Bakewell Pub Guide 2022

June 11 to 16, 2022, my wife and I spent our holidays in Bakewell in the beautiful Peak District. We happened to try out quite a few local pubs, so this is my (obviously very subjective) guide to all the pubs in Bakewell we went to.

The Peacock Inn

Very focused on standard pub food. Three beers from cask, all from Peak Ales: Chatsworth Gold, Bakewell Best and Swift Nick. Well-kept but really just your average bitters and golden ales. When we were in Bakewell previously in 2016, they wouldn’t even let you sit down inside unless you wanted to order food. This has fortunately changed. Good for a quick refreshment in the sun.

Website, Google Maps

The Queen’s Arms

In a stark contrast to the previous pub, you’re being greeted by a “sorry no food” sign. With parts of the floor carpeted, the whole length of the wall is lined by benches accompanied by tables and chairs. The whole pub gave me a rather simple and slightly Spartan impression. Even though it was relatively busy when we were there, it seemed quiet and relaxing, with some people reading their newspaper and enjoying a few pints. It seems to be a Marston’s pub, and had Pedigree and Old Empire from cask (besides a few others I don’t remember). Good for a quiet day.

Facebook page, Google Maps

Wheatsheaf

Despite its slightly sterile and pub-chainy look, we were unable to determine who actually owns this pub. I wanted to try Young’s London Original, but had to return it after I was served a pint of vinegar (the beer wasn’t taken off though), and went for Wainwright instead, which was fine but less bitter and hop-aromatic than what I remember it to be. The couple on the table next to ours also had food, but weren’t happy with their Sunday roast.

Website, Google Maps

The Red Lion

Three cask beers on, with either Timothy Taylor’s Landlord or Boltmaker being on all the time. Boltmaker tasted great, though a bit on the sweet side. It was quiet when we went in, the overall atmosphere seemed fine, but it can apparently get very busy at times.

Timothy Taylor’s Boltmaker

Website, Google Maps

The Joiners Arms

This pub wasn’t around yet when we first spent time in Bakewell. With slightly hipsterish-looking panelling from reclaimed scaffolding boards on the bar and the walls, it had a micropub-like, very informal atmosphere. In total, they had 6 beers from cask, always rotating, but while we were there, at least 1 to 2 Thornbridge beers were on, accompanied by several keg taps (lager, craft beer, cider). No food other than the typical pub snacks like crisps and pork scratchings, but instead a good place to get to casually get to talk to people, both locals and tourists. The pub is also very dog-friendly, and lots of people walking their dogs seem to make a quick stop there for a pint.

A good place if you’re into trying new, local beers, or if you’re into craft beer.

Facebook page, Google Maps

The Rutland Arms Hotel

Essentially a hotel bar, it has 2 beers from cask, namely Jaipur and Lord Marples, as well as their Helles Lukas from keg. The whole hotel lobby/bar/restaurant has been completely redone since we were last there in 2016, apparently after a takeover from a hotel chain. All the beers were Peak Ales back then, and frankly, I’m glad they changed it because all casks beers this time were well kept, tasted great, and highlighted a local product to tourists (and there were several American tourists at the bar while were also there).

Thornbridge Lord Marples (left) and Lukas (right)

Website, Google Maps

Thornbridge Taproom

A bit further out from the town centre, this is Thornbridge’s brewery taproom, with a fairly large range of their own beers from cask, keg and bottle or can. Everything we tried was well kept. If you’re hungry, you can order pizza which is all made from scratch in-house, and even though we didn’t have any, it smelled fantastic. As I learned, they take their pizza pretty seriously, got a proper pizza oven (though not wood-fired) and even ensure to buy the right flour.

By far the best place to try Thornbridge beers straight from the source!

Jaipur X at the Home of Jaipur

Website, Google Maps

The Manners

This is a Robinson’s pub, and it shows in the cask offering: Robinson’s Unicorn, Wizard, Trooper and Dizzy Blonde (despite the name, the visual branding has improved since 2016). The beer is perfectly fine, just not the most exciting to me. Instead, this pub is best visited for its food. By far the best pub food I’ve had in England. Our food highlights there were the honey roast belly pork, the steak & ale suet crust pie, the super juicy venison cheese burger, and of course the local specialty, Bakewell pudding.

Bakewell pudding at the Manners

Website, Google Maps

A few remarks

If you’ve been to Bakewell before, you may have noticed that we have not covered all the pubs. This is because we didn’t go there specifically to put together a complete pub guide, and also there was one particular pub that we thoroughly did not enjoy last time, and thus didn’t return. As for drinks, I mostly mentioned cask beer because that’s what I’m interested in. If you want to drink keg beer or cider instead, the typical offerings are stuff like Carling, Coors, Fosters, Peroni, John Smith’s, Guinness, Strongbow (& Strongbow Dark Fruits), etc. You get the idea. Some places (like the Manners or the Joiners Arms) also have craft beer on keg.

When comparing the state of Bakewell pubs in 2016 with 2022, I have to commend those who have expanded their offerings: back then, we couldn’t find a single pub that served Thornbridge beers (it’s literally brewed a few hundred metres down the road!), save for the Thornbridge taproom itself, which was just a bit of a lounge and a small bar underneath some of the brewery offices. Nowadays, you will find multiple local places happily serving a fairly wide range of Thornbridge beers in excellent condition, and Thornbridge brewery itself now has a massive and very popular taproom, all of which are great improvements. And there’s even a micropub-ish free house in the town centre that brings rotating taps to the town that have clearly been missing before.

How did Whitbread’s fermentation cellar work?

While looking for a picture of a Burton Union in old German brewing literature as part of another beer history discussion on Twitter, I came across a source that described Whitbread’s fermentation cellar and its setup. So that’s what it looks like:

(source)

But how did it work? Fortunately, the drawing is accompanied by an explanation.

In the center, you see a large vessel marked M. This is the main fermenting vessel. From the left, a pipe leads into it, marked r on the very left. It is actually enveloped by another pipe x, through which cold water can flow at a regulated speed. Pipe r comes from various cooling tubs, and the chilling pipe was meant to allow temperature control at which the wort is filled into fermenter M.

In M, fermentation is then started, and what the description calls the first fermentation is conducted. I think this is a slight misunderstanding in the process or just a poor description of it, because the beer is then filled into the smaller vessels N where it will expel more yeast that collects in the troughs in the middle. As some beer is lost in this process, all the N vessels are automatically topped up from O with more beer. This is done through a float valve that automatically tops up N if the level is too low. This very much sounds like a cleansing apparatus. And since O is also producing yeast, it has an iron swimmer connected with a leather hose so that any yeast on the top of the beer can fall into this swimmer and down the leather hose, ensuring that also the beer in O is cleansed.

And finally, the arched cellars P underneath, built from stone and made watertight, are used to store and mature finished beer. According to Martyn Cornell, these were vaults used for maturing porter that were opened in 1784.

And, of course, he wrote about this all in great detail quite a few years ago on his own blog.

My Summer Beer 2022

Like last year, I decided for 2022 to brew a light and refreshing beer for the the summer. I was really really happy with my 2021 beer, and so for this year, I again brewed an 8° Czech-style beer, this time even more traditional than last year.

And that was my exact approach: be as simple as possible, but stick to the ingredients that would constitute a Czech beer according to PGI (if I brewed commercially in the Czech Republic and wanted to sell my beer with a Czech Beer PGI label): the sugar from the wort needs to be at least 80% from Czech barley varieties, at least 30% of the alpha acid needs to come from Czech hops varieties, decoction mashing needs to be used, and the beer needs to be bottom-fermented. So I went all in:

The brewing and fermentation process itself was rather uneventful: I hit 8.4°P OG, chilled the wort to 10°C, pitched a yeast pack, fermentation took off in less than 36 hours, and after about 3 weeks, it was finished, with a FG of 2°P. I then ramped down the temperature to 2°C, let it sit at that low temperature for just 2 weeks, and then bottled it, bottle-conditioning it with 1 liter of wort that I kept back.

I’m absolutely impatient when it comes to waiting for beer to be finished maturing and bottle-conditioning, so I had to crack one bottle open after just 1 week. I pre-chilled it for a few hours, and then poured it into a Pilsner Urquell glass I had at home. While carbonation wasn’t 100% there yet, it was definitely enough to drink it. The foam was fluffy but with rather big and open bubbles (I hopes this improves when carbonation is higher), the beer still looked slightly hazy with a very pale colour). It smelled absolutely amazing, and just after the first sip I could definitely say that this was exactly like a Czech beer (it’s not a Czech beer because I brewed it here in Berlin, hence why I call it Czech-style). It has that exact bitterness and the kind of hop flavour and aroma that I would expect from any Czech beer, it has a unique edge to its malt character that I would attribute to the intense decoction mash (hard to describe, but once you’ve had plenty of Czech beers, you just notice it, from your easy-drinking 10° beers to modern Czech-brewed IPAs e.g. from Matuška), and it’s got a very good body for such a low-strength beer.

The Urkel Lager strain, despite (allegedly) having a Pilsner Urquell provenance, does not seem to produce diacetyl at any detectable levels. What it does though is produce lots and lots of sulphur. This was particularly noticeable during fermentation and at the beginning of the very short lagering period, but at packaging, all of that was gone.

In the end, choosing the right ingredients and processes for the kind of beer you want to brew matters, and I’ve only ever gotten all the details of a Czech-style beer right when I applied all the techniques that I knew, with all the right ingredients.

What follows is a quick recipe. In terms of ingredients, it’s incredibly simple and one of those beers that can be formulated as a SMaSH beer – single malt and single hops. In this case:

  • 3.1 kg floor-malted Bohemian Pilsner malt from Weyermann
  • 24 g 2021 harvest Saaz hops (4.2% ABV) @ 60 min
  • 24 g 2021 harvest Saaz hops (4.2% ABV) @ 30 min
  • 24 g 2021 harvest Saaz hops (4.2% ABV) @ 5 min
  • 1 pack Imperial Yeast L28 Urkel Lager yeast

Use enhanced double decoction mashing scheme. Lauter, sparge, chill to 10°C, pitch yeast. Ferment fully, lager at low temperature for 1 week (I went down to 2°C), bottle or keg and carbonate. This should get you about 20 liters of a beer with 8.4°P OG, 2°P FG, 3.4% ABV, about 25 IBU in bitterness, and a very pale colour.

Experience in Brewing a Belgian-Style Tripel

I’m not really an expert on Belgian beer styles. I do like my gueuzes and lambics, and there are some Belgian beers that enjoy occasionally (my wife and I keep a collection of various vintages of Orval), but my personal interest is not exactly focused on Belgian beer, and therefore I don’t seek them out regularly or brew them at home.

My Dutch neighbour Rick though, he’s very much into Belgian beer styles. When he learned that I knew how to brew beer at home, it was clear that we had to brew something together. I asked him what his favourite beer style was (it’s Tripel, with his favourite beer being Tripel Karmeliet), and so we decided to brew a Tripel. Prior to that, I had only brewed one Tripel that was loosely inspired by Brooklyn Brewery’s Local 1. So off I went to do a bit of research.

My first decision was to make the base mostly Pilsner malt, and use some sort of sugar so as to make the beer “thinner”. With a high original gravity, you’d expect the final gravity to be fairly high and the beer to be full-bodied, so adding sugar to amp up the original gravity but keep the final gravity at a fairly low level is the way to go.

With the hope of adding a bit more complexity to the malt profile of the beer, I decided to also add 500g of flaked spelt. Not only is it a fairly cheap and easy to get ingredient, it could potentially also impart its own flavour to the beer, and (as a relative of wheat) also help with head retention.

When it came to the choice of sugar, I first looked at what my options are with pale candi sugar. Turns out, candi sugar syrup from home-brew stores is really expensive, and so I decided to look into other types of sugar. I found a slide deck “The Sugars of Tripel” by Ted Hausotter which discusses several option in great detail and also involved some experimentation. If you plan to brew a Tripel yourself and are thinking your sugar options as well, don’t miss this presentation. Looking at the slides of tasting results and rankings of the type of sugar used, I opted to go for cane sugar, as it seemed an okay option that also didn’t deteriorate flavour-wise over time. There was some warning that sucrose could add a slight cidery note to the finished beer, but I was willing to risk that.

As for the yeast, I took a closer look at what my options were with dry yeast. Fermentis has two options that could roughly fit the phenolic and estery profile of Tripel, namely SafAle BE-256 and SafAle T-58. Lallemand also has two options, one is their LalBrew Abbaye, the other one a more recent offering that might seem a bit unusual at first: LalBrew Farmhouse, which they describe as a hybrid-style saison yeast. Unlike most other saison strains, this one is non-diastatic, meaning the yeast is missing a gene that would otherwise help it enzymes to break unfermentable sugars down to help ferment a beer to absolute dryness.

When I came across that product, it actually got me thinking: normally, saison yeasts are a bit more phenolic in their flavour profile, but if that yeast is indeed non-diastatic, I could end up with a beer less dry and still with enough body to make it a convincing Tripel. What’s the worst that could happen? If the flavour profile does turn more towards a typical saison, I’d have something akin to Dupont Bons Voeux. So let’s be a bit experimental.

When it came to hopping, I wanted to have enough bitterness and hop aroma so as not to make this beer too sweet. It’s what I had noticed with some Tripels, and Joe Stange had also mentioned to me in the past that Tripels can work surprisingly well even with higher levels of bitterness. I think his prime example was Westmalle Tripel. When aging strong beers, my experience is that you could lose quite a bit of noticeable bitterness, so it’s better to aim too high than too low. In the end, I decided for go for 1g/L of Herkules (16.7% alpha acid) as bittering addition, 1g/L of 2021 harvest Saaz hops (4.2% alpha acid) as flavour addition (30 minutes before end of boil), and 2.5g/L of the same Saaz hops as late aroma addition (5 minutes). In terms of calculated IBU, this should end up at about 38 IBU.

The brew day itself was fairly relaxed: Rick and I mashed in 5.2 kg of Bohemian Pilsner malt and 500g of flaked spelt, did an initial protein rest for about 15 minutes at 54°C, then ramped up to 62°C for saccharification for about 40 minutes, and then 72°C for another 30 minutes, finished off with an increase to 78°C. Lautering and sparging went fine, and we mixed in and dissolved 1.2 kg of cane sugar (an organic own brand from a local health and beauty retailer that is ever so slightly darker than regular table sugar). After 60 minutes of boiling and adding all our hop additions according to schedule, we chilled the wort to 20°C, measured OG (19°P) and pitched two sachets of the Lallemand Farmhouse yeast.

I had originally planned the recipe for an OG of 18.5°P, but for whatever reason, we had slightly higher extraction and got 19°P. Surely not a bad thing.

After about 2 weeks, the beer was fully fermented. We then bottled it, using the same cane sugar for priming, and then let it sit for a few weeks for bottle-conditioning. The final beer came out at 2.7°P FG, which means that the final beer should have about 9.2% ABV.

We finally sampled the first bottle together this Friday. The resulting beer was actually less bitter than expected, and the hop aroma was more subtle than what I had expected, but nevertheless present in sufficient amounts. The beer itself looked slightly hazy, with a pale orange tone that made it look very inviting. The foam was very white, long-lasting and pretty dense, while the carbonation was exactly the right amount to make it pleasantly fizzy but not overly so (we went for about 2.5 volumes / 5g/L carbon dioxide). As for the flavour of the beer itself, I think the yeast expressed a very balanced amount of fruity ester and spicy phenols without either of them being too much in your face or overpowering anything. The body is just right, not too dry and not too full, which makes the beer dangerously easy to drink. The alcohol does not show at all, it is very smooth and slightly warming, and no cidery note from using cane sugar was noticeable. Rick (as a home-brewing newbie and Belgian beer aficionado) was very happy, and so was I, as I hadn’t brewed this style much beforehand, and therefore was really just guessing my way into a recipe based on some reading about the style that I had done.

(it glows more when held against the light)

The choice of yeast, although a bit risky because it was supposedly not an ideal match for the style, was a good call, and I can absolutely recommend Lallemand Farmhouse dry yeast for Belgian Tripels and similar styles. Keeping the grist simple with just Pilsner malt and spelt flakes also turned out to be a good choice, as was the use of cane sugar.

To summarize the recipe:

  • 5.2 kg Pilsner malt
  • 0.5 kg flaked spelt
  • 1.2 kg cane sugar
  • 20 g Herkules hops (16.7% alpha acid) @ 60 minutes
  • 20 g Saaz hops (4.2% alpha acid) @ 30 minutes
  • 50 g Saaz hops (4.2% alpha acid) @ 5 minutes
  • 2 sachets Lallemand Farmhouse hybrid saison yeast

Mash in and do multi-step infusion mash as described above (54°C, 62°C 40 min, 72°C 30 min, 78°C mash-out), lauter, sparge, add cane sugar to wort, boil 60 minutes with hop additions as describe above, chill to 20°C, pitch yeast, package with carbonation level of 2.5 volumes / 5g/L.

More about the Brewing Commune in Freistadt

Alistair Reece recently blogged about brewing communes in Bohemia during the 19th century. As we had a brief exchange about this topic, I thought it would be worth looking more closely into the history of Braucommune Freistadt, the last remaining brewing commune in Austria.

The history of the brewery in Freistadt is quite a fascinating one: officially founded in 1777 (we’ll get to that later), its company structure is a remnant of how old brewing rights used to be organized. As Alistair mentioned in his blog, another remnant is the Zoigl tradition in the Oberpfalz, but it has survived in a slightly different way.

As someone who has been socialized as a beer drinker in Upper Austria, everyone just knew about Freistädter brewery and what makes them unique: the company is owned by the real estate owners of the Old Town of Freistadt (i.e. what’s within the city walls), company shares are tied to specific houses, not their owners, and the owners of these houses still have an “Eimerrecht” (lit. “bucket right”, where the Eimer, about 56 litres, was an old measure for liquids such as beer), which nowadays means that the brewery pays out dividends.

The city of Freistadt has had the so-called “mile right” since 1363, that forced everyone up to a mile (longer than a modern mile; the 17th century definition in Austria was roughly 7.58 km but it may have been even longer as the mile right apparently extended up to Kerschbaum which is more than 9 km away from Freistadt) to have to buy their wine, mead and beer from Freistadt, no brewing on site was allowed. This was a powerful privilege, and guaranteed the citizens of Freistadt income from their beer brewing.

Speaking of the brewing itself, this was originally something that was done at home at the time. For practical reasons, the brewing was not necessarily done in the households, but in separate brew houses. In 1525, Freistadt had 12 dedicated brew houses, in 1637 still 5. One house was then set up as a dedicated white beer brew house (white beer was popular through the influence of Bohemian White Beer). From 1687 onwards, Freistadt only had two brew houses: the white brew house which was owned by the city and the brown brew house which was owned by the citizens. Every citizen had brewing rights, the amount of which was determined by the value of their house and noted in the city’s house registry.

Some houses were excluded from these brewing rights, either because they didn’t belong to citizens or because they were built much later (you couldn’t just buy yourself into it by building a new house within the city walls). Particular houses that were excluded were those owned by the church, which included one house (no. 11) which originally had brewing rights but was then bought by the church and donated to the Piarist religious order, thus losing that right, as well as the local school that was founded by the church. Houses owned by the city also didn’t have brewing rights for the brown brew house, which included the town hall, a tower of the city walls, the local city barracks, and the white brew house (well, it did have brewing rights, but they were separate from the citizens’ brewing rights); the same applied to houses owned by the state or nobility (e.g. the local salt authority building).

Before the new brew house was built, the brown brew house was also rented out, regularly for periods of 3 years. The tenants had to take on quite a bit of risk, they had to pay in a substantial deposit, and they had a number of responsibilities: the quality of the beer, they had to deliver Germ (baking yeast) to the local bakers (a strong indicator that the beer was top-fermented), they had to take care of selling the spent grains, they had to pay the brewer, the brewing workers, the coopers and the beer transporters. But they also had certain privileges: they were allowed to export beer on their own, and they were allowed to confiscate as contraband any beer or cider (Most) imported by innkeepers, of which they were allowed to keep 50%.

As for the ingredients, some of the barley was grown by the citizens themselves, while more barley was bought from local farmers around the city, and occasionally, when the local supply was used up, even from Bohemian cities such as Budweis/České Budějovice and Krumau/Český Krumlov with which Freistadt has had a close trade relationship. Hops were grown locally (Mühlviertel, the part of Upper Austria north of the river Danube, has historically been a minor hop growing region), but sometimes also brought in from as far as Saaz via Krumau traders.

The decision to build a new brewhouse was made for several reasons: the brown brew house was basically falling to bits and constantly needed repairs done, having an old brewery within the city walls always brought with it the danger of fire, the experience with renting it out hasn’t always been great and had caused some damages to the citizens in the past, and fear of competition (Bohemian beer from the North, beer from Linz from the South) and a possible loss of the exclusive “mile right” that required a consolidation and rationalization in the production of the local beer.

A precondition to build a new brewery was that the citizens had to buy the old white brew house including the brewing rights. One original idea was that that brew house would get modernized and the brown beer brewing would get moved there, but the alternative was to build an entirely new building outside the city walls. After some negotiations, the buying contract between the citizens and the city was finalized on December 31, 1770, when building works for a new brewery had already begun.

Building the brewery itself was a slow process, and it took 10 years until the brewery was completed. Where does the supposed founding date of 1777 come from then? That year was when the building works were the most active, and when most of the building was completed. The main gate of the brewery building bears the year 1777 because of it.

The old brew houses were emptied and equipment was moved over to the new brew house in 1780. Some of the old coppers were sold to the local copper smith to turn them into new coppers for the brewery. The white beer brew house was sold in 1781, and the buyer with his new house was admitted as a citizen of Freistadt, receiving the transferred brewing rights from the old brown beer brew house of 30 Eimer.

At what scale did this new brewery operate? For the early years, this is hard to tell, but we know from an 1886 ad that the brewery was selling a 48 hectolitre copper pan, an iron coolship of the same volume and a sparger “due to the conversion to machine operation”. From brewing statistics of the same time, we also know that the brewery was brewing about 10,000-11,000 hectolitres of beer a year, which pans out to 1 batch a day on 4 to 5 days a week. With that amount of brewing, they were considered a medium-sized brewery for Upper Austria. Other industrial breweries, like Dreher in Schwechat, brewed at an entirely different scale at the same time, around 450,000 hl per year. For Freistädter brewery, it was obviously good enough to satisfy the demand of the local market. A shift in production size seem to have happened in the 1890s, when the annual amount went from 11,150 hl in 1892 up to 19,861 hl in 1898. Up to 1930, this annual amount remained about the same (most likely interrupted by brewing restrictions during World War 1), at roughly 20,000 hl per year.

Ironically, the Braucommune in Freistadt was only added to the company registry at the commercial court in Linz in 1895. This registration clearly listed which house numbers were included as shareholders. It even very clearly says “Company owner is a society of the respective owners of the following houses located in Freistadt: 1, 2, 3, 4, […]”, cementing that the company ownership has been bound to the houses, not the citizens.

Nowadays, Freistädter brewery has the status of a local brewery serving the local market, brewing beer that generally has a good reputation. Distribution is limited, and within Austria, is mainly limited to Mühlviertel (i.e. Upper Austria north of the river Danube), a few major cities of Upper Austria including Linz, and then Vienna, Austria’s capital. As for the annual production volume, it has grown in recent years: for 2013, the brewery reported 65,000 hl per year, but by the end of 2018, more than 100,000 hl per year had been brewed.

Fun fact: thanks a former work colleague of mine who lives in Freistadt (though outside the city walls), I visited the brewery a few times in 2007/2008, for a monthly event called “Abpiff” (lit. blowing the final whistle) at the brewery: for a modest fee of €8, you would get a snack and about 2 hours time to pour (and drink!) as much beer as you wanted from gravity-dispensed serving casks (designated drivers were of course provided with non-alcoholic drinks). This continued until the final whistle was blown, and no more new serving casks were tapped. According to my former work colleague, this wasn’t just an event for the local beer lovers to get together, but also an opportunity for the brewery to try out new beers and one-offs. I loved the concept of it, and whenever The Event™ is over, I’d love to go back to it.

(As a source for this article, I mainly used the 1937 book 160 Jahre Braucommune Freistadt as well as various statistics from Gambrinus, the Austrian “brewing and hop newspaper”)

Who was Meindl?

People who have read my book about Vienna Lager will probably remember the rather formative trip of Anton Dreher to England and Scotland. He went on that journey with Gabriel Sedlmayr as well as two other people, Georg Lederer from Nuremberg and a guy only mentioned by his surname, Meindl, and that he was a brewer’s son from Braunau. At the time of writing the book, I couldn’t find out who that Meindl guy was, and I didn’t really bother as he didn’t seem to have any further influence on Anton Dreher’s brewing experiments and ventures. But recently, my thoughts kept coming back to him, and I decided to find out more who Meindl was.

Searching for beer brewers named Meindl from Braunau first got me to a list of members of the “association for the support and promotion of industry and commerce in Inner and Upper Austria”, listing a “Meindl Georg”, a “civil beer brewer” from Braunau. So we now have a first name, Georg, that should help us quite a bit more.

(in case you’re confused, it’s an Austrian practice to sometimes list the surname before the first name; I myself didn’t realize this was strange until German colleagues of mine commented on it)

My first findings when searching for that name weren’t particularly cheerful, though: Georg Meindl, brewer from Braunau, was put under legal guardianship in July 1840 because of his “proven stupidity”. It’s not clear when this ended or what the exact root cause for this court decision was. At least in 1847 though, he was clearly active as a brewer and seemingly worked on technical improvements to his brewery, when he presented a “beer mashing apparatus” (likely a mash stirrer) constructed according to an “English method” at an industrial exhibition in Linz.

While still working as a beer brewer, Meindl’s personal interests seem to have turned more towards breeding animals, though: he was actively involved in organizing the agricultural fair in Braunau, providing space for the festivities both on his land and in his inn. He also participated in 1855 in the exhibition and prize competitions, showing his Cochin, Brazilian and English breeds of chicken, and placing fourth for a bull of his. At the agricultural exhibition in Linz in 1858, he also exhibited Essex pigs.

In an index of businesses of Upper Austria from 1865, we also see Georg Meindl listed as one of 11 active brewers in Braunau. Beyond that, there’s not much more to be found. When we continue to search further, it seems like we might going full circle: in August 1888, Hermann Meindl, a brewer’s son from Braunau, was put under legal guardianship due an “officially determined mental disorder”. The legal guardian put in place by the court was his brother, Georg Meindl, a railway station restaurateur. Both were likely sons of Georg Meindl, the brewer.

Today, Meindl brewery in Braunau doesn’t exist anymore. I have not been able to find out when exactly Georg Meindl’s brewery closed down. As a brewer and businessman, Georg Meindl certainly must have been successful enough, but unlike his travel companions to England in 1833, his work did not have the same impact on the beer industry.

Interpreting a 1960s Bavarian Dunkel Recipe

Whenever somebody asks me how I would brew a Bavarian Dunkel, I have to respond that I never actually brewed one on my own. Instead, I rather point to an authentic modern-ish recipe from a Bavarian brewery from the 1960s.

A few years ago, Urban Chestnut Brewery from St. Louis, MO posted a sheet from 1967 brewing records of Brauerei Erharting in Bavaria. Their brewmaster, Florian Kuplent, had originally apprenticed there, and most likely got his hands on these records that way.

The recipe is interesting because there are a lot of assumptions baked into it that you’d only know if you had an idea about Bavarian brewing. It also challenges conventional wisdom that Bavarian brewers would just brew their Dunkel from 100% Munich malt. At least in the 1960s, this was not true anymore for this recipe.

This recipe for Export Dunkel starts with the grist: it simply says 1350 kg of malt, of that 50 kg pale malt (lit. “Hellmalz”), 50 kg CaraMunich (originally CaraMünch, the German brand name), 10 kg roasted malt (Farbmalz in the original). What the recipe doesn’t say is the rest. The use of Munich malt (likely on the darker side) was simply implied from the type of beer that was being brewed. The pale malt was most likely a Pilsner malt. That way, we end up with a grist like that:

  • 1240 kg Munich malt (91.9%)
  • 50 kg Pilsner malt (3.7%)
  • 50 kg CaraMunich malt (3.7%)
  • 10 kg roasted malt, e.g. Carafa special II (0.7%)

Why the Pilsner malt? I can only speculate, but I assume that this might have been formulated under the assumption that the Munich malt had so little diastatic power that it would only self-convert and not fully convert the (enzymatically inactive) caramel and roasted malts.

The next part is the mash. It starts with doughing in the malt and letting it sit for 20 minutes at 35°C. This was typically done to ensure that all the malt was fully hydrated. Nowadays, this would be ensured through a pre-masher that would combine water and malt just before it goes into the mash tun.

Then, the mash was heated up to 52°C within 15 minutes. The mash tun must have been heatable.

The recipe then further mentions to mashes. For the first mash, 22.5 hl of mash were pumped into the kettle while the stirrer was running. In the kettle, the mash the underwent a multi-step mash on its own: 10 minutes protein rest at 52°C while a bit of wort was drawn off (Malzauszug) and kept in the Grant, 10 minutes saccharification at 60°C, 10 minutes saccharification at 65°C, 70°C until iodine test was negative and the mash was fully converted (normally 20 to 25 minutes) and then 75°C for another 5 minutes.

This step mash prior to boiling the mash is done to maximize the use of the enzymes that will eventually be destroyed, and to convert as much starch as possible, so that the intense boil will only extract some more starches to be converted in the second mash.

Then the mash was brought to a boil, boiled for 35 minutes and then mixed back into the main mash which then reached a temperature of 65°C.

Then the second mash started: 23 to 23.5 hl of mash were again pumped into the kettle, rested for 10 minutes at 65°C, then again rested at 70°C until iodine test was negative, and then 10 minutes more at 75°C. It was then boiled for 25 minutes, and mixed back into the main mash to reach a temperature of 74°C.

The wort that was drawn off must have then been mixed back in, the recipe is not fully clear on this, though. I don’t know exactly why, but I assume that this was done to retain some amylase enzymes and ensure that some end up in the mash just before lautering to help convert any last few bits of starch (even though this is unlikely given how thorough the extraction must have been through 2 long decoction boils).

Then lauter and sparging happened to collect about 100 hl of sweet wort which was then boiled for 2.5 hours. The resulting amount of wort at the end would have been 78 to 79 hl with an OG of 12.7 to 12.8 °P.

The hopping schedule looked like this:

  • beginning of the boil: 4 kg Hallertauer hops
  • 1 hour after beginning of the boil: 4 kg Hallertauer hops
  • 45 minutes before the wort is pumped off the kettle: 3 kg Spalter hops

The last one is particularly important: the timing does not depend on the end of the boil, but rather on when the wort is moved from the kettle to the chillers. None of the hop additions come with any indication of alpha acid content. There is one source though where we can get an estimation: international hop trader Barth Haas has its full range of historic hop reports online, both in German and English. The 1966-1967 report in English at least reports the “bitter value Wöllner” for some hops: 6.2 for Hallertauer hops and 6.6 for Spalter hops, both from the 1966 crop.

This “bitter value Wöllmer” was an early approach to estimate the bittering quality of hops. In particular, this value is calculate as alpha acid % + beta acid % / 9. For both Hallertauer and Spalter hops, we can assume that the alpha acid content is roughly the same as the beta acid content.

6.1 = x + x / 9 and solving for x gets us an alpha acid content of about 5.5% for Hallertauer hops.

6.6 = x + x / 9 and solving for x gets us an alpha acid content of about 5.9% for Spalter hops.

Bear in mind that these are just estimations, but should nevertheless give us a general idea about whether these were more high or low alpha acid for the variety.

And this is how you interpret a 1960s German recipe for Bavarian Dunkel.

2021, The Year of Vienna Lager?

Yesterday, I half-jokingly tweeted that two UK breweries best known for brewing German-style beers brewing a collaboration Vienna Lager is proof that 2021 is the year of Vienna Lager.

This actually made me reflect a bit on what happened since I published my book about the beer style. The book itself was very well received. I really feel like it filled a gap, and cleared up a lot of confusion about the style’s history. Of course, it takes a while to spread that knowledge, and I still come across some of the old myths around Vienna Lager that I was able to dispel.

Red Willow Brewery were the first ones to contact me about their own Vienna Lager. They had recently brewed one (named Meaningless, because of the Ultravox lyrics “This means nothing to me / Oh, Vienna” and all their beer names end with -less), and then found out about my book which they liked a lot. They were happy to send me a sample, and it was a good beer. Maltiness and bitterness were on the low end of the scale, but it’s certainly the kind of beer of which I’d have many more in one session, and thus in my opinion represented the spirit of Vienna Lager, to be an easily drinkable, flavourful beer that you can just enjoy with no fuzz.

One of the more surprising requests got to me just after Christmas when Rune Lindgreen of People Like Us reached out to me to get input on a Vienna Lager recipe. They were in the process of developing a coffee-infused Vienna Lager, certainly not the most traditional approach to the style, and wanted to get their base recipe counter-checked. I didn’t really have to do much, as the recipe looked fairly solid (I won’t go into details, but mostly Vienna malt as base malt, with small amounts of a few specialty malts). Then COVID hit me really bad, and it took me a while to recover from that, but a few months ago, I received several cans of the beer. Even though I’m not much of a coffee drinker, I was really impressed by this rather unusual interpretation: the base beer tasted exactly like I’d expect a modern Vienna Lager, some maltiness, balanced hop bitterness, well-attenuated, all with a distinct Vienna malt character, while the coffee added a particular roasted bitterness with some fruitiness that was enjoyable even for me.

By far the biggest surprise though was when Westerham Brewery from Kent got in touch with me. They had read my book, and took this line as a challenge:

As of 2020, no maltings is known to produce a Vienna malt using a historic variety such as Haná or Chevallier.

They got in touch with Crisp Malt, a traditional Norfolk-based maltings that still employs traditional floor malting techniques. In recent years, Crisp Malt has put considerable work in reestablishing old heritage barley varieties and turning them into quality malts. One of these heritage varieties is Haná, the old Moravian barley variety that was hailed the most in Austria for its brewing qualities. Crisp Malt had previously released a Haná Pilsner malt, and so they had the resources to also create a Haná Vienna malt. Long story short, Westerham brewed a Vienna Lager from it, and Crisp Malt started selling the malt as part of their small batch series. While I didn’t do much other than research and write a wee book, I’m full of joy to have inspired a brewery and a maltings to collaborate and produce a malt and a beer based on what I’ve written. I think it also speaks for the beer style that not only people are enthusiastic about it, but that even businesses are willing to take on some risk in recreating it true to the historic original.

Earlier this year, I was able to visit my family in Austria, which also gave me the chance to try out Austrian supermarket Vienna Lagers. That’s right, ever since two large Austrian breweries, Ottakringer and Schwechater (actually the original brewery where Vienna Lager was invented, nowadays owned by Heineken), released modern recreations of the style, Vienna Lager is a thing again back in its country of origin. I tested this by simply going to a local supermarket and picking two 4-packs of canned Vienna Lager. Austrian Märzen (similar to Bavarian Helles, but with a more robust bitterness) and Radler are still dominating Austrian supermarket beer aisles, but the fact that I can get two different mainstream brands in a regular supermarket shows that there is a niche for the style that goes way beyond craft beer.

Both beers are very similar: some maltiness, very well-attenuated, balanced bitterness, good body, a pale amber colour that is just a tad darker than e.g. Pilsner Urquell, and incredibly easy drinking and refreshing. The Schwechater version even features a picture of Anton Dreher, the inventor of the style, together with an extremely brief description of the style’s history. A tiny bit of beer history education.

Speaking of beer history education, Craft Beer & Brewing published a great article by Jeff Alworth summarizing the history of Vienna Lager, as well my historic reconstruction of the original Vienna Lager as it was brewed in the 1870s. On top of that, another book touching the subject of Vienna Lager was published, unfortunately in German only. Die Geschichte der Brauerei Schwechat, co-authored by Schwechater brewmaster Andreas Urban, which dissects the history of Schwechater brewery and the Dreher family in greatest detail, even better than my own book, with a large amount of previously unpublished pictures. It very much focuses on the brewery itself, though, so if you’re interested in Vienna Lager itself or don’t understand German, I can still recommend my own book. 😉

My views may be skewed, as I’ve been immersed in the whole topic of Vienna Lager for quite a while now, but at least my impression is that there is indeed an increased interest in the beer style. I’m very glad about that, as I still think it’s a fantastic beer. Donzoko’s and Braybrooke’s collaboration is just the latest interpretation of the style, but I’m sure it won’t be the last. In the “German Brewing” Facebook group, pictures of both home-brewed and commercially brewed Vienna Lager are posted at least semi-regularly, people on various social media platforms contact me to tell me about their latest home-brewed examples, and even I, together with a friend, recently brewed a 10° Abzugsbier version (well, it turned into a 11° beer as we overshot our expected efficiency) which is currently lagering. So, 2021 may indeed be the year of Vienna Lager.

My Summer Beer 2021

Due to a rather bad episode of COVID, I hadn’t brewed a beer since October 2020, a Helles, which, when I bottled it in April this year, didn’t properly bottle-condition, and instead became an oxidized mess.

So this beer was a fresh start, my first home-brewed beer in a long time, and just something I wanted to have for myself. When I developed that recipe, I got inspired by two things:

First, the Czech Republic’s culture for lower-alcohol beers, with original gravities of 10°P or lower, and moderate amounts of alcohol of 4% ABV and lower.

Second, a particular Leichtbier that I had at Mahrs Bräu in Bamberg, which they call Sommerpils: it’s a very bitter beer at only 2.8% ABV and 7.2°P OG, and the first time I realized that highly hopped beers with low ABV can work really well.

After some thinking, I came up with an idea: I wanted to create a Czech-inspired 8° beer, with a good amount of bitterness coming from a late hop addition at flameout. One particular hop variety that I really liked in the past was Brewers Gold. I had used it in a Golden Ale previously, and it just gave off lovely citrusy notes with a fruitiness that some describe as blackcurrant.

But why would I call it Czech-inspired? First of all, the OG: 8°P is something that you would in the Czech Republic more often that in e.g. Germany. German Leichtbiere are typically even lower than that.

Second, the grist: I decided to stick to just Bohemian Pilsner malt and a small ~3% addition of a dark caramel malt, in my case CaraBohemian.

Third, the mashing regime: I’m a huge fan of double decoction. Even though it takes a long time, it has given me very good results in previous beers. In particular, I’m using an enhanced double decoction scheme that basically skips protein rest or keeps it to a very short amount time. Decoction mashing is also extremely common in Czech brewing.

Fourth, the bittering hops: I used Saaz hops simply because I had them available, they’re reliable and suitable for what I wanted to achieve. As aroma hops, as mentioned above, I got Hallertau-grown Brewers Gold.

Let’s quickly compare this to the PGI regulation for the term “Czech Beer”: at least 80% of the sugar in the wort needs to be from malt from Czech barley varieties (which I assume Weyermann’s Bohemian Pilsner malt should fulfill), at least 30% of alpha acids from hops must come from Czech hop varieties (I’m using Saaz for bittering), local water must be used (I do that), bottom-fermenting yeast must be used, and decoction mashing must be used. I’d say I’m pretty close, except I don’t brew in the Czech Republic, nor do I attempt to get any PGI Czech Beer certification for my home-brewed beer. Nevertheless, the regulation is still a good indicator of what’s considered to be traditional or necessary for Czech beer, and therefore also serves as a good template for Czech-style or Czech-inspired beers.

Grist, hop additions, yeast and basic numbers.

The brew day itself was relatively uneventful, except for a slightly higher than expected OG of 9.4°P. The 8° beer became a 9° beer. I can cope with that.

I chilled the wort, pitched plenty of Lallemand Diamond Lager yeast, and just let it ferment. When the beer was fully attenuated, I decided not to bother with lengthy lagering, but instead just slowly lowered the temperature down to -1°C, kept it there for a few days, and then bottled the beer.

My Czech-inspired beer is now bottle-conditioned and ready to be consumed. When I first poured it, I was surprised about how hazy it was. Even after several more days in the fridge, it still remains hazy. I blame hop haze from the flame-out addition, but to be honest, I don’t actually care. Because the beer itself tastes great.

It’s got a full body, at a FG of 2.2°P, and with 3.9%ABV, it’s a very drinkable beer with a robust bitterness that lingers on. The Brewers Gold hops provide a nice citrusy flavour, but its additional fruitiness in the aroma combined with a slightly lower than expected carbonation (my fault) gives the beer an English Bitter vibe. Brewers Gold was originally an English hop variety, and it still shows in this bottom-fermented beer.

All in all, I’m really happy with the result. It’s a nice, refreshing beer perfect for a hot summer. I still have ~17 litres in my fridge that likely won’t last till the end of summer.

And finally, a photo of what the beer actually looks like. An alternative title for this blog post that I had in mind earlier was “my crispy boi is also a hazy boi”.

The Struggle Between Top- And Bottom-Fermented Beer In Cologne

This was supposed to be an article about Wiess, the legendary white beer predecessor of Kölsch. In a discussion with my friend Ben a few months ago we came to the topic of how little is actually known about Wiess and its history. So I tried my hands at researching it, and couldn’t really find anything through my usual sources. My next step was to go the Schultze-Bernd library at VLB Berlin, a vast collection of historic material about beer and brewing, curated by Gesellschaft für Geschichte des Brauwesens (GGB; lit. “Society for the History of Brewing”). I got to talk with their librarian, and she told me that she had done some research herself, but wasn’t really able to find much. I nevertheless tried to see what I could find. I didn’t find out much, either, but instead, I was able to dig up some interesting details about the history of brewing in Cologne during the 19th and early 20th century, including the struggle between top- and bottom-fermented beers in the city.

When the guilds were disbanded in Cologne in 1798 and the occupying French introduced freedom of trade, breweries in the city started exploding, from 52 in 1794 to 128 breweries in 1828. The city also grew massively, and the conflict from before the freedom of trade of outside brewers trying to sell their beer in Cologne was less noticeable as the demand in beer increased massively, as well. And while outside breweries were seen as a nuisance in the 1830s, they were of little significance: in 1839, only 2190 hl of Bavarian beer were imported into the city, from places like Bamberg, Kulmbach and Würzburg.

The first attempt of brewing bottom-fermented beer in Cologne was conducted in 1831 by a Bavarian Jewish brewer named Rothschild. The brewery failed, though, and was turned into a sugar factory only 6 years later. The second bottom-fermenting brewery was owned by a brewer called Ehemann, and formed the foundation for the later Adler brewery. In total, bottom-fermenting only grew slowly in these times, with two breweries in 1850, and four in 1869.

A major issue for them was to build reliably cool lagering cellars. Already the top-fermenting breweries had similar issues. To keep the cool air somewhat in, beer cellars were only opened during the night. Some of the beer still got sour. When it was an early stage of souring, it actually was a popular drink, and got sold under the name Steckenalt. Beer that got too sour was unrecoverable, and sometimes had to be poured out, causing substantial losses to some brewers.

Proper ice cellars only started being built in the 1850s, and in winters with very little ice, ice was brought to Cologne from as far as Norway.

From 1870 to 1900, the beer market was consolidated, and the number of breweries fell from 135 to just 68. This was due to technological improvements in beer brewing, giving an advantage to the more mechanized and automated breweries and those who could produce their own ice through the use of artificial refrigeration. Bottom-fermented beers were so successful that even some of the largest top-fermenting breweries in Cologne switched to bottom-fermentation. For some time it looked like top fermentation in Cologne was doomed.

Interestingly, the smaller brewers managed to overcome their crisis by introducing some automation and refrigeration on a smaller scale, while the growth of bottom fermentation stopped around 1900, and large breweries now faced the issue that their breweries were oversized for the production amounts, causing increased production costs.

This actually gave the small top-fermenting breweries a slight advantage: they managed to slightly cool their cellars by putting ice in containers hanging down from the ceiling, producing the perfect conditions to store top-fermented beers. Through that, they got rid of much of the dangers of beer spoilage, could brew weaker beers even during the summer (that otherwise would have spoilt), had a shorter turnaround time on their beers (virtually no lagering), and were able to achieve a more consistent quality.

Beer taxation was reformed in the early 20th century, and that had some impact on brewing in Cologne as well: the brewing tax law of 1906 introduced consistent beer taxation for all of North Germany. It contained some provisions that were helpful to the small breweries of Cologne, in particular a progressive tax based on the amount of malt used by the brewery. The law also introduced a prohibition of “malt surrogates” (such as unmalted grains, sugar or other starch sources) for bottom-fermented beers. Suddenly, the large bottom-fermenting breweries couldn’t use some of their classic ingredients like rice, maize and sugar, which at the time were cheaper than malted barley. One local beer type in particular, Knuppbier, a bottom-fermented beer sweetened with sugar, couldn’t be brewed the same way and had to be switched to top fermentation, so some of the breweries had to set up separate top-fermenting brewing departments just for that beer type.

World War I changed everything again and brewing ingredients were strictly rationed. The malt surrogate prohibition for bottom-fermented beers was still in effect, while for top-fermented beers, artificial sweeteners, food colouring and non-beer-derived CO2 for carbonation were allowed. The restrictions were tightened several times which made brewing even weak beers entirely unprofitable, so several small breweries ceased operations.

The detrimental effect on top fermentation in Cologne was noticeable after the war: while in 1913, 41% of all the beer brewed in Cologne was still top-fermented, that share had dropped to just 6.7% in 1922. Of 53 top-fermenting breweries before the war, 29 had shut down after the war, while 4 had switched to bottom fermentation. The main reason why not more of these small breweries folded was often the direct connection of the brewery with a brewery tap, a pub of sorts that only sold that brewery’s beer as well as food, of course with the idea that people would drink even more if they had something to eat with it. These pubs were often set up to look rustic, which combined as their status as small Hausbrauerei gave it a certain charm that attracted the people of Cologne.

Of course, credit where credit is due: this article is mostly based on the PhD thesis of Hans Trinius at the University of Cologne, written in 1924. Not only does it give quite detailed insight into the brewing industry and its ups and downs from the 19th century up to ~1922 (it also contains lots and lots of statistics related to production, import&export, taxation, etc.), it also very obviously influenced a number of other books and publication surrounding the topic of beer and Cologne.