Old-Fashioned Lagers and Smoked Beers with Live Oak

Live Oak Brewing in Austin, Texas, is best known for their old-fashioned, highly drinkable, award-winning lagers and wheat beers. Many of those beers involve Old World ingredients, traditional decoction mashes, or significant portions of smoked malts. 

In this wide-ranging, opinionated, 68-minute conversation, founder Chip McElroy and head brewer Dusan Kwiatkowski detail the how and why of the recipes and processes behind their beers—in particular, they zoom in on their pre-Prohibition–style Pre-War Pils and remarkable Polish-style Grodziskie, brewed with 100 percent oak-smoked malt. 

Among other topics, they discuss: 

• the benefits of decoction mashing 
• adjuncts and cereal mashes for pale American lagers
• working with corn grits, from mash to lauter to clarity
• fully avoiding DMS in adjunct lagers
• bitterness and hopping in various styles of pilsner
• yeast pitch rates, fermentation, harvesting, and lagering
• the particularities of certain Czech and German lager strains
• the benefits of horizontal tanks for fermenting and lagering
• combining spunding and forced CO2 to hit target carbonation
• brewing “Polish champagnge,” aka grodziskie 
• classic ingredients and step-infusion mash for grodzisikie
• the challenges of lauering 100 percent smoked wheat malt
• building great smoked beer based on classic styles
• embracing smoke flavor
• and more.