Anton Dreher Jr.’s 1878 Patent on Pasteurisation

I recently came across a patent (Reichsprivileg, lit. Imperial Privilege, as they were called at the time) about a conservation method that had been granted to Anton Dreher Jr. which he had submitted in August 1878.

As the patent submission was entirely handwritten in Kurrent, the predominant cursive handwriting in Austria at the time, I had great troubles reading it (despite having learned the basics in elementary school, 31 or 32 years ago, for like a day, just for fun), but sending it through Transkribus with a special Kurrent model yielded great results that required only very little correction.

Reading the patent itself was actually quite interesting: it specifically acknowledges “the famous French chemist” Pasteur’s work on pasteurisation of beer and wine to improve their shelf life and transport stability for export into tropical countries. One limitation they still had was it required sturdy packaging, which at the time were either well-sealed stoneware or extra thick glass bottles, in which the beer had to be pasteurised. Otherwise, all the carbon dioxide would escape, or even worse, the packaging would not withstand the internal pressure.

With all the carbon dioxide removed, the beer would only be an “unpalatable alcoholic extract”, the Imperial Privilege says. The disadvantage of the required sturdy bottles was that they were very heavy, which greatly increased the freight costs.

Dreher’s approach was the following: the beer was packaged into any vessel that could be tightly sealed, such as glass bottles, stoneware bottles, or casks. The packaged beer was then put into a larger vessel that could withstand internal pressures of up to 10 atmospheres (roughly 10 bar, or 147 psi), the vessel was filled with water and sealed up. The water was then heated either through direct firing or steam to the degree it should be heated.

Through thermometers and pressure gauges, the temperature and internal pressure could be determined and based on that, the required counterpressure in the sealed vessel could be applied and adjusted.

Once the required temperature has been reached, cooling is started by applying cold water. As the internal pressure is lowered, the counterpressure equally needs to be lowered, until everything has cooled down to regular atmospheric temperatures.

The specific novelty of this approach, according to the Imperial Privilege, is that it allowed pasteurisation of beer for export in any vessel instead of just sturdy bottles.

The header of the submitted Imperial Privilege, literally saying “description”, with a crossed-out 1877 revenue stamp with a face value of 15 Kreuzer, and Emperor Franz Josef’s face on it.

You can find the original letters in the digital archive of Imperial Privileges of the Austrian Patent Office, while this is the transcription of the German text:

Der berühmte Französische Chemiker Pasteur hat zuerst darauf hingewiesen, dass gegohrene Getränke, als: Wein und Bier eine grössere Haltbarkeit und Transportfähigkeit in tropische Länder erlangen, wenn dieselben bis zur Siedhitze erwärmt und darauf wieder abgekühlt werden. Die Erfahrung hat die Zweckmäßigkeit dieses Verfahrens bestätigt und es ist der früher unmögliche oder wenigstens höchst riskante Transport solcher Getränke in tropische Länder wesentlich erleichtert worden.

Die Erwärmung des Bieres ist nun mit Schwierigkeiten verbunden, weil die Kohlensäure, bekanntlich ein Hauptbestandtheil des Bieres, bei dem Erwärmen entweicht und nur ein ungeniessbarer alkoholhaltiger Extract übrig bleibt. Um nun die Kohlensäure auch in dem erwärmten Biere zu conserviren, müsste man bisher zu dem Erwärmen Gefäße wählen, welche das Entweichen derselben verhindern. Dazu eigneten sich nur Glas- oder Steingutflaschen, welche um dem Drucke der Kohlensäure und Ausdehnung der durch Erwärmung ausgedehnten Flüchtigkeit zu widerstehen, sehr dickwandig sein müssen.

Dadurch würde aber sowohl die Waare als deren Fracht empfindlich vertheuert.

Es ist mir nun gelungen ein Verfahren zu entdecken, wodurch die Erwärmung des Bieres bei vollkommener Konservirung seiner Kohlensäure in jeder Art dicht verschließbarer Gefässe ermöglicht wird.

Bei dieser Methode wird dem in der Umhüllung befindlichen Biere und seinem durch die Temperatur bedingten Drucke ein Gegendruck entgegengesetzt welcher jenem das Gleichgewicht hält oder ihn noch um etwas überschreitet.

Dadurch wird das Entweichen der Kohlensäure verhindert und der Zweck, das Bier mit seinem ganzen Kohlensäure-Vorrath zum Versandt zu bringen, vollkommen erreicht.

In ein Gefäß, das einen Druck von 3, 4 bis 10 Atmosphären auszuhalten im Stande ist, werden eine beliebige Anzahl Flaschen, Steingutkrüge, Fässer etc gebracht, das Gefäß mit Wasser gefüllt und dann dicht abgeschlossen.

Hierauf wird dus eingefüllte Wasser bis zu dem gewünschten Temperatursgrade entweder mittels direkten Feuers oder durch Dampf erwärmet.

Mit der Erwärmung des die Bierbehältnisse umgebenden Wassers steigert sich natürlich die Wärme des Bieres selbst und damit auch dessen Druck.

Durch Thermometer und Manometer lässt sich seine Temperatur und sein Druck genau constatiren und der nothwendige Gegendruck darnach entsprechend reguliren.

Der Gegendruck wird durch eine einfache Wasserdruckpumpe erzielt.

Ist die Temperatur des Bieres bis zum gewünschten Wärmegrade gestiegen, so wird mit der Abkühlung durch kaltes Wasser begonnen und hauptsächlich daraufgesehen, dass die Abnahme des inneren Druckes mit dem äußeren Gegendrucke gleichen Schritt hält, bis das Bier zur gewöhnlichen atmosphärischen Temperatur abgekühlt ist.

Die Neuheit der eben beschriebenen Entdeckung besteht demnach darin, dass Bier in jeder Art verschliesbarer Gefäße unter Anwendung äußeren Druckes zum Transporte in tropische Länder und zum Transporte überhaupt fähig gemacht werden kann, während früher nur Bier in Flaschen zu diesem Zwecke präparirt werden konnte.

Wien, am 20 August 1878.

Photos of Johann Götz from the National Archives in Kraków

This is a bit of an unusual type of post for my blog. Instead of lots of texts, I’ll be mostly posting a few images instead, namely photos depicting Johann Götz (aka Jan Ewangelista Goetz) that I found in the National Archives in Kraków. The quality may not be the absolutely best, as I basically just took snapshots with my Pixel 6 phone camera, but it’s good enough for now.

None of the photos were dated, so when it comes to the age of them, all I can say is “1893 or earlier”.

Photo of Johann Götz by Awit Szubert, Kraków. Digitisation licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Photo of Johann Götz by Awit Szubert, Kraków.

The first one is a photo taken by Awit Szubert (1837-1919), a photographer from Kraków. In this photo, Johann Götz wears historic clothing of Polish noblemen, a kołpak hat with a feather on his head, and boots. Attached the clothes is some sort of side arm, like a knife or a small sword. Johann Götz is stood next to a table and has his left hand on a book. On the other side of him, there’s a cushioned chair.

The next two photos show Johann Götz wearing a suit jacket with two medals, one around his neck, and one as a breast medal. Both photos were taken by Polish photographer Walery Rzewuski (1837-1888), based in Kraków. The breast medal is the Golden Cross of Merit with the Crown, while the one around his neck is the Knight Commander medal of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Sylvester.

The final set of photos are two portraits of Johann Götz by Franz Grainer (1840-1904) in Reichenhall, Bavaria. Again wearing a suit jacket but this time buttoned up all the way, he looks more serious with a straight head on the left one, but a bit more smiley (as much as that’s noticeable with his beard) with a slightly tilted head on the right one. Franz Grainer was also the court photographer of Princess Therese of Oldenburg, as is noted on the back of one of the photos.

Judging from the years of death of each of the credited photographers, I would say that the photos themselves are all in the public domain (in Poland, copyright expires 70 years after an author’s death). Please note that this is not legal advice.

Malt Surrogates in Northern German Beer in 1890/1891

The German Brewing Tax Law of 1906, which went into effect on June 3, 1906, regulated the permissible ingredients for bottom- and top-fermented beers within the Northern German Brewing Tax Association. From that point onwards, bottom-fermented beers could only be brewed from barley malt, hops, water and yeast, while top-fermented beers could also be brewed using malt made from other grains, various sugars (beer sugar, cane sugar, invert sugar, starch sugar, caramel colouring) and sweeteners (for low-ABV beers only). But before that, beer tax laws in North Germany were much lenient (Bavarians hated that), and ingredients like rice could be used.

I recently came across statistics for the tax year 1890/1891 that give greater insight into that. Previously, I also wrote about bottom- vs top-fermenting breweries in Germany resp. Prussia in 1889/1890. But this goes even more into detail.

I won’t reproduce all the numbers here as that would be too much. But let’s look at some of the highlights:

An average beer brewed in the Northern German Brewing Tax Association in 1890/1891 would have been (by weight of ingredients):

  • 95.75% barley malt
  • 2.78% wheat malt
  • 0.01% other grains
  • 0.51% rice
  • 0.73% sugar
  • 0.03% syrup
  • 0.19% other malt surrogates

The most rice was was used in Bremen (the statistics don’t include 3 export breweries) with 3.23% rice, Mecklenburg with 2.56%, and the Rhineland, with 2.38% of all ingredients used in brewing.

When it comes to brewing sugar, Brandenburg stands out with 2.85% of the total brewing ingredients by weight. They also similarly stand out for the use of wheat malt, with 16.08%. That’s probably an artifact of the Berliner Weisse brewing industry (Berlin was part of Brandenburg) which used plenty of wheat malt. The Province of Posen was number two, with 10.46%, which absolutely makes sense: the city of Grätz/Grodzisk Wielkopolski is located in that historic Prussian province, and is best known for the Grodziskie beer style which is brewed from 100% smoked wheat malt.

It’s also interesting to see what percentage of breweries even used malt surrogates of any kind (including rice, sugar, etc.) in the first place: 83.33% in Bremen, 80.65% in Lübeck, 75% in Hamburg, and 59.46% in Anhalt. On the other end, where malt surrogates were used the least, are these places: Hohenzollern (0.85%, just 2 out of 234 breweries), Westphalia (4.49%), Province of Hesse-Nassau (8.02%) and Grand Duchy of Hesse (12.15%).

In the same statistics, we also get more insight into the distribution of top- vs bottom-fermenting brewing: the top places for bottom fermentation (in terms of production volume) in Northern Germany in 1890/1891 were:

  • Grand Duchy of Hesse, 100% bottom fermentation
  • Province of Hesse-Nassau, 99% bottom fermentation
  • Westphalia, 96% bottom fermentation
  • Brunswick, 95% bottom fermentation

Conversely, the top places where top fermentation still held on were:

  • Kingdom of Saxony, 44% top fermentation
  • Province of Posen, 40% top fermentation
  • Silesia, 39% top fermentation
  • Brandenburg, 38% top fermentation

Production Volumes of Johann Götz’s Breweries, 1847-1876

On my visit to the National Archives in Kraków, I came across quite a bit of material related to Johann Götz and his breweries. So who’s Johann Götz anyway, and what makes his breweries relevant?

Johann Evangelist Götz, or Jan Ewangelista Götz (sometimes spelled Goetz) as he’s called in Polish, was born in 1815 in Langenenslingen in modern-day Baden-Württemberg. Coming from a family of brewers, he was hired as a cellar master in 1837 at the Kleinschwechater brewery by Anton Dreher, who happened to be his cousin. After 1.5 years, he was promoted to brewery foreman and Dreher’s personal assistant. He was closely involved in brewing the first “real” Kleinschwechater Lager in 1840, and has been credited with improved the quality of the beer as well as the brewery’s overall efficiency. He was an important figure in the history of Vienna Lager, but his stint at Kleinschwechat was relatively short, as he moved to Galicia in 1845 where he co-founded the Okocim brewery not far from Kraków.

At a time when bottom-fermentation was still only catching on in Vienna and bakers started to feel a lack of availability of barm (brewer’s yeast, skimmed from fermenters of top-fermented beers), he went to the easternmost realms of the Austrian Empire and started a new, industrial brewery using the techniques he helped develop and perfect together with Anton Dreher. In doing so, he was (to my knowledge) the first one to establish a lager brewery in partitioned Poland.

Besides the brewery in Okocim, he also started another brewery in Kraków, in the Piasek district. One find I was very happy about when I went through the material in the National Archives was a German-language hand-written list of production statistics for both breweries. Though they were not quite complete for all years, they still give us great insight into the overall development and growth of both breweries.

Here are the statistics for the Okocim brewery by year. All amounts are in Eimer. One Eimer equals 56.589 liters, or about 0.566 hl. I added the equivalent hl in parentheses.

Year10° Beer13° Lager BeerCombined
18474,500 (2,546)3,000 (1,698)7,500 (4,244)
18504,900 (2,773)6,240 (3,531)11,140 (6,304)
18555,148 (2,913)12,776 (7,230)17,924 (10,143)
18602,304 (1,304)26,976 (15,265)29,280 (16,569)
18651,336 (756)35,648 (20,173)36,984 (20,929)
18701,200 (679)51,000 (28,860)52,200 (29,539)
18713,750 (2,122)47,850 (27,078)51,600 (29,200)
18721,600 (905)64,000 (36,217)65,600 (37,122)
18733,000 (1,698)80,000 (45,271)83,000 (46,969)

One interesting detail here is how the brewery produced both a 10° beer and a 13° beer (the degrees refer to the original gravity in Balling). This is something we know from Anton Dreher’s brewery, where these two beer strengths were the two main beers brewed at least until the 1890s. Distinguishing beers by OG is also still common in Czechia, though the main strengths there are more commonly 10° and 12°.

It is noticeable though that while the 10° beer was a relatively large share of the overall production in early years, it never grew beyond slightly more than 5,000 Eimer per year, and within 26 years the share of 10° beers in the overall production volume shrank from 60% to just 3.75%. I guess lower-strength beers weren’t particularly popular among Poles at the time…

In the same document, we also get statistics for Götz’s brewery in Kraków. Again the amounts are in Eimer, which the equivalent hectoliter in parentheses next to it.

YearAmount
18662,726 (1,542)
18675,190 (2,937)
18687,800 (4,414)
18698,000 (4,527)
18708,280 (4,685)
187110,600 (5,998)
187214,360 (8,126)
187317,000 (9,620)

Clearly, the Kraków brewery was producing at a much smaller scale. But still, at a combined 100,000 Eimer (56589 hl) for 1873, this was a sizeable brewing operation divided between locations.

The hand-written production statistics of the Götz-owned breweries in Okocim and Kraków, in German

I then also came across printed statistics (in Polish) from a few years after that lists production statistics up to 1876, plus many more details about the equipment and capacity of the Okocim brewery:

YearAmount
18477,500 (4,244)
185724,200 (13,694)
186734,000 (19,240)
187151,600 (29,200)
187265,000 (36,783)
187382,300 (46,573)
187481,600 (46,177)
187580,100 (45,328)
187673,900 (41,819)

In addition to that, we learn more about the brewery capacity: the malting floor had a size of 19,120 square foot (the foot used was probably the Wiener Fuß of about 316mm). The brewery had two brew houses, each of which could produce 3 turns of 220 Eimer each per day, so a theoretical capacity of up to 1,320 Eimer (747 hl) per day in total. Fermentation happened in 116 vats with a capacity of 55 Eimer each, while the lagering cellar held 443 lagering casks of 60 to 150 Eimer each, for a combined total of 47,000 Eimer of beer that could be lagered at once.

Leaflet with statistics about the Okocim brewery, in Polish

And similar information the branch in Kraków:

YearAmount
18675,200 (2,943)
18708,200 (4,640)
187110,600 (5,998)
187214,360 (8,126)
187315,560 (8,805)
187416,300 (9,224)
187518,170 (10,282)
187615,000 (8,488)

Both malt house and brew house were considerably smaller there: the malting floor only had a size of 4,200 square foot, and only one brewing system was in place that could produce 100 Eimer per turn, with up to 2 turns per day. The lagering capacity was also significantly smaller, with only 8,000 Eimer.

Leaflet with statistics about the Götz brewery in Kraków, in Polish

Visiting the National Archives in Kraków

On my recent trip to Kraków, I also spent a few hours at the National Archives to Kraków in an attempt to research two beer/brewing-related topics I’m interested in.

The way the National Archives in Poland work is that they’re decentralised, and archive material is stored geographically close to what it relates to, so if you’re interested in anything relating to Kraków and surroundings, the branch in Kraków is the one to go to.

I struggled a bit initially to understand the overall procedure, so here’s my attempt to document it if anybody else also wants to look up any documents from that archive.

  1. you search the archive for what you want to look up using this search form.
  2. If a document exists in digitised form, you can just read it online.
  3. If a document isn’t digitised yet, you can order it to view in the reading room of the respective archive. For that, you need to write down the archival group (collection) and the archival unit reference number. In this example, the collection would be Akta miasta Krakowa and the reference number would be 29/33/0/3.2.3/Kr 8243.
  4. For every reference number, fill out this form separately.
  5. Once the documents have been retrieved and are ready to be viewed, they will be reserved for 10 working days at the archive under your name, and you will receive a confirmation email that they’re available.
  6. Once you have that confirmation, you can book a time slot at the reading room. Don’t be worried if you only see one or two time slots available. These are just the morning and/or afternoon opening times. You don’t have to be exactly on time, and (at least from what I understood), your table will be available to you the whole morning or afternoon.

And that’s it. In the grand scheme, it’s not that hard, the overall process is just not well-documented yet in English and certain details, like how long will documents be kept for viewing, weren’t clear to me until I received the confirmation email. So always make sure to book your material far enough in advance, but not too far.

Now let’s talk about the archival material itself that I wanted to take a look at: a big reason for me to visit was to find out more about the historic Goldfinger brewery in Kraków. I previously did a little bit of research into Markus Goldfinger through online archives, mostly the Austrian newspaper archives. For more about that, please check out my article about the modern Goldfinger Brewery in Downers Grove, Illinois that I visited in June 2024.

Besides that, I also wanted to see what material there is relating to Johann Götz, the founder of Okocim brewery, as he not only operated his main brewery in Okocim, but also owned and operated a second brewery in Kraków.

Let me just say, my search regarding Johann Götz and Okocim was much more successful than the one regarding Markus Goldfinger and his brewery. There wasn’t much I could find about Goldfinger in the first place, and of two bundles of documents that I ordered, only one was made available to me. What I did get to view was a big bunch of correspondence between members of the Goldfinger family and the magistrate (think of it as the municipal office), most of them stamped with Austrian revenue stamps of 50 Kreuzer each (value nowadays would be roughly €8.50).

There was one letter that caught my eye, though:

A photo of a letter signed by M. Goldfinger and addressed to the Magistrate of Kraków.
A handwritten letter signed by M. Goldfinger, addressed to the Magistrate of Kraków.

What I could identify was the word “piwo” in the fifth row of the main text, which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be part of the phrase “piwnicy na piwo”, which translates to “beer cellar”.

Due to work, holidays and then a bit of illness, it took me a while to get it transcribed properly (I used Transkribus plus a lot of manual reading and trying to recognise individual letters because Transkribus’ result was far from perfect), but thanks to a good friend (thanks Filip!), I eventually managed to get it corrected and proof-read. The transcription goes like this:

Swietny Magistracie!

Niżej podpisany właściciel browaru piwnego, ulica św. Filipa, Kleparz w Krakowie uprasza Swietny Magistrat, do odebrania do użytku, budynku Słodowni i piwnicy na piwo w browarze mym jak wyżéj; a to podłóg planu zatwierdzonego przez Swietny Magistrat i rezolucyi L 21142 z dnia 20 września 1889 roku.

M. Goldfinger

Since I don’t speak a word of Polish (well, maybe one… piwo), I used DeepL to translate it for me, and this was the output:

Honourable Magistrate!

The undersigned owner of a beer brewery, St. Philip’s Street, Kleparz, Krakow, requests the Honorable Magistrate to put into use the Malt House and the beer cellar in my brewery as above; this according to the plan approved by the Honorable Magistrate and Resolution L 21142 of 20 September 1889.

M. Goldfinger

While the wording is a bit clunky (according to Filip, the language used in the Polish original is a bit dated), it’s basically a request from Markus Goldfinger to the magistrate for permission to start operating the malt house and the beer cellar.

So there’s a new mystery: why did Mr. Goldfinger require permission to operate a malt house and a beer cellar. Are these by any chance new ones that were built? The brewery was founded about 15 years prior, so the brewery presumably had a beer cellar and the means to malt barley by then (back then, a lot of breweries were still malting themselves).

Nevertheless, a very cool find, and it got me closer than ever before to be able to see and feel hand-written letters from Markus Goldfinger himself.

As for the history of Johann Götz and his breweries, I found a large amount of documents, photos and technical drawings (and interesting ones too!), so there is much more to unpack before I can publish a blog post about it.

My Year in Beer, 2024 Edition

2024 was an exciting year. For the first time, I was invited to speak at a conference about one of my favourite topics, Vienna Lager, and not just at one conference, but actually two. First at Heimbrau Convention (HBCon) in Romrod back in March, and most recently, at Sympozjum Piwowarów in Kraków, Poland.

Beyond just talking about Vienna Lager, both events were great: at HBCon, I learned everything there is to learn about brewing beer like Mönchsambacher Weihnachts-Bock which I then used later on in a home-brewed Franconian-style Kellerbier, drank lots of excellent home-brewed beers, and met up with lots of other homebrewers, while in Kraków, I got to meet people from the Polish craft beer scene as well as see a few super interesting talks about the history of Porter, the latest brewing trends in the US, and a rather enlightening introduction to the human sense of smell and taste.

I also managed to go to Bamberg 3 times. First, as a farewell to a good friend and beer aficionado who moved from Berlin to Bishkek earlier this year but had never been to Franconia before; then to celebrate my good friend Ben‘s 30th birthday by doing a crazy day trip where we took the first train in the morning from Berlin to Bamberg, went all over Bamberg, and then went home on the last train; and finally, as a place to stay and visit BrauBeviale, the annual brewing and beverage industry fair in Nuremberg. For a slight change, we ventured a bit further out and did a day trip to visit the breweries Hummel and Wagner in Merkendorf and Höhn in Memmelsdorf, followed by a leisurely Frühschoppen trip to Zur Sonne in Bischberg the next day, all breweries we had not been to before that were easy enough to reach by public transport (if you pre-plan your trip a bit).

For my 40th birthday, my wife got me a two week trip to the US, which we of course used as a beery holiday and as an opportunity to meet people we had previously only known or talked to online or heard of their beers. Our main stops were Chicago, Austin, and Boston, with visits to Dovetail, Goldfinger, Live Oak, Notch and a few more. It’s safe to say that the American craft lager scene is very strong and is brewing tasty, diverse beer at a high technical level, combined with an incredible enthusiasm for the products they create.

And at the beginning of October, I even managed to visit Oktoberfest and the Augustiner tent on the festival’s very last day.

On the beer writing side, I did not manage to get any new big projects started, but I was nevertheless productive: in 2024, I wrote and published 31 blog posts (including this one), adding up to more than 31,000 words. In terms of page views, these are the top 5 most often read articles of 2024 that I wrote in the same year:

  1. Why Augustiner’s new alcohol-free Helles is a big deal
  2. How To Brew Mönchsambacher Weihnachts-Bock, according to the brewmaster
  3. My Summer Beers for 2024
  4. Alcohol-Free Augustiner: The Tasting
  5. Liquid yeast: why do I even bother?

I was a bit surprised to see just how popular my blog posts about Augustiner’s new beer, an alcohol-free Helles, had gotten, but then, non-alcoholic beers with ≤ 0.5% ABV have been the big new trend in 2023 and 2024, with overall quality of beers massively improving compared to 5, 10, 20 years ago. At Oktoberfest, I then experienced the new Augustiner beer in its absolutely best state: properly cold and served fresh on draught by the liter, it is a delight that is virtually indistinguishable from the regular strength beer. I didn’t miss the alcohol in the beer, because it didn’t feel like it was actually missing, and there were none of the off-flavours typical for alcohol-free beer that would have reminded me of the fact what I was drinking.

But the actual number one most often read blog post this year was not even written in 2024, but rather A Very Biased Guide To Berlin Beer and Pubs, October 2023 Edition, which is now responsible for more than 30% of all the page views on my blog.

Cheers to that! And while I don’t have any other big beer history project lined up, I still have a few more interesting topics that I want to further research and discuss in this blog. Watch this space.

Visiting Sympozjum Piwowarów 2024

Earlier this month, I was invited to speak at the Sympozjum Piwowarów (lit. “Brewers’ Symposium”) in Kraków, Poland, which happened on 10th to 11th December, 2024.

At the Heimbrau Convention in Romrod earlier this year, I met the President of the PSBR, the Polish Association of Craft Breweries, who invited me to talk about the history of Vienna Lager, which I gladly accepted.

The journey from Berlin to Kraków is straightforward, but not exactly fast: a direct train line connects both cities, but it takes about 7 hours in each direction. On the positive side, PKPIC, the Polish train company operating InterCity trains, seem to be operating more reliably and more on time than Deutsche Bahn (DB), and even apologised for slight delays that would still be within DB’s definition of “being on time”.

On the evening before the conference, we attended the party for conference attendants. We didn’t stay too long, but it was great to meet a few people and shake a few hands. The conference venue was Klub STUDIO, a bit outside the city center, in the middle of what seemed like blocks and blocks of student accomodation. One of the great things about it though is that it comes with a brewery, Browar Górniczo-Hutniczy.

On the first day, I watched the talks of Randy Mosher, who spoke about the scientific taste of smell and taste, which was very enlightening. From what I understand, he’s been working on a book about that very topic, which should be out in 2025.

Randy Mosher on the stage. Behind him, a slide that says “We’re much better than we think. Humans can scent-track like dogs! * Cloth with chocolate flavor * People on all fours * Swinging noses side-to-side * Got better with practice”.

Right after that was Jamie Bogner’s talk about the latest trends in American craft brewing of 2024. Jamie Bogner is the co-founder and editorial director of Craft Beer & Brewing magazine. Of course, a lot of these trends are around IPAs, but these points stood out:

  • Hazy DIPAs are less and less consumed on draught, but more in packaged formats.
  • Lower ABV versions are more popular.
  • Hazy IPAs are branching out into further sub-categories, such as beers driven by Citra/Mosaic or NZ hops.
  • Noble hops are increasingly getting integrated into IPAs
  • Flowable hop products (flavour extracts) help with reducing loss and increasing intensity.
  • Most award-winning West Coast “IPAs” are fermented with W-34/70 these days.
  • Crystal malt has seriously fallen out of fashion, as customers want very pale beers (at least when it comes to West Coast IPA).
Jamie Bogner on stage, on the screen there’s a slide with the headline “American Brewing Trends December 2024”

After that talk, we talked to some of the people at the company stands. As the next scheduled talks were all in Polish, we decided to visit the stained glass museum instead, then went to visit the Kraków Christmas market, and finished with a few beers and dinner.

The next day, Martyn Cornell did his presentation on the history of Porter. Martyn said that he hopes that his book on the subject matter should get published at some point in 2025, and after seeing his talk, I’m even more looking forward to it than before.

Marty Cornell on stage, with the title slide on the screen, saying “Porter, the beer for working class Londoners that conquered the world”

My talk was right after Martyn’s, in which I briefly talked about how Vienna Lager was created, why it went extinct in Austria during World War I, and how it used to be brewed during the 19th century, based on historic sources. I all went okay, except I ran out of time a bit. No matter how well I thought I had prepared the talk and timed it, I still overran because speaking at home apparently is an entirely different thing than speaking on a stage.

Right after my talk, I had to leave quickly as I had an appointment in the National Archives in Kraków to review a few documents that I had ordered. I have yet to fully review the material I’ve taken pictures of, but I’m sure you’ll see a blog post or two in the next few days or weeks about it.

After the visit to the National Archives, we had early dinner (I had my first pierogi at a proper sit-down restaurant) to return to the venue for the Kraft Roku 2024 award ceremony. Kraft Roku (lit. “Craft of the Year”) is Poland’s craft beer competition. Even though we understood very little (Google Translate in camera mode at least helped me understand the text on the big screen), it was still great fun, the Górniczo-Hutniczy beers we had also helped.

The audience at the Kraft Roku award ceremony

We stayed at the party afterwards as long as we could, but eventually needed to leave because we had to catch our train back the next morning.

Overall, Sympozjum Piwowarów was an excellent event. Lots of very good presentations (though I couldn’t exactly understand many of them), lots of interesting people to meet, and just an expression of how active and enthusiastic the Polish craft beer scene is. As a friend of mine noted, in Germany you either have a very academic-industrial approach to beer, or you have the home-brew scene, but nothing in between. Well, this symposium exactly filled that “in between” gap.

(full disclosure: both train journey and hotel were paid for by the Sympozjum Piwowarów organisers for me and my wife)

The Colour of Vienna Lager: Somebody Got It Right

One question I’m often being asked is whether Vienna Lager from 100% Vienna malt is actually correct because when you look at beer style guidelines (most, often, the BJCP style guidelines), the minimum colour is often darker than what you’d get from just using Vienna malt.

This seems to have caused insecurities even among seasoned brewers who are otherwise well-informed about historic styles, as they sometimes get confronted by know-it-alls in their brewery taprooms.

One thing I always need to point out and remind people of is that style guidelines are primarily for competitions. They are neither prescriptive (there’s no beer police that will arrest you for brewing something out of style!) nor exhaustively descriptive. They define a subset to set the limits specifically for brewing competitions. You can brew whatever you want, even if it doesn’t match any specific style. That’s how new beer styles get created!

One criticism of mine in the context of Vienna Lager is that style guidelines (in particular BJCP) aren’t exhaustive enough to include historic Vienna Lager. That means that a historically accurate Vienna Lager probably wouldn’t fare well in a beer competition, most likely because it’s paler than what the style guidelines say.

But there’s hope on the horizon: when the Brewers Association (BA) released their 2024 style guidelines, I of course had to look at what they say about Vienna Lager. To my surprise, the minimum colour in the BA guidelines was 12 EBC, which is roughly what you get from 100% Vienna malt at 12-13°P OG. Finally somebody got it right.

I then noticed that this wasn’t even a recent change, so I looked at all the important specs (min/max OG, min/max FG, min/max ABV, min/max bitterness, min/max colour) from 2014 until 2024.

The change in minimum colour already happened in 2022 when it was set as 12 EBC, down from 20 EBC the year before. Before 2017, it was even as high as 24 EBC.

In terms of bitterness, this has always been the same (22-28 IBU), same for ABV (4.8-5.4%) and OG (11.4-13.8°P). Only in 2024, the FG range somewhat changed: before that, it was 3.1-4.6°P, but since the 2024 version, this has been somewhat narrowed to 3.1-3.9°P.

A historic Vienna Lager, like it was likely brewed in the 1870s, with its 4.6% ABV, 13.25°P OG, 4.25°P FG and 12 EBC colour would fall just slightly outside of these style guidelines, but probably be close enough so that this wouldn’t be noticed during a blind taste test.

It most definitely is a major improvement compared to what the BA style guidelines used to be 10 years ago, or even compared to the most recent BJCP style guidelines.

So if you’re a brewer and you face the problem that your Vienna Lager from 100% Vienna malt and otherwise inspired or informed by historic Vienna Lager brewing is claimed to be “out of style” outside of a competition, just point people to the latest Brewers Association style guidelines.

How to Brew Historic Kölsch from 1927

Johannes Olberg’s book “Moderne Braumethoden” from 1927 contains a multitude of recipes for more than 50 different beer styles. One of them is Kölsch, briefly discussed as the “national drink” of Cologne, and characterised as golden, thirst-quenching, “not too heavy but digestible” beer. The recipe is particularly interesting because it’s the only well-documented Kölsch recipe I’m aware of from before the end of World War 2.

A lot has changed since then, and the Kölsch of 2024 is of course very different from Kölsch about 100 years earlier. Even the modern standards of what Kölsch is supposed to be, the “Kölsch-Konvention”, was only developed from 1981 onwards, Germany’s Federal Cartel Office signed off on in it 1985, and it was finally signed by 24 Kölsch breweries in 1986.

Olberg’s recipe doesn’t mention a specific malt to use, but judging from the colour description, we can assume that a pale malt like Pilsner malt was used.

A number of mashing methods were used, like Kesselmaische, or boiling one or two thick decoctions, but the following process was described more in detail:

The crushed malt is mashed in with brewing water to get to a temperature of 35°C, then rested for 30 minutes. After that time, the mash is slowly heated up to 50°C over the course of an hour (that’s 0.25°C per minute), and then to 70°C over the course of another hour (0.33°C per minute). It shall then rest at this temperature until the mash is fully converted. The author suggests that this would take 30 to 40 minutes and that an iodine test should be used to ensure full saccharification.

After that, the temperature shall be increased to the mash-out temperature of 76°C, either by heating up the mash, or by moving one third of the mash into the lauter tun and boiling two thirds of the mash in the kettle, then mixing it back into the mash to increase the temperature to 76°C (the two thirds doesn’t sound right, I’d reverse the ratios).

When the mash is in the lauter tun, lautering begins. About 6 to 8% of the total amount of hops are reserved for later, and of the remaining hops, a third is added to the first runnings. The wort boils for a total of 120 minutes.

Another third of the hops is added after an hour of boiling, and the last third is added 40 minutes before knock-out. The 6 to 8% of hops reserved earlier are added to the wort shortly before knock-out. The hopping rate is about 30.9g of hops per kg of malt that is mashed in.

The resulting wort should have an original gravity of 11 to 12°P.

The wort is then chilled to 10°C and the Kölsch yeast is pitched. Fermentation should last about 5 days. After fermentation is finished, it is then pumped over into maturation casks which are only loosely bunged. After 5 to 6 weeks the beer can get filtered and sent out to customers.

The maturation casks are also prepared before the young beer is pumped in: hops (at a rate of about 0.9 g/l) are put in 75°C hot water for about 30 minutes, then the steeping water and the hops are added to the casks.

Using all this information, I came up with the following recipe to brew about 20 liters of this historic Kölsch:

  • 4.9kg Pilsner malt
  • 150g hops, ideally a traditional low-alpha-acid German variety with a fine aroma, the finer the better. For my recipe, I assumed Hersbrucker with 3% alpha acid, but Spalter, Hallertauer mittelfrüh or Tettnanger would be equally suitable.
  • German Kölsch yeast, e.g. WLP029

Mash in with 14 liters of water, then proceed with mashing and lautering as described above. The hop additions are:

  • 46g hops in first runnings
  • 46g hops 60 minutes before end of boil
  • 46g hops 40-x minutes before end of boil

After the end of the boil, whirlpool, then knock-out. Take the time between end of boil and knock-out into consideration for the last hop addition (it’s basically the x in the last hop addition). Shortly before knock-out, add 12g of hops to the wort.

Chill the wort to 10°C, then pitch the Kölsch yeast. Wait until fermentation is finished, then add 18g hops to a small amount of water and keep it at a temperature of 75°C for 30 minutes. Depending on whether you move the young beer into a separate vessel for maturation or not, either add the hops-water mixture into the maturation vessel before you pump in the beer, or simply add it to the fermenters. Mature the beer for 5 to 6 weeks, then carbonate, filter (if you have the facilities, most homebrewers don’t) and package it.

The resulting beer should have about 12°P. If you’re using hops with 3% alpha acid, the final beer should have about 44 IBU (calculated).

In terms of bitterness, this is a very different beer from modern Kölsch. And not only is it quite bitter, it is also kind of dry-hopped. The difference is that the hops were briefly treated with hot water at 75°C, which should denature the natural amylase enzymes in the hops which could cause hop creep, but is still not quite hot enough to cause the alpha acid to be isomerised and introduce even more bitterness in the beer.

So, if you want to rebrew a hundred year old historic Kölsch, this recipe is a good place to start.

How to brew Dortmunder Adambier

Okay, this is slightly random. Dortmunder Adambier is a beer style I never really looked into, and when I wrote my book Historic German and Austrian Beers for the Home Brewer, I didn’t really come across anything useful that resembled a recipe.

Earlier this week, I was contacted by homebrewer Jesper Hjortshøj who asked me whether I had any more information about how to brew this beer style. I admitted that I didn’t know anything, but it got me started to look into it how much I could find out. And quite quickly, I actually came across a description that was sufficient enough to derive a recipe from it.

The August 1869 issue of the Der Bierbrauer contains a whole article about the beer style with lots of information and details.

Dortmunder Adambier, apparently often also just called “Adam”, was a very strong dark wheat beer, often aged for years, and thus very clear, with a dark-red-brown colour. The malt made to brew it was kilned to only a pale colour, and no additional dark malts were used, so any colour of the beer came from “browned proteins”, as the article says it, basically from the long, intense boil the wort undergoes.

When Adambier was poured, it poured like oil, but without any foam, and had a sweet taste and vinous taste to it. It was brewed from either wheat or barley or a mix of both, but Adambier brewed from wheat was more full-bodied and tartaric, and thus preferred.

A very basic chemical analysis indicates that it was a very strong beer with 8.54% alcohol by weight (or 10.73% alcohol by volume), 21% residual extract by weight, 16.7°P apparent extract as measured on the saccharometer, and an attenuation of just 52.1%.

We also get more hints about the strength: one example that was analysed had an original gravity of 34.9°P. But there’s another hint: it says that in order to brew 20 Ohm (a local pre-metric volume measurement, I assumed the Brunswick Ohm of 144.8 liters) of Adambier, the same amount of malt is needed as for brewing 50 Ohm Bavarian beer. Assuming an OG of 12 to 13°P for Bavarian beer at the time, that means that Adambier brewed that way would have roughly have an OG of 30 to 32.5°P. Slightly lower than the analysed beer, but still roughly a similar strength.

We also learn about the hopping: for every Ohm of beer, 1 Pfund (500g) of “fine Bavarian” hops were used (later in the text, it even talks about 2 Pfund per Ohm). That converts to 3.45 g/l of hops, or if you use double the amount of hops, 6.9 g/l.

In 1869, the brewing this beer style was apparently already partially modernised, and it is implied that Bavarian triple decoction mashing was employed. But the old way of mashing it is already described, and it is wonky: the grist was doughed in in a kettle (the amount of liquor or the temperature of it isn’t documented), then left to rest, until it was brought to a boil. It takes 5 hours to bring the whole mash to a boil, during which probably the mash fully converted.

After the boil, the mash was moved to the mash tun, left to rest for 2 hours, and then wort was drawn off. At the same time, water was heated up for a second mash to draw off even more wort. Both worts were added to the kettle, hops were added, and the wort was boiled vigorously enough to effect good evaporation up to the desired strength.

The wort was then chilled to 10°C, and yeast was added at a pitch rate of 345 ml of yeast slurry per hectoliter. Primary fermentation took about 4 to 5 weeks. It was then filled into 10 Ohm casks, and the bunghole was kept open until the beer stopped ejecting yeast. It was then loosely bunged and aged for 2.5 to 3 years.

If I was to brew such a beer at home, I would approach it like this: since this requires producing such a strong wort, I would only brew half the amount of what I’d brew normally, let’s say 10 liters. I’d dough in my ingredients, Pilsner malt and pale wheat malt (the text says that pale malt was used, after all) with the same amount of liquor that I’d normally use for a 20 liter brew.

To make life slightly easier, I would probably just do a single-step infusion mash at 68°C or similar, or at most go for a double decoction, because I think most of the character of the beer will come from the long boil anyway, lauter, and then just go for a very long boil with 69 g of Hallertauer hops added to the first wort until I got the volume down to about 10 liters or the desired OG of somewhere between 30 and 35°P.

I would then chill down the wort, pitch whatever top-fermenting yeast I have on hand, and then just let it go. For sour beers, I have a dedicated fermenter that is contaminated, so any wort going into it probably gets infected with lacto and/or brett. Jesper said that when he brews his Adambier, he intends to pitch the dregs of a Schneeeule Berliner Weisse for just a small amount of lacto and brett, which is actually similar to my approach for the Old Ale that has been maturing for almost a year, where I simply pitched the dregs of two Gueuze bottles for secondary fermentation.

I hope that should give everyone who wants to brew a historically fairly accurate Adambier a good idea how to approach it and how to formulate a recipe for it. And thanks to Jesper for making me look more closely into the beer style!