21. The Coin Tavern. The 30 Years War. Bavarian Beer! Part 2.
Description
The beer selected for this episode is called Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier. Why this beer? It’s a very old, traditional German style of beer. This style is not that well known (just like the Thirty Years’ War). A lot of the Thirty Years’ war involved burning German towns and villages, so I thought that this beer style was quite appropriate! Rauchbier, which literally translates to “smoked beer” in German, gets its distinct campfire-like flavor from drying malt in a kiln fueled most commonly by Beechwood. The polarizing style has a fascinating, if slightly smoky, history. In the past, all beer had a smoky character due to the method of drying malt over open fires. This was the only way to dry the malted barley before the invention of smoke-free kilns. In 1635, and Englishman (from Cornwall) named Sir Nicholas Halse patented a "smokeless" kiln, revolutionizing malt drying. This led to a decline in smoky beers as breweries adopted the new technology, resulting in cleaner, lighter-colored beers. So, while many German brewing regions abandoned the smoky method, Bamberg in northern Bavaria, with its access to beechwood for smoking the malt, and its strong connection to traditional brewing, continued to produce Rauchbier.
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