Larsblog

You know how the Inuit supposedly have dozens of specialized words for different kinds of snow? It comes as no surprise to people who know the Finns that they have lots of specialized words for different kinds of drinking and alcohol. Here is a little dictionary of these drinking terms, collected on an expedition through the Finnish countryside in the summer of 2018, hunting for Finnish traditional farmhouse ale, sahti. ...

I had been googling "landøl" to see if it really was the name for Danish farmhouse ale, when I stumbled on a recipe for it. The recipe came from Olga Hansen at the farm Nøddebjerggård on Møn. "Huh", I thought. "That's very specific. Let's try tracing her." I tried googling various combinations and suddenly found that they'd brewed farmhouse ale on the same farm in 2017. So of course I called them, and asked if I could come visit. (This was in July 2018.) ...

The most common question I get in interviews is "what do you consider to be a farmhouse ale?" and since the answer is a little involved I decided to write it up more fully. There is a fairly clear-cut definition, but it takes a little explaining. ...

The title makes it sound like I've lost my mind, because of course bread yeast exists. You've all seen it sitting on supermarket shelves. But I've started to wonder whether what's sold as bread yeast really is a separate kind of yeast, or whether they're just brewer's yeasts that have changed profession. ...

I visited Vikonys in Lithuania and saw how the Lithuanians there brew keptinis. The basic idea is straightforward enough: do a normal mash, then bake the mash in a huge Lithuanian duonkepis oven to get caramel flavours by toasting the sugars in the mash. This is an important idea, because it's a completely "new" type of brewing process that creates flavours you cannot make with normal techniques. ...

I got the tip-off from Jørund Geving, a farmhouse brewer in Stjørdal. He'd gotten into a random conversation with a farmer from Ål in Hallingdal, who said there were people there who still brewed. That's in eastern Norway, so that was remarkable news in itself: a new brewing region! But then he dropped the real bombshell: these guys had their own yeast, which they called gong. ...

There really was a time when not brewing Christmas beer in Norway was not just illegal, but even punished harshly. I realize this sounds like a tall tale, but it is documented far beyond any reasonable doubt. Which is of course quite confusing. Why was the law like this? That's quite a complicated question, it turns out. ...

I wrote about the Muri mystery and how I didn't think we'd ever solve it, but yesterday I got an email out of the blue. Kristoffer Krogerus had noted a new paper on Saccharomyces eubayanus (one of the two parents of lager yeast) where the researchers had sequenced the genomes of a number of commercial brewing strains. He downloaded the data and took a closer look. ...

Somehow it seems to have happened for real. I've been slaving away at this farmhouse stuff for almost a decade now, and now a summary of all that labour is going to appear in the form of an English book written by me. Somehow it seems at the same time both inevitable and almost unbelievable. But here we are. ...

Back in 2014, when people first started getting seriously interested in kveik, a homebrewer named Bjarne Muri realized he might be able to contribute something. He came from the farm Muri in Olden in Nordfjord, western Norway, not far from Hornindal. His grandfather was a farmhouse brewer, and the last time they brewed on the farm was in 1991. Two things remained from that final brew: a home-made video, and the yeast, dried and stored in an outhouse on the farm. ...