainder mash grains out of mash tun. They already have more, fresh juniper water ready in the kettle. The first 3 to 5 liters of wort are put back in again so all of the flour that comes out at the beginning is back on the top. They run the wort until it is clear, so the fine particulates that came out of the malt go back in. Now it is time to prepare the hops (Hornindal uses about 150 grams of amarillo), as well as getting ready for the kveik.

The hops are in a bag which hangs in the milk can, right under the spigot so the wort drains out of the lauter tun, through the hops bag, and into the milk cans. They do not have hops in the lauter tun. The brewer would taste the wort and when it gets too strong remove the hop bag, and if not, leave it in the whole time. All the wort is drained very slowly out of the lauter tun into the milk cans. The hot juniper infusion from the kettle is used to sparge. At the beginning of the lautering stage the brewer started a kveik bowl by drawing out some hot wort in a kveik bowl to cool it down. He uses a big glass bowl, no more than half full, as it will be put near the fire to keep warm.

“You are welcome to the beer.”

4:20:05 – 4:31:09

Stig placed the kveik bowl near the fire, guided by experience, and moves it closer or further away depending on the temperature. Hornindal shows a beautiful traditional kveik bowl with the text “you are welcome to the beer” around the rim in which the dried kveik flakes are stored. When the kveik wort reaches 29C, they usually look for between 28-32/34C, the kveik flakes are shaken into this wort. A bit cooler does not matter too much right now, but when added to the beer wort it should be 30-32C as then it would start to ferment quicker.

They are tapping into their second milk can as they can still taste the sweetness. The brewer explains: “We don’t measure the sweetness with anything else than we just taste it, that is the traditional way, and that is why we are still doing it. We don’t measure everything with modern technology, we use the way they did hundreds of years ago – so it’s traditional, all the way.” He changed the hop bag from one container to the other, and squeezed it a bit.

Hornindal does not use a standard wort chiller, a coil of copper tubing and garden hose, but something they came up with themselves: a perforated garden-hose collar around the neck of the milk can, which leaks cold water all around the sides of the metal can to cool down the wort. They might do this as a standard copper coil would not fit in the milk can as the opening is relatively small. The first can of wort was about 36-37C when poured into the fermenter (in the garage, this happened off-screen), which is a bit too warm for the kveik. He thinks it is better to start a little too warm, than too cold; the process takes a little while and otherwise it needs to be warmed back up. He opts for cooling down the second milk can a bit to make up for the difference.

About half a dozen brewers are drinking beer in the background, kveikøl from different brewers, but they were all almost empty so they have been patiently waiting for this day for a couple of weeks now!

5:23:36 – 5:36:06

Hornindal is congratulating the kveik, locally called the “mariaue,” as it has “really done a good job, it is all foamy.” The kveik starter is 32C and they are ready to put it all in the “jeel,” here the fermenter. They normally have the fermenter in the basement as it is warmer there, but they found they have no video down there so for the sake of the festival the “jeel” is set up in the garage. The fermenter needed some insulation as otherwise the kveik would not be warm enough.

And then it is time for the Yeast Scream! [5:27:30]

“We have done the brewing, now it is up to the kveik to do the rest of the job. We have to wait 40 to 48 hours and then we will know how it is.”

It is time to clean up the mess, to have dinner, and then a party!

Hornindal leaves the fermenter open while fermenting, sometimes covered with a blanket but not usually. In summer they might use a lid because of bugs, but not usually.

To brew traditional Hornindal kornøl

Equipment:

• open fire
• copper kettle (circa 150 liters)
• plastic barrel mash tun
• plastic barrel lauter tun
• plastic barrel fermenter
• metal milk cans to store & cool wort
• thermometer
• home-made wood filter block
• home-made wort chiller

Ingredients:

• 100% lager/pilsner Norwegian malt
• homegrown juniper
• Amarillo hops
• house kveik.

Process:

• The brewers start by boiling a juniper infusion in the copper kettle.
• Then add this infusion with the malt, in small amounts, to the mash tun. The mash is stirred very well, covered, and let sit for an hour. The water in the kettle is replenished to heat and be ready for sparging.
• The lauter tun is prepared by placing the wood filter block in front of the spigot and packing it tightly with juniper branches.
• The mash from mash tun is carefully scooped around and on top of the filter block and juniper in lauter tun. Then the lauter tun is lifted onto a platform and the rest of the mash is schooped in, with a scoop, by hand. The first 3-5 liters of drawn wort is added back to the lauter tun, not until the wort runs clear is it collected in the milk cans.
• Some of the first wort is drawn off for the kveik and cooled; at the same time they make a hops bag and hang this in the opening of the milk can, under draining wort.
• When the wort reaches between 28-32C the dried kveik flakes are added. This needs to be done as soon as possible to give the kveik several hours to start proofing.
• The wort is very slowly drained through hops bag into milk can, this takes about 2 hours.
• Start sparging by adding hot juniper water on top of the mash in the lauter tun. This pushes out any remainder wort and rinses the grain bed of any remainder sugars.
• When the wort loses sweetness, they stop sparging and pour wort into an (indoor) insulated fermenter. It will likely need to be cool down, for which they used their home-made wort chiller.
• Pitch kveik – and do not forget to SCREAM!
• Clean-up, dinner & a party.

The introduction of the Brew #1: Hornindal team:

Brew #1: Hornindal

The YouTube screen grabs are used with permission from the festival organizers.

How to make a yeast ring

The Scandinavian Saga’s show the Vikings understood how to work with yeast to brew beer long before the first published Nordic books on brewing. Halv’s saga speaks explicitly of yeast, called dregg. Other words found in sagas are jǫstr, related to the Swedish ‘jäst’ and gerð, related to the the Danish-Norwegian ‘gær.’ As well as kvikur or kveykur, both linked to the adjective ‘kvick’ and meaning that which sets something in motion, related to the Norwegian ‘kveik.’

Many different methods of preserving yeast have been used over time, including the baking of yeast cakes with the addition of flour and the drying of yeast sludge on rough wood logs, straw wreaths of whittled yeast rings. For more on the history of Scandinavian yeast devices, check out my previous post at:

https://medievalmeadandbeer.wordpress.com/2019/05/04/scandinavian-yeast-logs-yeast-rings/

The most curious piece of brewing equipment, the yeast ring is mostly found in traditional Scandinavian farmhouse brewing. It would be used by drying yeast sludge on wreaths of straw or braided bark, as well as rings of small pieces of whittled wood. For this type of storage, the sludge could be dried quickly with the help of sterile hot ashes which would absorb excess water, the heat would help expedite drying, and the alkaline environment it creates would be antimicrobial. When Sir Arthur Mitchell toured some of the western islands of Scotland in 1768 he took note of how the natives of the Isle of Skye revived their yeast preserved on a wreath:

“The natives preserve their yeast in the following manner: They cut a rod of oak four or five inches in circumference, twist it round like a w[r]ythe, and steep it in fresh yeast for some hours, then hang it up and dry it. And whenever they need yeast they take down the twisted rod, and put it into a covered vessel amongst two or three pints of luke-warm wort, so in two hours thereafter they have fresh barm fit for immediate use.”

Practical instructions

Design of a Danish yeast ring, from the book Landbokvinden (Back to the land, 1964).

There are many different ways to make a yeast ring. Some are made simply from tightly twisted straw, others from strips of bark expertly braided together. Most are made from wood, often birch or beech, and most are made from narrow mortise & tenon pieces which are interlinked together. Some have a raised wedge head which keeps the pieces locked in, others have an indentation to the side. Some are square edged, some have rounded edges, and some have a decorative serration at the top, sometimes even at the bottom. Most have a square wedge head when seen from the top, and the measurements are often 2 wedge lengths makes up one body length (ratio 2:1), but sometimes shorter, at one and a half to 1, and sometimes much longer. On average, a good ball-park design to match many of the extant artifacts is about 75 pieces, or 25 sets of 3.

A modern reconstruction (left) made out of plastic with a 3D printer by George Hart (http://www.georgehart.com/rp/torzle/torzle.html)

   

A traditional reconstruction from the Hungarian book on whittling called Remeckel a bicksa (The knife is great, 1958).

This version seems to be the most common design and is probably indicative of the process: the many, many pieces would be carved or whittled by hand, with a knife, and the wedged end and slot (mortise) would not be problematic to create. This technique might also explain why it perhaps originated in Scandinavia – an area with a strong whittling tradition and long, long dark and boring winters.

The key to the puzzle

There are several options for the key piece which closes the loop, and could theoretically open it again. It is not quite clear what the benefit of taking it apart would be, except perhaps for a deep clean before it goes into storage (or to the museum). There are several museum artifacts which are disconnected (often also incomplete); the majority of the artifacts are connected and in one piece. None of the four key versions mentioned below are easy to re-open, and are all prone to damage when done so repetitively.

• Key 1 (left): a piece with a minimally raised wedge, low enough so it can be pushed through the mortise. Optional: widen receiving mortise slightly as well. For cheaters: chisel the wedge off completely, insert piece, and glue back on. This key piece has to be the very first of the chain.
• Key 2 (mid.): the tenon is split lengthwise from the middle of the back to the mortise. Then the two arms are sprung open and pushed over the body of the connecting link, similar to an old-fashioned clothes pin.
• Key 3 (right): If the mortise is cut a bit wider than the link width, then it could be possible to remove just enough of the side wall to push through the other link. The part removed could be carefully glued back to remove all traces of construction.
• Key 4: steam or boil the key piece ten to twenty minutes to soften the wood. Compress the wedge in a vice to flatten the wedge and insert through slot. As it cools and dries, it will re-expand somewhat and steaming can be used to expand it further. This is a known technique for making improbable wooden objects.

References

• Loránt, Ferkai. Remekel a bicska, 1958.
• Ole Højrup. Landbokvinden. Denmark, 1964.
• Mitchell, Arthur. James Robertson’s tour through some of the western islands, etc., of Scotland in 1768. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Volume 32. Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1898. https://books.google.com/books?id=-vacElTywOMC&dq
• Thunæus, Harald. Ölets historia i Sverige I Från äldsta tidre till 1600-talets slut, 1968.

 

 

Scandinavian ‘magic sticks’ – yeast logs & yeast rings

Likely one of the first organisms domesticated by man, yeast was kept at the ready using many different storage techniques throughout history. One of the oldest such known practices are the Ancient Egyptian yeast breads: delicately baked little loaves of yeasty goodness which, when crumbled into sweet liquid, would create a new yeast starter – for beer, or to leaven bread. For most of man & yeast’s history, bread yeast and beer yeast were the same. The user often had a clear preference, either for keeping the top yeast (barm) or the bottom yeast (lees). But this preference seems more random than geographic, as one farmer would prefer the top, his neighbor the bottom and some would save both – and the yeast would be used for anything that needed fermentation.

A yeast ring made out of sheep vertebrae, Gjærkrans HF-00244 (left photo: Hadeland Folkemuseum) and a teethy straw yeast wreath, Jästkrans UM28850 (right photo: Uplandsmuseet).

There are many different, and some quite unusual, methods for keeping yeast found in Scandinavian context. Like the Ancient Egyptians, one method mixed yeast with flour and would knead it into a flat cracker, with or without a ‘donut’ hole. The crackers would be dried, and could be stored, nice and dry and out of the way, strung along the length of a hanging stick. In our more recent past, liquid yeast could be stored in bottles; often submerged in cold water such as in a well, which would act like a natural refrigerator.

Lars Garshol (2013): “Brewers usually preferred their yeast fresh, and if they didn’t have any, would borrow from their neighbours. This was common, and taking payment for yeast was unheard of. Some say well dried yeast could last for more than a year, and, if necessary, it could be revived with sugar and water, then dried again. Given how hard it is to keep yeast alive and working well, and how it seems to depend on a community of neighbours all helping one another it’s not very surprising that kveik has disappeared in most places.”

Yeast logs come in all different shapes and sizes: a jästkubb NM.0041501 (photo: Nordiska Museet), a gjærstokk from 1704, a gjærstokk NF.2016-0174 (photo: Norsk Folkemuseum), and a kveikal from 1621, NF.1928-0442 (photo: Norsk Folkemuseum).

Scandinavian Yeast Logs and Yeast Rings

An intriguing piece of Norse brewing equipment, and unique to Scandinavia, is the yeast log. From a simple piece of rough-barked birch log with a hole at the top to attach a rope, to elaborately drilled and carved sculptural Odes to yeast, the yeast log captures our imagination. When brewing guru Michael Jackson visited Norway he was mesmerized by the “magic sticks” he encountered there, functional yeast logs kept as family heirlooms long after commercial yeast became available. The log would be used by lowering it into the fermentation vat to catch the yeast that would form a foam on top. Then it would be pulled out, rolled in flour, dried for a few minutes, dipped again and this process repeated a few times. When properly covered in yeasty paste, it would be hung to dry.

A yeast log carved at the bottom with the date 1621 from Telemark, Norway NF.1928-0442 Photo: Norsk Folkemuseum, https://digitaltmuseum.no/011023159380/kveikal

Another traditional piece of brewing equipment, most often found in Sweden and Denmark, is the yeast ring. Yeast sludge would be dried on wreaths of straw or braided bark, as well as rings of small pieces of whittled wood. For this type of storage, the sludge could be dried quickly with the help of sterile hot ashes which would absorb excess water, the heat would help expedite drying, and the alkaline environment it creates would be antimicrobial. When Sir Arthur Mitchell toured some of the western islands of Scotland in 1768 he took note of how the natives of the Isle of Skye revived their yeast preserved on a wreath:

“The natives preserve their yeast in the following manner: They cut a rod of oak four or five inches in circumference, twist it round like a w[r]ythe, and steep it in fresh yeast for some hours, then hang it up and dry it. And whenever they need yeast they take down the twisted rod, and put it into a covered vessel amongst two or three pints of luke-warm wort, so in two hours thereafter they have fresh barm fit for immediate use.”

The secret identity of the Yeast Ring

When the Scandinavian museum records were checked for yeast rings, many examples can be found but also something else: Ulrika Torell curator of the Nordiska museet (Nordic Museum) explained the “pannring” as follows:

“A so-called yeast ring, or yeast wreath, originally used for brewing beer and malt drinks. The wreath is placed in the fermenter where yeast residues adhered and were allowed to dry into the hollows of the wreath. In this way, a good yeast was preserved for the next brewing. The wreaths were made of wooden sticks or straw. When the homestead brewing needs eventually declined [yeast could now be purchased, as well as beer] the wreaths instead began to be used as trivets for pots and pans and got a new name.”

Yeast ring made by the author from swamp birch (Betula allegheniensis).

From the 19^th century onwards, it is fairly easy to find examples of wood wreath trivets both in Scandinavian, and in Hungarian, culture. The digital collections of the Swedish and Danish museums especially list dozens of “pannring” objects collected in the late 19^th to the middle of the 20^th century. The same is found for Hungarian wood wreath trivets, there called cauldron wreaths – the oldest object is dated to 1860. But did they not get used before then, or did they not get collected and catalogued? It looks like unfortunately it is the latter. The concept of ethnography, the systematic study of people and culture, had only recently developed. Universities and private collectors would collect data and objects, most often from strange and foreign lands and peoples. But not until the industrial revolution was it realized by governments and universities alike that rural life as had been known since living memory was quickly fading away, replaced by modern conveniences like refrigeration and dry-goods stores. Ethnographers were sent into the field in their own countries to preserve what was left, and this push for the past is still visible in the influx of collection acquisitions in the late nineteenth century.

The Hungarian Kutyagerinc – used to keep round-bottom cooking pots from tipping. Photo: Arcanum online.

Hungarian Trivets

A neat example of a wood wreath trivet is the Hungarian kutyagerinc, or dog’s spine, as seen on the table in the photograph of the shepherds’ couple dining. In the words of Barna Gábor in his book A pásztorok muvészete (The art of shepherds, 1989):

“Most shepherd’s apartments have chimneys, smoky kitchens and open stoves and multiple families cook on the stove. There is also a kitchen in the Keszthely Empire where six families cook on a stove. The footed cauldrons, pots and pans are designed for this, and the fire is gathered around it. It is natural that the feet and the pot are rusty, which is not a problem; the people consider, the goal with open fire is a more delicious meal and a crunchy roast.

If the soiled dish is put on the beautiful white tablecloth, it will make a mess. For this reason, the shepherd carries a tablecloth surface-saver, which is called a kutyagerinc (dog’s spine) because it really resembles the backbone of the dog, but is assembled as a wreath. The kutyagerinc consists of two or three hundred parts intersecting each other, held together by the parts, so that one part is tightly connected to the other.

The good kutyagerinc is that which is cramped as close as possible. You don’t need to use glue, an adhesive, for the kutyagerinc, because it holds itself together. If the assemblage of the kutyagerinc is connected with two opposing parts, it can be turned so that the heads of the parts stand in a different direction [it rotates] and the wreath has a different visual. The two ends of the wreath are so cleverly hooked up that the observer can’t figure out how the hundreds of pieces are put together so wonderfully! The shepherd does something for pleasure. There is no benefit, it’s just nice!”

The wreath as a yeast ring

Whenever the whittled wreaths are displayed in musea or on the internet, Scandinavian visitors would immediately identify it as a yeast ring. The yeast ring identity seems to be deeply ingrained within the Scandinavian mindset, bringing up the question of how old this custom could be. While there exists that Norwegian yeast log carved on the bottom with the date of 1621, there is no such luck with yeast rings. Same with Hungarian kutyagerinc, the museum objects in the Scandinavian collections are mostly dated and/or acquired at the end of the 19^th century to the middle of the 20^th century. A chance encounter while leafing through the 1555 multi-volume Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (A History of the Northern Peoples) by Olaus Magnus provided an intriguing illustration.

Yeast ring, hanging outside the brewery. Olaus Magnus’ Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (1555, p.445) and appears here with permission of the Silver Special Collections Department of the Library of the University of Vermont.

 On display: one yeast ring, hanging of a pole outside a drinking establishment, to indicate the brew was successful and ready for consumption. Interestingly, it was apparently such a normal tool that the use of the ring is not mentioned in the body of the text of the book. The earliest practical descriptions of brewing beer are from the 16^th and 17^th century, but interestingly, quite often the literal use of yeast is omitted. The brewers had words for yeast and knew how to treat it – it was nothing surprising or new. For instance, the Danish cook book Koge Bog (1616) instructs “When you put the yeast in, then make careful certain that you don’t put it on too hot or too cold, but when it is slightly more than lukewarm.” While the German brewer Christoph Kobrer (1581) includes a detailed chapter on “keep[ing] the stuff for brewing” (about preserving and reviving yeast), Olaus Magnus (1555) only mentions to use “a small quantity of older beer.” Englishman Andrew Boorde (1542) instructs to use nothing but malt and water and to never add anything to beer, except “yest, barme, or godesgood,” three synonyms for yeast. And if one might find it strange to hang a yeast ring out in in the open, keep in mind brewers back then did not know yeast was a creature, only that the sun and an airy breeze would help dry out the sludge more quickly, and that that was good. On the other hand, the ring could also be just used and cleaned, hung out to dry and sterilize in the sun, as medieval dairies were known to do with their wood equipment. Putting out the yeasty tool to indicate a job well done is not something unusual; there is a long tradition in Europe of using yeast related utensils as pre-period inn signs, like besoms (twiggy sweeping brooms) and ale-poles (the medieval variant of mash paddles).

The Swedish article by Nils Nilsson called Jästkransen (Yeast wreaths) from 1981 is interesting in regards to the practical use of tori. While it is not as detailed as for instance Odd Nordland in his Brewing and beer traditions in Norway: the social anthropological background of the brewing industry (1969) or Gösta Berg in Jäststock och jästkrans (Yeast log and yeast wreath – 1949) what Is interesting are the two photographs included. One is of a confirmed pannring / trivet, while the other is of a confirmed yeast ring. And it is clearly visible: the yeast ring is slathered in dried yeast, and the trivet has scorched edges from where the hot pots touched the wood. Note that while yeast sludge can be soaked and rinsed away it is impossible to clean scorched wood. And most of the wreaths collected as trivets do not show any indication of heat scorching, which seems to undermine the assumption of them actively being used as trivets.

From Nilsson: (left) Jästkrans, one of a pair acquired from Harlösa in Skåne in 1945, information about the use is missing. The dried substance between the sticks contains, apart from various “debris” residues, starch and yeast fungi. Diameter 15 cm. KM 47,356:2. (right) Wreath braided with sticks, according to Kulturens folk art catalog 1932, a trivet from Skåne, that is to say, a stand for a frying pan. Diameter 23 cm. KM 35.767.

In the words of Nils Nilsson, in his 1981 Jästkransen:

“Another method was to allow the yeast to dry, which gave significantly increased durability. The yeast must then be collected in a suitable way. From ancient towns in central Sweden and Norway it is known that they used to lay down a so-called yeast log or yeast stick in the yeast vessel, a piece of log of rough bark with recessed depths where the yeast mass was gathered into. The stick was then hung to dry and the yeast in the holes could then be preserved for a long time.

The same method has been applied with wreaths, which were usually straw bundles, but which in southern Sweden and Denmark were often composed of small sticks stuck into each other, or yeast rings. The wreaths could either be placed in the vessel like the yeast stick, so that the yeast flowed into the cavities, or “filled” by pouring the yeast over them. Otherwise, the approach was the same.

Wreaths composed of small wooden sticks are quite common in our museum collections. Very few of these have a clear function as yeast rings. In general, they are found as a trivet for saucepans, pots and the like. In this capacity, they still exist, usually manufactured and marketed as home-made supplies. The question is then whether the use of wreaths as a pot holder was developed only after ceasing to store yeast dried in wreaths, in other words a kind of functional retreat as it is called in scientific language. More likely, they have been used for both these purposes and that the connection with the beer yeast was forgotten after the use of brewing beer at home had disappeared”.

References

• Berg, Gösta. Jäststock och jästkrans, 1949.
• Bringéus Nils-Arvid. Arbejde og redskaber: Materiell folkkultur på syensk landsbygd före industrialismen, 2003.
• Foote, Peter (ed.). Olaus Magnus: A Description of the Northern Peoples 1555. Vol. III. The Hakluyt Society, 1998.
• Gábor, Barna. A pásztorok muvészete. In: HOFER TAMÁS (sorozatszerk.): Hajdú-Bihar megye népmuvészete. Európa Könyvkiadó, Budapest, 1989. https://www.arcanum.hu/hu/online-kiadvanyok/Malonyai-malonyai-dezso-a-magyar-nep-muveszete-1174D5/iii-kotet-a-balatonvideki-magyar-pasztornep-muveszete-118077/a-pasztor-muveszkedese-11837F/
• Garshol, Lars Marius. When did people start reusing yeast? Posted 2018-04-29 http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/390.html
• Garshol, Lars Marius. Kveik: Norwegian farmhouse yeast. Posted 2013-11-07 http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/264.html
• Højrup, Ole. Landbokvinden, 1964.
• Jackson, Michael. The Beer Hunter: Odin’s glass of nectar. Michael Jackson learns the secret of Norway’s home brews, passed down via Viking “magic sticks” Published Online: OCT 1, 1997; Published in Print: DEC 4, 1993 In: The Independent. http://www.beerhunter.com/documents/19133-000103.html
• Mitchell, Arthur. James Robertson’s tour through some of the western islands, etc., of Scotland in 1768. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Volume 32. Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1898. https://books.google.com/books?id=-vacElTywOMC&dq
• Nilsson, Nils. Jästkransen. Sweden, 1981.
• Nordland, Odd. Brewing and beer traditions in Norway: The social anthropological background of the brewing industry. Norway: Universitetsforlaget, 1969.
• Thunæus, Harald. Ölets historia i Sverige I Från äldsta tidre till 1600-talets slut, 1968.

All websites listed were accessible as of March 22, 2019.