Various Nordic Brewing Traditions

Sahti —David Bleitner

Michael Jackson claimed that “Sahti is the only primitive beer to survive in Western Europe. The beer that peasants learned to brew in the 1500s is still made much the same way today, much of it in people’s homes.*” Sahti has a long and peculiar history in Finnish culture. Most sahti today is still brewed in saunas. Saunas are a substantial part of Finnish culture and brewing. The importance of the role of saunas in Finnish culture is illustrated by the estimated 2 million saunas in Finland for a population of just over 5 million. With 200-day winters in some parts of the country, having a place to warm up when it is negative thirty degrees is nice. Saunas have a long history in Finland not just for brewing beer and relaxing but also for baking bread, celebrating business deals, smoking meats, and even giving birth (hopefully not simultaneously).

Inside the typical home/sauna brewery is the Finnish mashing vessel called a kuurna. The bottom of this long, trough-shaped vessel is lined with juniper branches and straw that act as the filter to separate the wort from the grains in the mash. The mash often, but not always, contains a large quantity of rye malt. The juniper berries on the twigs often add a spicy, aromatic note to the final beer. If the berries are used later in the process, they add some microbial stabilization and flavor. Traditionally, sahti is unboiled and hops are not always added. Instead, the wort is run off into milk churns and fermented with bakers yeast. When the beer is done fermenting it is poured into the traditional serving vessel which is a two-handled vessel made of juniper wood.* While some commercial examples are now brewed in Finland (and in the United States), most sahti is still home brewed and therefore many subsets of the style exist. There is really no wrong way to brew it, so we know we are doing it right.

For our sahti, Bare Bear, we don’t use any of the traditional equipment, because, well, we don’t have it. John once talked about carving a kuurn from a tree, but he never did. It is good he didn’t because I don’t know where we would’ve put a tree sized vessel used once a year during the other 364 days of the year. But we do add oak staves in the boil that imparts a tannic character to the final beer in honor of the noble kuurn. We use a Belgian style yeast instead of bread yeast because it tastes better and we use stainless steel fermenters instead of milk jugs because we are a commercial brewery and our customers would probably get mad if we served the beer flat out of old milk jugs.

Gotlandsdricka — John Laffler

Gotlandsdricka, or Gotlandsdricke, is the indigenous farmhouse ale of Gotland, the largest island in Sweden. A cousin to the Finnish Sahti, it’s similarly kept alive by a handful of old Swedes and has been very much in danger of dying off with them. Almost 10 years ago I was over in Denmark for a festival and over the course of several, several beers the head brewer at Nårke decided it was dreadfully important to run through several of the books on the subject he had with him a the bar despite the fact that a) they were in Swedish b) there were no pictures and c) I don’t speak Swedish. Undeterred, he carried on and felt it was very important to discuss the tradition of brewing this indigenous farmhouse style of beer and also that there are different sexes of juniper trees.

In the last couple years, this blend of enthusiasm and stubbornness has taken root and the brewing traditions of Gotland have been somewhat rejuvenated both on the island itself and in the larger world wide brewing community. Most surprisingly, the traditional, extremely obscure yeasts called kviek that was widely used in the region for indigenous farmhouse brewing which had become next to extinct and replaced by baker’s yeast, has found a home in American craft brewing and is now commonly used to produce hazy IPAs. Life will find a way!

Larsblog is a good resource for these sorts of topics. He started documenting Scandinavian brewing a few years ago. http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/363.html

Kveik Yeast — Ben Saller

“Kveik” is a Norwegian term for microbiological cultures used in farmhouse breweries. These cultures vary substantially from brewery to brewery, many having been passed down and kept alive through multiple generations of brewers. Though the kveik that is increasingly popular among American brewers tends to be homogenized cultures of brewers yeast, traditionally there would often be lactic acid bacteria and other microorganisms in the mix. Kveik has become more and more commonplace in small breweries in the US thanks to the Norwegian brewers that have willingly shared it, figures like blogger Lars Marius Garshol (The Indiana Jones of yeast), North American yeast scientists/lab owners, as well as enthusiastic professional and amateur brewers who preserve cultures and share them with others throughout the world.

Kveik has survived throughout the ages at times with the help of kveik rings, or wooden lattices that brewers allow yeast to dry on. Kveik is particularly resilient when dried, and can retain its viability for extremely long periods of time. Kveik has other unique properties that have intrigued brewers throughout the world. It effectively ferments wort at temperatures far higher than most other brewers yeasts without producing off-flavors. Relatively tiny kveik cultures are also capable of fermenting even high gravity wort extremely quickly, attenuating in as few as a couple of days. The flavors that different kveik strains contribute to beer are diverse. Some offer subtle, pleasant notes of citrus or tropical fruit. Others can be more bready or earthy. Beers fermented with kveik generally lack the phenolic characteristics of their Belgian counterparts. As a result of all of these factors, kveik can be used to make many styles of beer, from traditional Norwegian sahtis to imperial stouts to hazy IPAs (guilty as charged).

*Jackson, M., Beer Styles, beerhunter.com/styles/sahti.html