Lithuanian beer, again

<< 2012-11-18 20:36 >>

Cathedral, Vilnius Old Town

I've written before about how Lithuania has a beer tradition of its own, different from any other country on earth, but back then I didn't really know very much about it. I'm still far from an expert on Lithuanian beer, but by now I've learned a bit more, which I want to share. One reason is that I find that although Lithuania is just a short (and cheap) plane ride away, people don't seem to have any interest in exploring this world of beer unknown to just about everyone.

Of course, Lithuania has industrial brewers like every other country, turning out industrial pale lagers, Baltic porters, and all that stuff. It also has some brewpubs producing beer of the same types found everywhere else. Well, forget all that. There's nothing wrong with it, but you don't need to go to Lithuania if you want a Baltic porter.

Beer journalist Martin Thibault (known as MartinT on Ratebeer, and one of my sources of information) wrote that he's gradually come to realize that the Lithuanian beer tradition is one of the world's great beer traditions, alongside those of the UK, Germany, Belgium etc. That's a pretty big claim, but I actually agree with him. Of course, Lithuania is a much smaller country than Germany, with only 3 million people, but they still do have a living, even vibrant, beer tradition that they share with nobody else.

Unfiltered farmhouse ale

What we are talking about here is traditional home brew, the sort of beer that people have been brewing at home for millennia. The industrialization of beer killed this off most places in Europe, except for the Nordic countries, and Lithuania. So the type of beer traditionally brewed has somehow survived here, and is now made commercially by a growing number of small microbreweries.

Lithuanian home brewers have traditionally stored their yeast in the well to keep it cool, sharing their yeast with one another when needed. On his trip to Lithuania, Martin kept some of the yeast sludge from the bottom of a bottle, and took it home to Montreal. There, friends at McGill University had it sequenced, and compared the DNA with that of other yeast species in the GenBank database. That database contains essentially all gene sequences extracted by researchers all over the world for the last 20 years. The Lithuanian yeast did not match any other known yeast species. In fact, it appears to be an entirely new species, hitherto unknown to science.

Chew on that for a moment.

Senojo Vilniaus Alus

In other words, when Lithuanian brewers claim to be continuing an ancient beer-brewing tradition unique to Lithuania, there is pretty strong scientific evidence that they are speaking the truth. That is quite something.

Of course, for someone who's actually tasted these beers, this is interesting, but not really surprising. Lithuanian farmhouse ales, or kaimiškas, don't really taste like any other kind of beer. There's huge variation between the beers, rather like with Belgian beers, but at the same time a clear family resemblance, again like Belgian beers.

Most of these beers are unfiltered. Some are pale, and some are dark. Strengths vary from about 5% to about 7%. An earthy, strawy flavour appears in many of these beers, but nutty oily flavours are there, too, and many spicy herbal tastes, too. There are a couple of named styles, but most beers seem not to belong to any of them.

One example is "keptinis", meaning "baked" beer, so called because the malt is baked into bread loaves, which are then used for mashing. I'm told that today only the Čiżas family makes real keptinis, but the Kupiškis brewery makes a keptinis where they just bake some of the malt in an oven. (Much of this information I got from the owner of the site Tikras Alus.)

More kaimiškas

One of the more famous variations is beer that uses peas as part of the grist (that is, as one of the fermentables). There is a long historical tradition for this, but the style does not have a recognized name. Michael Jackson wrote about this in 1995s, and today it is only brewed by Birżu alus. I tried it, but found it tasted like a fairly normal German helles, with perhaps a little more flavour and depth than usual.

There are also smoked beers, called duminis. Another variation is to use red hot stones to boil the wort, causing caramelization, just like with German steinbier, but apparently an independent tradition. I also found a beer brewed with raspberry leaves.

However, the beers following the purity law are no less remarkable, and very much worth a trip to Lithuania to sample. One beer I really liked was Širvenos Dundulio Dounkelis Tamsusis (yeah, the names are a bit of a challenge), a reddish brown rye beer from the Širvenos brewery in northern Lithuania. It has a smoothly dry-sweet with an amazingly vivid caramelly licorice flavour that hides earthy spicy notes in the background.

After two trips to Lithuania I find I've now tried about 40 different farmhouse ales, and there are many, many more out there. There are now at least six different bars in Vilnius serving these beers, so finding them is not hard at all. So, what are you waiting for?

Update: I've now made a third trip, where I visited five breweries. Blog posts from that start here, summary of what I learned here.

Update 2: If you want more information I've published a guidebook to Lithuanian beer, which goes into a lot more detail.

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