What the Brewers Association Did With Adambier and Grodziskie

Update.  When I wrote this post yesterday, Ron Pattinson hadn't commented on the Brewer's Association guidelines.  But he has now, so you should go to the source.

Source: Homebrew Chef

The Brewers Association has decided to include Grätzer/Grodziskie* and adambier as new styles for the purposes of judging in the GABF and other festivals.  This is a curious endeavor.  It's one thing to use guidelines for styles that have a historical through-line; current incarnations represent the best example of what we understand the style to be.  Porter, for instance, refers to a moderately alcoholic black beer with a roasty flavor, not a highly alcoholic, barrel-aged beer characterized by the vinous note of brettanomyces, as would have been the case 200 years ago.  But pick up a style that ceased to exist--especially one like adambier, which went extinct decades ago--and you are confronted with the question of which incarnation to pick.  So what did the Brewers Association do?

Grodziskie
Grodziskie, a fairly well-documented style, was a lot of different beers over the years. This is how BA describes it:

Grätzer is a Polish-Germanic pre-Reinheitsgebot style of golden to copper colored ale. The distinctive character comes from at least 50% oak wood smoked wheat malt with a percentage of barley malt optional. The overall balance is a balanced and sessionably low to medium assertively oak-smoky malt emphasized beer. It has a low to medium low hop bitterness; none or very low European noble hop flavor and aroma. A Kölsch-like ale fermentation and aging process lends a low degree of crisp and ester fruitiness Low to medium low body. Neither diacetyl nor sweet corn-like DMS (dimethylsulfide) should be perceived.

Leaving aside the editing that paragraph requires (did a blogger write it?), I see a few issues.  The Reinheitsgebot comment is sort of salient in that the law wasn't adopted outside of Bavaria until the 20th century, but of course the style lived past 1906, confusing matters.  The kölsch comment is odd--what's the link there besides the fact that we're talking German obergärige (top-fermenting) beer.  But more to the point, where does the overall characterization of the beer--light smoke and hop flavors--come from?   It doesn't conform to any of the descriptions Ron Pattinson--in his usual painstaking way--has discovered.  For example:

Grätzer Bier, a rough, bitter beer, [is] brewed from 100% wheat malt with an intense smoke and hop flavour. The green malt undergoes smoking during virtually the whole drying process, is highly dried and has a strong aroma in addition to the smoked flavour.  (1914)

The starting gravity for that beer was just 1.028.  It's a post-Reinheitsgebot version, however, so maybe BA was thinking an earlier grodziskie.  Let's jump back a half century:

This bright, light, highly effervescent fine wheat beer is shipped far. It owes its peculiarities of the use of willow bark. It has a slight taste of smoke from the drying of the malt with smoke. Mashing is done by infusion, but willow bark is scattered on the cooler, and on the next day it is put into the fermentation vat.  In this way you create fermentation material from one brew to the next. The beer is well mixed and immediately filled into barrels that have a wide bung hole, which is bunged with straw. The beer is delivered to the customer in this state. (1867)

The source mentions isinglass for fining as well, and observes that "the willow bark contains tannin and a well known bitter substance."  Not very Reinheitsgebot!  One thing I'll note is that the older versions Ron found reference to were all hoppy as hell.  Ron also located a reference to modern Polish grodziskies just before they went extinct.  There were three varieties, a small beer, a 12 P beer of 3.5% alcohol (very low attenuation) and a 14 P strength version that was 3-5%, which indicates incredibly poor to just poor attenuation. 

All of which is to say that in over a hundred years of written descriptions of the style, Ron found none that looked like the Brewers Association.  The descriptions he found mentioned lots of smoke, lots of hop, low attenuation, high effervescence, willow bark, bottle-fermentation--none of which are mentioned in the BA's description.   So where'd they get theirs?

Adambier
This style seems to have made it to the 20th century, but barely, and it seems to go way back.  Here's what the Brewers Association has to say about it (again, with the atrocious editing):

Adambier is light brown to very dark in color. It may or may not use wheat in its formulation. Original styles of this beer may have a low or medium low degree of smokiness. Smoke character may be absent in contemporary versions of this beer. Astringency of highly roasted malt should be absent. Toast and caramel-like malt characters may be evident. Low to medium hop bitterness are perceived. Low hop flavor and aroma are perceived. It is originally a style from Dortmund. Adambier is a strong, dark, hoppy, sour ale extensively aged in wood barrels. Extensive aging and the acidification of this beer can mask malt and hop character to varying degrees. Traditional and non-hybrid varieties of European hops were traditionally used. A Kölsch-like ale fermentation is typical Aging in barrels may contribute some level of Brettanomyces and lactic character. The end result is a medium to full bodied complex beer in hop, malt, Brett and acidic balance.

Again with the kölsch!  (That style is essentially a modern one, and while it's fine if the BA wants to think of all North German styles as kölsch-like, fine, but nothing before 1900 bore much resemblance to modern kölsches.  Lagers didn't challenge them until Dortmund started cranking out the exports well into the 19th century, and so there was no reason that they would "kölsch-like," by which we mean low-ester, lager-like ales.)  But this wheeze aside, I think they got a lot closer to the mark on adambier.  Here's Ron:

Dortmunder Adambier was a strong, sourish top-fermenting beer. Wahl & Henius ("American Handy Book of the Brewing, Malting and Auxiliary Trades", 1902) has an analysis of the beer performed in 1889. It was around 18º Balling, 7.38% alc. by weight (9.4% ABV) and a lactic acid content about half that of a contemporary lambiek. In contrast to sour beers such as Gose and Berliner Weisse, Adambier, also called Dortmunder Altbier, was heavily hopped. It acquired its sourness much like Porter - through a long secondary fermentation. Bacteria in the lagering vessels slowly changed the beer's character. It needed to be stored for at least a year for this process to take place.

The weird thing about this is that while Weyermann's new smoked wheat malt has recently unleashed a torrent of grodziskies (ten or twelve, easy), who in god's name is making adambier?  Is this really a style we needed to be statted out?  What's next, joppenbier (also Germano-Polish!)?  Cottbuser?

I await your thoughts on this matter eagerly.
_______________
*Even the name is dangerously political.  Grätz is, of course, the German name of the town from which the style came, and Grodzisk the Polish.  Right off the bat you may sense the awkward politics.  Prussia, Jews, and the World Wars played a role in the history of the town (I've no doubt language and religion did, too), and I don't even want to think about which name is less loaded.  I'm going with the Polish, because the small town is now located in the Republic of Poland.

More on Grätzer

How did we survive before the internets? Before electricity I can understand--whales kept things dimly lit. But before the internet we must have wandered the desert, hoping to stumble by chance upon nuggets of wisdom, like gold. Yesterday, two great comments appeared on my grätzer post from men more educated than I.

First, from Alan Taylor, the Widmer Brothers' resident Germany expert, who has such a precise and scholarly sense of things that he corrected the quote I included (via Pattinson) from Bierbrauerei. Taylor notes:

By the way: A Zentner is actually 50 kg or 100 Pfund, so the ratio of hops to malt is higher than in the quotation you had.

Well, obviously. How silly of me to confuse my kilos and Pfunds.

Next we have Kristen England, the homebrewer I quoted (via Hieronymus), who is one of the vanishingly small Americans to have actually brewed a grätzer. It's quite useful for the homebrewer interested in brewing their own grätzer, a number who include me:

The problem with the beer isn't, surprisingly, the 100% wheat. It's getting the level of smoke you want without mucking up the malt. Meaning making sure it can still convert itself.

I've done many different types of wood and oak really does work best. Rauchmalt is too smooth and hammy. The oak tannins really dry the beer out and with the hops dries the beer out completely. The cherrywood smoke made it taste like an ashtray.

The BU's are around 40 or so. 2/3 first wort and then 1/3 the last 15min works very well. All low [alpha] % noble which adds a ton of tannin because of all the hop matter that goes into it. You'll be surprised at how clear this beer ends up.

I find that OG+10 = BU works great. I like mine about 1.028 and then 38 BU. Finishes around 1.009. Bone dry.

Thanks, Kristen. this is most useful.

Meet Grätzer, the New Gose

The newest thing in brewing is ... old things. Last year, we marveled that the very obscure gose style was enjoying a boomlet. But gose is old hat. Having scoured through all extant commercial styles, brewers now appear to be perusing the extinct. Last week, Ben Edmunds offered a beer inspired by an old style called grätzer (which he pronounced "grate-sir"). We'll loop back around to his version in a moment, but first, let's have a glance at the historical style.

Grätzer/Grodziskie
Grätzer is actually indigenous to Poland, where it was known as grodziskie. Grätz was the German name for the town Grodzisk, which was, for a little over a hundred years, part of Prussia. But the beer style both pre- and post-dated Prussia, and was in fact still brewed in Poland until the 1990s. Grodzisk was a major center of brewing, and at the end of the 18th Century, boasted 53 brewers.

One of the famous local products in that old-school Beervana was a beer made entirely of smoked wheat malt. The indispensable scholar (and Grätz enthusiast) Ron Pattinson retrieved this information for our edification:

"Grätzer Bier, a rough, bitter beer, brewed from 100% wheat malt with an intense smoke and hop flavour. The green malt undergoes smoking during virtually the whole drying process, is highly dried and has a strong aroma in addition to the smoked flavour. An infusion mash is employed. Hopping rate: for 1 Zentner (100 kg) of malt, 3 kg hops. Gravity just 7º [Plato]. Fermentation is carried out in tuns at a temperature of 15 to 20º C."
--“Bierbrauerei" by M. Krandauer, 1914, page 301.

In brief, the passage highlights a few key points: in addition to being brewed entirely of smoked wheat, the beer is small (1.028; less than 3% ABV) and aggressively hoppy. Although it was fermented cool (60-68 degrees), it was an ale. Also interesting: the beer is hopped during the mash.

Stan Hieronymus, writing in Brewing With Wheat, tracked down homebrewer Kristen England who, after chatting with Pattinson, brewed his own Grätzer. It became one of his favorites. England told Hieronymus, "The amount of smoke and hop in this very low-gravity beer is absolutely massive."

Fascinating stuff, and certainly something that should pique interest in more minds than just Ron Pattinson's. Aggressively hoppy, intense flavors--the style may date back 600 years, but it sounds pretty contemporary to me.

Breakside's Grätzer
The greatest barrier to brewing Grätzers is not incidental: no one produces smoked wheat malt commercially. This means a brewery either has to smoke its own malt or improvise. Edmunds improvised, using regular smoked malt. In fact, his is an all-barley version, employing Munich and pilsner malt along with the smoked. (To head off howls from uber-geeks, he admits the obvious: "this is not an historical recreation of grätzer, but rather a re-imagination.")

Ben studied brewing in German, and when he consulted historical descriptions, found mention of an apple note. Instead of vibrant hopping, he decided to spice the beer to evoke that apple character, and added cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. He also blanched at the historically tiny OG and boosted it to 1.046--leaving a beer of relatively robust 4.4% abv.

The spice dominated the palate, which was light and quaffable, but only mildly smoky. Hops also fell back. It was actually quite a nice beer, but quite a bit different than my expectations.

A Grätzer Revival?
Given the difficulty smoking wheat malt, it's a bit hard to imagine grätzer emerging an even minor trend. Hieronymus cites a collaboration between Yards and Iron Hill where the brewers smoked some of their malt, but so far as I know, no one has made a fully traditional grätzer. Perhaps a nanobrewery will attempt it. In the meantime, it may be that the style remains solely the purview of homebrewers. I'll confess that after tasting Ben's version, I did a Google search to see how hard it is to smoke malt. At 1.028, we're only talking about five pounds--how hard can it be?