ALL-GRAIN

Batch size: 5 gallons (19 liters)
Brewhouse efficiency: 72%
OG: 1.044 (11°P)
FG: 1.006 (1.5°P)
IBUs: 22
ABV: 5%

MALT/GRAIN BILL
6.6 lb (3 kg) Weyermann Beech Smoked Malt
1.25 lb (567 g) Weyermann Munich I
6.6 oz (187 g) Weyermann Caramunich I

HOPS SCHEDULE
0.5 oz (14 g) Hallertauer Magnum at 60 minutes [22 IBUs]

YEAST
Fermentis SafLager W-34/70 or similar

DIRECTIONS
Mill the grains and mash in at 132°F (56°C) for 10 minutes; raise to 145°F (63°C) and rest 30 minutes; raise to 154°F (68°C) and rest 30 minutes; then raise to 168°F (76°C) for mash out. Recirculate until the runnings are clear, then run off into the kettle. Sparge and top up as needed to get about 6 gallons (23 liters) of wort, depending on your evaporation rate. Boil for 90 minutes, adding the hops according to the schedule. After the boil, chill to about 57°F (14°C), aerate the wort, and pitch the yeast. Ferment at 57°F (14°C) for 7 days, then steadily drop to 33°F (1°C) and lager for 21 days. Filter, package, and carbonate to 2.4–2.5 volumes of CO₂.

BREWER’S NOTES
Water: We run our water through our reverse-osmosis (RO) system to get the total hardness down to 120 ppm, then we add calcium chloride (32 g per barrel, or about 5 g for a 5-gallon batch).

When longtime friends Michael Key and Eddie Leal joined Silver Reef and helped open it in 2019, the southern Utah beer scene was a desert as dry as the Mojave.

In a largely Mormon area where the craft-beer learning curve can be steep, bringing a regular rauchbier to the table might sound crazy—but the pair had seen it work before. When they were both working at Gordon Biersch, the company’s Annapolis brewery won gold for its rauchbier at the 2014 Great American Beer Festival—and, suddenly, every Gordon Biersch had to brew one as a promotion.

“We thought nobody was going to drink it,” Key says, “so we made the smallest batch possible.” But the company put its marketing muscle behind the beer, and it was selling out everywhere. “People loved it,” Key says. So, they brewed it again at Leal’s location.

Their experience with that beer would eventually lead to Más Fuego—which, a decade later, won a gold medal of its own at the 2024 World Beer Cup.

It was Leal, now head brewer at Silver Reef, who named the beer, drawing from his Latin background. “I was thinking of smoke and fire,” he says. “Más Fuego is basically adding more fire.”

More Smoke

They brew Más Fuego in 20-barrel batches at Silver Reef’s production facility in St. George. The brewery’s primary owner is the Ellis Island Casino in Las Vegas, so there’s an outlet for all those kegs–about 20 pubs, besides the casino.

When Leal brought Más Fuego to Silver Reef, he increased the beer’s smoky core—Weyermann’s beechwood-smoked malt—to 80 percent of the grist. The rest of the grain bill pushes into märzen territory, with layers of Munich and Caramunich. “I like the märzen-style for this beer,” Leal says. “In a helles version, the malt can be too light. Märzen meshes well with the smoke.”

With so much of the beer going to Nevada—about two-thirds, with the beer just about always being on draft—the team is regularly brewing it. “We like drinking it; we like brewing it,” Key says. “We love the smell when we’re mashing it. It’s like a barbecue in here.”

When deciding how to hop the beer, Leal didn’t want to taper the sweetness of the malt or the intensity of the smoke too much. “I want the malt and smoke to shine, so I just do a bittering hop addition of 22 IBUs,” he says, “just to counter the sweetness a little bit.”

More Lager

The team stopped using Hersbrucker hops years ago, moving to German Magnum to bitter all their lagers. “The consistency is better,” Key says. “It’s a cleaner, higher-output hop.”

With six decades of brewing experience between them, including their time at Gordon Biersch, Key and Leal know their way around lager brewing. Key started brewing at Steelhead in Eugene, Oregon, working under the legendary Teri Fahrendorf. While running a brewpub for her, he needed to bring in an assistant and hired Leal. Today, the two work in tandem, with Key the director of operations. “We grew up together,” Leal says.

When it comes to lager, the two prefer to stick to what has worked for them over the years. “I’ve noticed in the long run, I get better attenuation, better filtration, when I stick to the old ways,” Key says. “We’re used to doing stuff a [certain way], and we hardly budge. It works. We might play around with some beers, but not the lagers.” For example: Key doesn’t believe a decoction is necessary with modern malts, but he’s steadfast in his commitment to step-mashing Más Fuego and the other German-style lagers.

Key spent about five years brewing for Gordon Biersch in Pasadena, using what were largely traditional German lagering techniques. He’d wake up and drive 50 miles across Los Angeles, just so he could live near the beach. Between the commute, long hours, and exacting work—such as having to constantly step up small batches of yeast to propagate pitches large enough for the full-scale system—it was a rigorous ordeal. “I probably lost 10 years of my life out of the first five years I was brewing,” Key says. Still, the experience taught him to avoid shortcuts and follow an intentional, systematic process.

The knowledge and rituals extend into Silver Reef today. The long commute and excessive yeast propagation are the past, but he’s still spunding for natural carbonation, lagering patiently, and polishing for great clarity through a plate-and-frame filter.

One outlier in the process has been the local water. Key says that when they were outfitting Silver Reef, they contacted a California water treatment company. “At one point, the word ‘motherfucker’ came out of his mouth,” Key says. “He hadn’t seen anything like it before.”

Besides having very hard water, with a lot of calcium, there’s also a lot of sand in it—the brewery has to pre-filter the water coming into the building just to keep the dirt out. Then they need to change those filters about twice as often as a normal system. The brewery also uses an oversized water softener. “We add a lot of calcium chloride to our beers, and some gypsum,” Key says.

Leal adds that the calcium chloride emphasizes the body of the beers, aids fermentation, and helps the beers come out cleaner. “It just gives a softer mouthfeel,” he says.

More Barrel

While Más Fuego took gold in the Smoke Beer category at the 2024 World Beer Cup, Silver Reef’s Smokin’ Barrel also took bronze in Wood- and Barrel-Aged Beer.

In fact, Smokin’ Barrel was Más Fuego—before it rested in Basil Hayden bourbon barrels for about two years. “We don’t baby our beers,” Key says. “This barrel sat in our casino in Vegas, in our beer garden, it sat in the summer when it was over 100 degrees out,” he says. “It can get cold in the winter, too. It got beaten up.”

Its success was a pleasant surprise—some barrels at the brewery just don’t pan out under such conditions, but the one that produced Smokin’ Barrel was a winner. Leal says its flavor initially was all barrel—but then, over time, it got smoother and smoother, and some of that whiskey character faded, eventually letting the smoke peek back through. “The smokiness just hung in there,” he says.

With beers like Más Fuego and Smokin’ Barrel, the team is proud of what they’ve built in the desert that was a beer desert.

“We want to bring beer culture to southern Utah,” Key says. “And bringing Más Fuego—establishing it as one of our house beers, where people want to drive up to try it, or drive from Vegas to come through and try this beer—it’s kind of nice.”

Key says that industry reps will contact him when they’re headed to Vegas, just to see whether Más Fuego is on tap. “It’s our little niche,” he says.

For more about how to get smoky character into extract-brewed beers, see No Rests For The Wicked: Home-Smoked Beer.

PARTIAL-MASH

Batch size: 5 gallons (19 liters)
Brewhouse efficiency: 70%
OG: 1.051 (12.6°P)
FG: 1.012 (3.1°P)
IBUs: 23
ABV: 5.1%

MALT/GRAIN BILL
4.4 lb (2 kg) Muntons Munich Liquid Malt Extract (LME)
3.1 lb (1.4 kg) Weyermann Beech Smoked Malt
7 oz (198 g) Weyermann Caramunich II
3.5 oz (99 g) Weyermann Carafa II

HOPS SCHEDULE
1.5 oz (43 g) Hallertauer Hersbrucker at 60 minutes [16.5 IBUs]
0.8 oz (23 g) Hallertauer Hersbrucker at 30 minutes [6.5 IBUs]

YEAST
Fermentis SafLager W-34/70 or similar

DIRECTIONS
Heat about 4 gallons (15 liters) of water to 150°F (66°C), then carefully stir in the LME, ensuring that it doesn’t clump on the bottom. Mill the grains and, in a mesh bag, immerse them in the water for 1 hour, switching on the heat as needed to maintain the temperature. Remove the grains and drain into the kettle, rinsing thoroughly. Top up as needed to get about 6 gallons (23 liters) of wort, then boil for 60 minutes, adding hops according to the schedule. After the boil, chill to about 50°F (10°C), aerate the wort, and pitch the yeast. Ferment at 52°F (11°C) until fermentation is complete and gravity has stabilized. Crash and lager it cold for at least a month. Package and carbonate to 2.4 volumes of CO₂.

Full disclosure: For most of my life, I was not a fan of smoked salmon, smoked meats, smoked cheeses—smoked anything. Thinking back on it, my dislike was probably based on some bad experiences with smoked foods in the past.

So, the first time I enjoyed a smoked beer was only about six years ago. I was on a work trip in Germany in the summer of 2018, on our way to a trade show in Berlin. My colleague suggested we stop in Bamberg, where we could visit the Weyermann malthouse as well as the famous Schlenkerla pub for some glasses of “the smoked stuff.”

I knew the Weyermann visit would be fun, but the thought of smoky beer did not sound nearly as inviting. Truthfully, I felt a bit embarrassed that it would be my first time drinking a rauchbier—but I also knew that, in Bamberg, I’d be exposed to the best. My friend reassured me that I’d been missing out: “Don’t knock it ’til you try it.”

She was right. And I’ve become a total smoke convert.

I love being right, but not as much as I hate being wrong—and man, was my colleague right about smoked beers. At Schlenkerla, I drank three half-liter glasses of the smoky, chestnut-brown Märzen and soon forgot about my jet lag. There were other Schlenkerla beers available—the Weizen, Helles, oak-smoked doppelbock, and more—and I tasted them, but the rich Märzen was my favorite. The next day, I had a new perspective as we toured Weyermann, learning about their own malt-smoking process as well as the local smoked-beer tradition.

Several months later, back home in Seattle, I decided to brew my own smoked beers. At the time, there was a small German imports store down at Pike Place Market, so I procured a few bottles and settled on Schlenkerla Märzen as my ultimate guide.

Smoke Your Own

There are lots of quality smoked malts available these days—and we’ll get to those—but first let’s consider an aspect of this tradition that gives us an opportunity to experiment, get creative, play with fire, and ultimately have a lot of control over the final character: the smoke.

Over the years I’ve experimented with smoking my own malts, including trying different types of wood. Pro brewers sometimes swear by the smoke flavor they get from fruit woods such as apple or orange, while others go with traditional hardwoods such as almond, hickory, oak, or pecan. Perhaps the most famous smoked beer in the United States—Alaskan Smoked Porter—uses alder, the same wood you might use for smoking salmon. There are lots of options, and part of the fun is in deciding which woodsmoke you want to use.

One way to decide is to try different smoked beers, find some you like, and figure out what kind of smoke was involved. Another way is to use a cocktail smoker. (Yes, I have a cocktail smoker now. Told you I was a smoke convert!) Just use it to smoke some cold water, then evaluate the aroma and taste using different wood chips.

Firing up a barbecue smoker or grill is another way to try different woods—and, in that case, you might as well smoke some malt while you’re at it. First, soak some malt in water for about an hour, then spread it out about a half-inch thick on some fine mesh. Set your grill up for smoking—instructions will vary depending on your type of grill, but they usually involve some moistened wood chunks and indirect heat—and keep the temperature low, below 200°F (93°C). The longer the exposure, the more intense the smoke aroma and flavor will be in the malt.

Now, given that our focus here in the No Rests Test Kitchen is extract brewing, smoking the bulk of the grist isn’t an option. I’ve experimented with a few ways of smoking malt extract using a cocktail smoker and smoking bell, and the results were … mixed. But there is one more DIY method I want to mention: making your own liquid smoke.

While the artificial stuff from the supermarket probably isn’t going to taste great in beer, making your own might be the ticket to a smoke flavor that can be easily controlled. (There are some entertaining YouTube videos that explain how to make it—Alton Brown has a method—but you’ll need a barbecue smoker and a few accessories.) As with other potent extracts, you can even bench-test it by dosing a drop or three into whatever beer you have handy.

Recipe Considerations

While it’s fun to play with smoke, this recipe represents a more reliable way to get that character into a highly drinkable lager, using malt extracts—and it includes a taste of Bamberg.

At Schlenkerla, they malt most of their own barley over a beechwood fire—the smoke comes from their old-fashioned malting process. Obviously, that’s not a practical option for most of us. Thankfully, there should be a lot of different smoked malts available through your local homebrew shop or online supplier. Those include Weyermann’s beechwood-smoked malt from Bamberg as well as others smoked with alder, cherry, hickory, and more. Smaller craft maltsters are producing some of the more interesting options these days, including some unusual fruit woods.

However, most of those are base malts, and their smoke intensity varies widely. We can steep them with the partial-mash method, but we want one with enough smoky oomph that a few pounds will be enough to make an impact. I’ve found that Weyermann’s beechwood-smoked malt is just right for this, in combination with a base of Munich liquid extract plus some Caramunich for depth and a small amount of debittered Carafa II for a deep, rich copper color.

(Notably, Weyermann also makes a smoked-malt extract—and I don’t know of another company that does—but that’s not a product I’ve seen available in the United States. If you can get that, it would certainly be worth trying.)

The yeast is an easy choice—Fermentis SafLager W-34/70. The dried yeast is easy to pitch and tolerant of somewhat warmer temperatures, in case you lack temperature-​controlled fermentation or don’t ferment under pressure. (For more on that, see “Extracting the Elegance of No-Pressure Pilsner,” beerandbrewing.com.) It’s a clean and reliable lager yeast, and I love the high cell count, affordability, and ease of use.

Rauchbier isn’t about hop flavor; we just want some bitterness there to balance the sweet-and-smoky. German-style beers deserve Noble hops with low alpha acids, and Hallertauer is a solid choice.

The brewing here is pretty straightforward: Add the liquid malt extract to your pot or kettle of warmed water, bring it to 150°F (66°C), and stir well to avoid any clumping on the bottom. Put the malts in a mesh bag, immerse them in the water, and allow them to steep for an hour before straining, then bring the wort to a boil. I like to boil a full hour with the hop additions in this recipe. (And it sure makes the house smell great!) After the boil, cut the heat, chill, and pitch. Fermentation might last about two weeks, then you can package and lager it at cold temperatures for at least a month.

When it’s time to enjoy the beer, be sure to enjoy it with food—roast pork and dumplings with rich sauces, sausages, cold cuts, potato pancakes… But I think my favorite is a good old bratwurst and crusty pretzel with brown mustard. I find the beer’s smoky-malt character pairs well with the meat’s salty fat and the mustard’s tang.

If all goes well, your rauchbier should be visually stunning, with rich garnet highlights and a creamy, long-lasting head. I find the aroma on mine to be a wonderful mixture of woodsmoke and Munich-malt richness, slightly evoking bacon. It may seem odd until you have a few sips—and before long the glass is empty, and you’re pouring yourself another one. And another.

“This recipe is very much a helles first, a smoked beer second,” says Tom Beckmann, owner and brewer at Chicago’s Goldfinger.

“The smoke on this beer is much more subtle than on a typical rauchbier, which helps to not distract from the pleasant malt sweetness and gentle Noble-hop character throughout. Using two different woods—oak and beech—as the source for smoke provides a multidimensional smoke character.”

ALL-GRAIN

Batch size: 5 gallons (19 liters)
Brewhouse efficiency: 72%
OG: 1.048
FG: 1.010
IBUs: 17
ABV: 5%

MALT/GRAIN BILL
7.1 lb (3.2 kg) German pilsner
1 lb (454 g) beechwood-smoked malt
11 oz (312 g) oak-smoked wheat malt
3 oz (85 g) acidulated malt (or as needed to adjust pH)

HOPS SCHEDULE
0.5 oz (14 g) Hallertauer Mittelfrüh at 60 minutes [8 IBUs]
0.75 oz (21 g) Hallertauer Mittelfrüh at 15 minutes [6 IBUs]
0.75 oz (21 g) Hallertauer Mittelfrüh at 5 minutes [3 IBUs]

YEAST
Fermentis SafLager W-34/70, Omega OYL-106 German Lager I, or similar

DIRECTIONS
Mill the grains and mash at 144°F (62°C) for 45 minutes; raise to 154°F (68°C) and rest 15 minutes; then raise to 162°F (72°F), rest 15 minutes, and mash out. Sparge and top up as necessary to get about 6 gallons (23 liters) of wort, depending on your evaporation rate. Boil for 90 minutes, adding hops according to the schedule. After the boil, do a whirlpool step: Stir or recirculate to create a vortex, then allow 20 minutes to settle. Chill to 50°F (10°C), aerate the wort, and pitch the yeast. Ferment at 50°F (10°C) for 10 days to clear diacetyl. Crash to 32°F (0°C), package, and carbonate to 2.5–2.6 volumes of CO₂.

BREWER’S NOTES
Mash: We aim for a mash pH of 5.3; adjust the acidulated malt as needed. (We also aim for a wort pH of 5.1.) If you can’t do a step mash, a single infusion at 149°F (65°C) for 60 minutes is fine.

Smoke: The original version of this beer had 10 percent of the grist as beechwood-smoked malt, but it got added smoke character from the re-pitched yeast of our Grodziskie (made with 100 percent oak-smoked wheat malt). If you find the oak-smoked malt too sharp, you can dial it back and add more of the gentler beechwood-smoked. The goal here is to not be strongly smoky, but for the smoke to provide an interesting dimension to an otherwise delicious helles.

Last fall, when I was in Bavaria, every time a local heard we’d been to Bamberg, they’d ask what we thought about the rauchbier.

“I think it’s a world classic,” I’d say. “One of the best beers in the world.” Every single time this stunned them. A foreigner who loves smoked beer? How?

There is something so seductively smooth and complex, so satisfying to the taste of smoke in a beer—personally, I love it. Some people call themselves hopheads. Me? I’m a smokehead.

However, when people say something like, “Historically, all malt was smoked”—even for me, that sounds like too much smoked beer. It’s nice to have variety, after all. But let’s stop and think about it a moment: What are all the possible ways to dry malt? Any method works, as long as it doesn’t get the malt so hot that it destroys the enzymes, and as long as it’s not so slow that the malt gets moldy.

Just leaving the malt out in the sun works fine, for example. (See “Brew Like the Wind,” page 62.) But there are far stranger methods that also work. In Norway, there was a tradition of drying malt in hollowed-out wooden logs; to keep the malt warm, they dropped small, fire-heated stones into it. They had to stir vigorously to avoid burning the malt, but it was effective enough that the person stirring would be enveloped in steam while working.

Neither of these methods smoke the malt—and they’re both ancient, at least as old as smoked malt.

So, the idea that originally all malt was smoked is absurd. Beer brewing began in the Middle East, and it appears to have been several millennia before it spread outside that region. Drying the malt in the sun must have been by far the most convenient method. I’ve heard it said that such a method wouldn’t work in Northern Europe. In reality, sun-drying the malt was normal in the Baltics, and even in the northernmost parts of western Norway, into the 20th century.

Yet even in those regions, there were people making smoked beers. Why?

Clearing Away the Smoke

It’s undoubtedly true that smoked malt was common historically, in both commercial and farmhouse brewing. Part of the reason is that fire dries malt faster, and you don’t have to worry about the weather. You can even use it to darken the malt.

However, just because they dried the malt with fire, does that mean it was smoky? Well, if you want to use fire to heat something without smoke, you needed a chimney—and the chimney is a surprisingly recent development. In Northern Europe, chimneys in homes seem to date from the 12th century—and even then, only mansions and castles had them. In ordinary houses in Britain, it wasn’t until the 16th century that chimneys started becoming common. In Norway, some people were living in houses without chimneys as late as the start of the 20th century.

Just like today, there was demand for unsmoked brewing malt. In England, patents for malt kilns that made unsmoked malt show up starting in the 17th century. In Norway, it was in the 19th century that farmers started adding metal chimneys to their old malt kilns to pull the smoke away. However, the move toward unsmoked malt was slow, and in commercial brewing it probably mainly happened in the 18th century.

Left: Traditional approaches to drying malt with smoke in Gotland, Sweden. Right: Stjørdal, Norway. (Photos: Lars Marius Garshol)

The Many Levels and Flavors of Smoke

Let’s make this clear: Franconian rauchbier is only one type of smoked beer. Stjørdalsøl and gotlandsdricke are two other smoked-beer styles that still live. Polish grodziskie is a revived smoked beer, and the original early 18th-century porter also was smoked beer. So was Austrian steinbier. (For much more about some of these traditions, see “The Cult of the Kiln,” “Gotlandsdricke: Sweden’s Elusive Smoked Ale,” and “Fire & Brew Stone: The Real Story of Steinbier,” beerandbrewing.com.)

Rauchbier just happens to be the only smoked beer that Michael Jackson made famous.

Just as different styles of beer can be smoked, there are also different kinds of smoke aroma. That aroma depends, for one thing, on the malt kiln. The såinn used in Stjørdal has a distance of only about 60 to 90 cm (24 to 35 inches) from the fire to the drying malt. But the kiln used on Gotland is on the ground floor, with a chimney leading up to a såinn-like drying surface on the floor above—a distance of perhaps three meters (10 feet). The smoke drying the malt for gotlandsdricke is therefore cooler when it reaches the malt, and it seems to result in a gentler, more refined smoke aroma.

All these kilns send the smoke through the green malt, but the most common kiln in Scandinavia was the sauna. The same building that people used literally as a sauna also was used to dry malt. It had a single room; the oven was basically just a pile of stones with a hollow space at the base in which to light a fire. There was no chimney. The malt dried on shelves around the walls of the room. That way, the smoke didn’t pass through the malt at all, but it still would have gotten a light smoke aroma.

However, the kiln is not the main variable. More important is the fuel.

Intriguingly, in farmhouse malting historically, there are clear patterns to which fuels people preferred. Where they lacked trees, they tended to use peat. This is also why scotch uses peat—not many trees on the Scottish isles. Peat-smoked malt can be harsh, even astringent, and many brewers say they don’t like the flavor of it in beer at all.

Franconian rauchbier uses beech, which was also used in other parts of Germany, in Denmark, and in southern Sweden. Beech gives a smooth, strongly smoky aroma with notes many people associate with meat. It’s also practical for malting because each log burns for a long time, calmly and evenly. That means the maltster doesn’t have to check the fire so often to prevent it from going too cold or too hot.

Further north, birch has been very common, particularly in Norway. Birch-smoked malt tastes somewhat like beech, but softer and more subtle, with notes of hot wood like in a sauna. As with beech, birch is a sought-after firewood today because it burns evenly and releases a lot of heat.

The second most popular malting wood in Scandinavia was alder, which is used in stjørdalsøl. Alder is the opposite of birch and beech: It burns quickly and makes little heat—perfect for a kiln where the malt is close to the fire. The aroma is powerfully pungent and tangy, and it can easily give notes of soot and ash. Notably, Alaskan Brewing’s Smoked Porter—surely the most decorated American smoked beer—gets its character from the same local alder used to smoke salmon.

Juniper often was used to smoke malts, too, and this is surprising because in most places juniper logs of any size are hard to find. Those that could be found were valuable as a wood that was extremely durable and resistant to rot. Still, in Sweden, as much as one-third of the smoked beer was smoked with juniper. I’ve never tried that, so I can’t speak to the aroma, but juniper wood is famously aromatic even before you light it.

Wherever those fuels were common for smoking malt, they also were common for smoking other things—such as fish, cheese, and meat. Because many of these woods are either impractical or valuable for other uses, it’s clear why people used them: the flavor.

Left: Stjørdal, Norway. Right: Telemark, Norway. The Telemark photo depicts a historic sauna used for malt drying in addition to its other culinary and personal health uses. (Photos: Lars Marius Garshol)

Smoke in Your Own Beers: A Few Things to Try

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to source some of these traditional types of smoked malt today. Beech-smoked is easy enough, since Weyermann makes it, and alder- and peat-smoked malts are available. Birch-smoked malt is rare indeed, and juniper-smoked even rarer. Especially with the rise of craft maltsters in North America, you can find malts smoked with other woods—such as apple, cherry, hickory, mesquite, and oak—even if they’re not always traditional.

Of course, it’s possible to smoke malt that’s already been dried using a food smoker or a grill. The aroma isn’t the same as when drying the malt with smoke, but you can at least play with different smoke flavors.

When it comes to composing recipes, perhaps the main variable is the intensity of the smoke. It takes surprisingly little smoked malt to get a noticeable aroma. My most recent beer was a kornøl with 3 percent Stjørdal malt—and although the beer was lightly smoked, the smoke aroma was very distinct. I made two beers from the same mash: a strong beer of about 8 percent ABV and a small beer of about 2 percent. Intriguingly, the smoke aroma was much more noticeable in the small beer—strong enough to put some people off it completely. So, gravity clearly plays a role.

Smoked malt also can be used in beers that aren’t necessarily smoked beers, and they “can be used as a spice,” as the Finnish beer writer Mika Laitinen says. “For example, adding a 5 percent share of smoked malt into pilsner or weizen makes an interesting lingering aftertaste, although the beer isn’t obviously smoky.”

In Stjørdal, central Norway, Roar Sandodden says that in his experience, a beer with 100 percent Stjørdal malt did not necessarily taste any more smoked than one with only 50 percent. “There seems to be a kind of ‘ceiling’ to the smoke aroma,” he says. This may be similar to how 100 and 200 IBUs taste similarly bitter—there is a threshold.

Most modern brewers use amounts of smoked malt well below these levels. At the farmhouse-inspired Eik & Tid in Oslo, Norway, cofounder and brewer Amund Polden Arnesen says it’s a question of experience and tinkering. “Smoke is a pretty big beast of flavor,” he says.

Laitinen adds another point: “The malt producer makes a big difference in smoke-flavor intensity.” Thus, 10 percent smoked malt from one company may add a lot more smoke than the same portion from another producer. Obviously, the wood used can also affect the intensity.

Related to the point about gravity: “Sweetness is one of the best ways to balance a smoked beer,” says Torkjel Austad of Bygland Bryggeri in southern Norway. Similar to bitterness, acidity, and yeast-driven phenolics, smoke (which itself is phenolic) helps to balance sweetness—and that makes sweetness a good counterbalance.

Flavors that seem sweet without actually being sweet in themselves—malty flavors, caramel, vanilla, chocolate, or toffee—can have a similar effect. Playing with the interactions of those malt-driven flavors and the effects of the wood used for smoke has great potential.

There are other combinations. Laitinen in Finland says he likes to combine smoke “with various tree-based ingredients, such as juniper branches and spruce tips.” In Norway, Austad recommends using “fruity” kveik yeast with beech- and alder-smoked malt. In general, Noble hops seem to work better with smoke than fruit-forward New World varieties.

You can play with the process, too. One tip from Austad: “Try making a raw smoked ale,” he says. In other words: no boil. “This will create a more bready malt character than boiled smoked beers.”

Of course, if you really want to explore all the possibilities in smoked malt, the best way is to make your own. Having control over the steeping, germination, and drying opens possibilities for aromas you can’t get any other way. However, what exactly the maltsters in Stjørdal and on Gotland do to get some of the stranger flavors they produce is not something any textbook can teach you.

Those maltsters may not even know themselves—but it’s a huge world to explore, for those who have the patience, space, and daring.

Live Oak Brewing in Austin has a reputation for traditional Czech- and German-style beers—including plenty of lagers and wheat beers—and several are smoked. Courtesy of owner Chip McElroy and head brewer Dusan Kwiatkowski, here is a homebrew-scale recipe for their smoked schwarzbier.

“With balanced, roasted malt flavor, this beer prominently features a beechwood smoke,” the brewers say. “This smokiness mingles with layers of darker malt flavors, braced by Noble hop character. Fermented cold and clean with our German lager yeast, this beer highlights the complexity that smoke adds to traditional dark lagers.”

ALL-GRAIN

Batch size: 5 gallons (19 liters)
Brewhouse efficiency: 72%
OG: 1.048
FG: 1.012
IBUs: 25
ABV: 4.8%

MALT/GRAIN BILL
6.7 lb (3 kg) Best Smoked Malt
2.1 lb (953 g) Weyermann Barke Munich
6 oz (170 g) Weyermann Carafa III

HOPS SCHEDULE
0.5 oz (14 g) Northern Brewer at 60 minutes [15 IBUs]
0.9 oz (26 g) Mittelfruh at 30 minutes [10 IBUs]

YEAST
Fermentis SafLager W-34/70

DIRECTIONS
Mill the grains and mash in at 144°F (62°C) for 30 minutes; raise to 154°F (68°C) and rest 15 minutes; raise to 162°F (72°C) and rest 15 minutes; then raise to 172°F (78°C) for mash out. Recirculate until the runnings are clear, then run off into the kettle. Sparge and top up as necessary to get about 6 gallons (23 liters) of wort, depending on your evaporation rate. Boil for 60 minutes, adding hops according to the schedule. After the boil, chill to about 46°F (8°C), aerate well, and pitch the yeast. Ferment at 48°F (9°C) until the gravity has dropped below 1.024, then raise the temperature to 54°F (12°C); when the gravity has dropped to 1.012 or below, lower the temperature to 39°F (4°C) and rack to a lagering vessel. Lager at 39°F (4°C) for 2 weeks, then steadily drop to 32°F (0°C) over 4 days. Lager at 32°F (0°C) for 4 more weeks, then package and enjoy.

BREWER’S NOTES
Don’t get creative and go adding aroma/knockout hops.

With this recipe, I kept increasing the smoked malt percentage over the years—it’s at 97 percent now, hence the name. I could go to 100 percent, but I like the tweaks created by the melanoidin and chocolate malts. Tinker on your own—but don’t live in fear of all that smoked malt. Embrace it!

For much more about this style, see Smoking Is Cool: The Unique Allure of Rauchbier.

ALL-GRAIN

Batch size: 5 gallons (19 liters)
Brewhouse efficiency: 72%
OG: 1.058
FG: 1.013
IBUs: 26
ABV: 5.9%

MALT/GRAIN BILL
10.5 lb (4.8 kg) Briess Cherry Wood Smoked Malt
4 oz (113 g) melanoidin malt
2 oz (57 g) chocolate malt

HOPS SCHEDULE
0.6 oz (17 g) Nugget at 60 minutes [26 IBUs]
1 oz (28 g) Hallertauer Hersbrucker at flameout

YEAST
Wyeast 2308 Munich Lager

DIRECTIONS
Mill the grains and mash at 152°F (67°C) for 60 minutes. Recirculate until your runnings are clear, then run off into the kettle. Sparge and top up as necessary to get about 6 gallons (23 liters) of wort. Boil for 60 minutes, adding hops according to the schedule. After the boil, chill to about 50°F (10°C), aerate well, and pitch plenty of healthy yeast. Ferment at 50°F (10°C) for 3 days, then allow the temperature to rise gradually to 60°F (16°C) over the next 10 days. When fermentation is complete and gravity has stabilized, crash, package, and carbonate to about 2.25 volumes of CO₂.

BREWER’S NOTES
The percentage of smoked malt matters less than the smokiness of the malt in question, and Briess Cherry Wood Smoked is a treat. However, if you find it’s too smoky for your palate, don’t just cut it a little, cut it a lot—down to about 20 percent of the grist, replacing the balance with Maris Otter. There’s not a substantial difference in smoke intensity when you go from about a third of the grist up to near 100 percent—but at that 20 percent level, the intensity drops off. But if you’ve never done it, give it a whirl with the big load of smoked malt.

Of all the myriad forms of lager, the one I always order when I see it on a tap list is rauchbier. Why? Because, for all the reasons that beer pairs well with grilled, roasted, and smoked meats and cheeses, beer ingredients pair beautifully with smoke as a flavor in the beer itself.

Whether it’s grain, honey, nuts, toffee, raisin, or chocolate flavors from the malts, or floral and earthy notes from the hops—all these and more are perfect complements to smoke, with the potential to become something greater than the sum of their parts.

These days there is another dimension to the fun of combining these flavors: A wider range of smoke flavors is now available to work into your beer. Back in the long-ago days of 2007—when I started homebrewing—we were just starting to see decent smoked malt hit the shelves, and it was still obligatory for recipe writers and homebrew-shop staff to warn us away from peat-smoked malt and (shudder) Liquid Smoke. Nowadays, you can tune your smoke to harmonize with your beer in the same way that pitmasters adjust their wood for their chosen meats.

While it may be an acquired taste, I believe there’s a smoked beer for every drinker—from those who might like a subtle oak to those who don’t mind a burning mesquite bush in their glass. Here, we’re going to cover the many ways you can make a smoked lager to suit your own tastes, informed by advice from some of the best brewers on either side of the Atlantic.

First things first, though: Just what, exactly, is rauchbier? In short: It’s a lager whose clean fermentation profile lets that beautiful smoke character shine—in balance, ideally, with its other ingredients.

So, how do we get there?

Approaching Smoked Beer

Strictly speaking, rauchbier refers to the smoked lagers most often associated with Bamberg and its surrounding countryside in Upper Franconia, Germany. (“Rauch” is simply “smoke” in German.) This is an older flavor that has survived as a tradition; many beers probably tasted smoky to some degree before the invention of more refined technologies to dry and kiln grains.

Style descriptions (such as those from the Beer Judge Certification Program—BJCP) tend to zero in on a rauchbier that is essentially märzen, with some percentage of the base malt replaced by smoked malt. The flavor features a blend of malt and smoke flavors, which can vary from subtle to strong, with a dryish finish and maybe some light floral hop aroma. And its fermentation profile should be clean—this is a lager, after all. The best-known commercial examples are Schlenkerla Märzen and Spezial Rauchbier, both from Bamberg.

More broadly, though, you can add smoke to almost any style of beer, including a range of both ales and lagers. You should experiment sooner or later, but the classic rauchbier is a great place to start. Smoked malt fits nicely into a classic German lager, with its emphasis on malt character, classic hopping, and clean fermentation.

The most important lesson at this stage is you don’t need to take a potentially aggressive phenolic flavor—that is, smoke—and work into a riotous flavor monster of a beer.

Consider this advice from Chip McElroy, an avowed smoked-beer enthusiast and owner of Austin’s Live Oak Brewing, which has a reputation for great lagers (smoked and otherwise): “It doesn’t have to be a double-imperial-chocolate-sweet-and-sour-pineapple-upside-down-black IPA with twigs and berries to be able to ‘stand up against’ the smoke,” McElroy says. “It’s not a battle; it’s a dance. Keep it simple, keep it light.”

The Challenge of Balance

To begin at the beginning: First, make a good beer.

Don’t let the smoke, ahem, get in your eyes. You still need to make the kinds of conscious recipe choices that are key to good brewing. “I think it’s the beer underneath the smoke [that] is most important,” says McElroy. “If that’s right, then the smoke comes across as an added bonus.”

Once you have a good beer, you can start thinking about how smoke—and specific smoked malts, in particular—will contribute to it. That may lead you to further refinement of the recipe.

“Balancing the smoke against the other flavor elements of the beer is the tricky thing,” says Matthias Trum, sixth-generation owner and brewmaster at Schlenkerla—home of what in my view is the world’s finest smoked beer.

In fact, balance was a universal theme among the brewers I contacted. This quest for balance creates dueling recipe considerations:

• How do your ingredients’ flavors work in conjunction with smoke?
  
• What is the character of the smoked malt or malts you choose for the recipe?
  

Knowing your ingredients is important here, especially because not all smoked malts are created equal. (More on that later.) The goal is not only to have the smoke in balance with the other beer flavors, but also to make sure it’s compatible with those flavors. “It is so important to integrate the smoky flavor, rather than letting the beer get dominated by it,” says Oliver Wesseloh, founder and brewer of Kehrwieder Kreativbrauerei in Hamburg.

While balance is important to all kinds of beer, it’s especially critical to the drinkability of rauchbier. If not handled carefully, smoke can easily overtake a lighter-bodied, lighter-flavored beer.

The same principle works in reverse: When I brew a smoked beer, I want you to know it’s a smoked beer. For my “bigger” smoked lagers—such as my smoked Baltic porter—I’ll sometimes seek out a malt smoked with a more aggressively flavored wood. Or, consider the example of Schlenkerla’s own doppelbock, called Eiche, at 8 percent ABV. Its malt is smoked with oak instead of the brewery’s usual supply of relatively mellow, seasoned beechwood. The Eiche—eiche is German for oak—is rich yet every bit as balanced as the Märzen.

Wesseloh argues that “a great smoked beer is sessionable.” I take his point, but in my view it’s not a strict requirement: A beer can be both big and drinkable. When we go bigger on gravity or style for our smoked beers, we should consider the role of the smoke with those flavors and potentially increase its contribution.

Know Your Woodsmoke

A key part of that consideration is knowing what kind of flavor—quality and intensity—you’ll get from malts smoked over different woods. Schlenkerla and Spezial use beech-smoked malt, for example, but here I must bear bad tidings: Those are incredibly difficult beers to imitate because both breweries have their own in-house maltings heated by wood-fired ovens, then a decoction brewing process that works perfectly with their homemade malts. (For more details, see “Exploring the Most Brewery-Rich Region in the World,” beerand brewing.com.) So, maybe you won’t walk down exactly the same path as Schlenkerla and Spezial—but you still need to make some important choices about woods the same way you would hops and yeast.

Read up on smoked malts, consider some reviews, taste the options—good practice, really, with any malts you want to add to a grist. As homebrewer-tinkerers, we have another pretty obvious option for our research: We can brew with it and taste the finished product for ourselves.

The wood matters.

“Pitmasters in Texas will bend your ear all day [talking] about the differing qualities of barbecue smoked with post oak or pecan or mesquite, etcetera,” says McElroy at Live Oak, which is located near some of the country’s most famous barbecue joints.

“And they’re right,” he says. “The same goes for beer.”

There are plenty of choices these days. Alder, cherry, oak, beechwood, mesquite, pear, apple, hickory, plum—maltsters big and small are offering a wider range of smoked malts than ever, and each brings its own flavors to the party.

Avoid Unforced Errors

There are a few pitfalls to dodge here. They’re not unique to smoked beer, but smoked beer may be particularly vulnerable to them.

First and foremost, be diligent about the freshness of your smoked malts.

“The biggest issue I see is the availability of fresh smoked malt and, with that, repeatability,” says Florian Kuplent, cofounder and brewmaster at Urban Chestnut in St. Louis. “The smoke character diminishes over time, and it’s not always obvious how old the malt is.”

If there’s any doubt about your malt, ask. If that’s not feasible because you’re buying online, at least order from a vendor with plenty of pull-through on their stock, to minimize the risk of getting stale malt.

Multiple pro brewers also warned me to be careful about hop choices—both in the varieties and the quantities. Smoke and bitterness don’t always play nicely together (though some malty heft can help make it work). Meanwhile, New World hops that rely on citrus and tropical-fruit flavors can be jarring in conjunction with smoky phenols.

If you opt for an ale yeast, go for cleaner profiles; fermentation-driven phenols and esters can combine with smoke to create some unsavory flavors. Likewise, pay attention to your water and rid it of all chlorine and chloramine. These are always nasty in beer but can be particularly heinous in combination with smoke.

How Much Smoke?

I saved this question for last: How much is too much when it comes to smoked malt?

Many brewers advocate for a lighter hand when using smoked malts. (“No campfire for me, thanks!” says John Stemler, consultant-brewer at Chatty Monks in Reading, Pennsylvania.) Many recommend a certain percentage-of-grist threshold, from 25 to 50 percent, or they otherwise suggest starting low and building up from there until you hit your preferred level of smoke.

That is prudent advice, and I tend to give the same kind of advice for other ingredients—but not for smoked malt. Why not? Because getting a beer that tastes overly smoky is not especially correlated to having a large percentage of smoked malt in the grist. Instead, it is more directly a function of intensity and quality of the smokiness of the malt.

Many of these same brewers happily mention recipes in which they use entirely or almost entirely smoked malt. Schlenkerla, notably, uses 100 percent smoked malt in virtually all its beers. (The exception is the Helles, whose subtle smoke character comes from the yeast, re-pitched from the Märzen and including a bit of trace wort.) Yet I would defy you to say that any of their beers are “too smoky.”

Instead of going light, I recommend you taste the malt and then add enough to ensure that you can properly taste what that malt brings to a finished beer in terms of smokiness. In other words, “go heavy”—and then, if you need to, dial it back.

Going this route will give you far more information, more quickly, ensuring that you can taste the smoke character and get a handle on how it manifests in the finished beer. On the other hand, going light will rarely “save” a beer whose smoked malt is too intense for it, anyway. Instead, you may be facing multiple re-brews as you gradually increase the percentage of smoked malt, only to realize after seven iterations that you’re working with a smoked malt that’s just … kind of muted.

Owning the Niche

I love smoked lagers. I love them for their complexity of flavors yet the simplicity of their construction. (I once had a lengthy discussion with a brewer who was convinced that “smoked hops” would make for a radical new flavor. He just couldn’t accept that all he needed to make a great smoked beer was some smoked malt using his usual process.)

Better still, for us brewer-tinkerers: Once you’ve built up your fluency with smoked malts in the clean, malt-forward lager realm, you can move on to other smoked styles, such as grodziskie, lichtenhainer, smoked porters, plus any number of smoked variations on classic styles.

This impressive smoke repertoire will astonish even your craft-savvy friends, who may mistakenly believe that all smoked beers are ashy messes or bratwurst-in-a-glass. In fact, getting these right is far less complicated than mastering mixed fermentations or any number of advanced styles.

Here, it’s really just a matter of knowing your malts—and the reward is a flavor gestalt like no other.

Few things in humanity’s long climb from the depths of prehistory have been as constant as the safety, the warmth, and the sanctity of the hearth and its fire. Smoke and flame have been totems that life was resoundingly good—or, at least safe for a few hours. With the exceptions of camping trips, winter cabins, and tending to long-smoked meats, modern life is surprisingly devoid of the pleasures of smoke. Our lungs are better for it. But what about our hearts?

Back in the misty history of American craft brewing—before the mist turned into a thick and hoppy pastry haze—there were certain rungs on the ladder of beer appreciation that every serious beer nerd would climb. The order might have differed a bit for each; maybe the first step was a fruit beer, a Kölsch, or something smooth, malty, and brown. Then there were some hoppy rungs—pales ales and IPAs—followed by barleywines, imperial whatsits, and big Belgians of every stripe. Somewhere up there were rungs for funk and acidity—worlds in which a geek can get lost and linger a while.

But near the top of the ladder—before stepping off, smugly, to rediscover wines and whiskeys—there were the smoked beers.

The most famous of these are the luxurious smoked beers of Bamberg—the rauchbiers of Schlenkerla and Spezial, namely, coming in a range of styles that include märzen, weizen, and bock. They can be challenging at first, until you realize that you want another. And another. Their brewers are among the most skilled craftsman, able to replicate the right balance again and again as a matter of generational family pride.

A great smoked beer is much easier to drink than it is to brew—yet it’s easier to brew than it is to sell.

While many people are intensely devoted to smoked meats, cheeses, barbecue, and the pleasures of the campfire, most drinkers are less than keen on the smell and taste of smoke in their beer. It’s odd if you think about it. This aversion ignores our primal wants. It ignores history. Most of all, it ignores possibility.

The Taste for Smoke

Historically, we know that maltsters worked hard to reduce the impact of smoke on their malts, but it still ended up as a trait—variable, but present. It was a consequence of drying malt with fire fed by various fuels, and it would be until we developed indirect heating techniques that produced cleaner heat.

Why did they bother? It’s all about “sensory thresholds,” or the level at which most people can detect a sensation, such as flavor or aroma. Some compounds, if we’re not aggressively sensitive to them, get measured in parts per million. Diacetyl (butterscotch/microwave popcorn) is measured in parts per billion; we can smell diacetyl coming a mile away. Meanwhile, amid the complex molecules swirling around in smoke, there are compounds to which humans are extraordinarily sensitive. We’re talking thresholds measured in parts per trillion.

To put that in a less abstract way: One part per trillion is the equivalent of a drop of water in 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Our ancestors evolved to be smoke-sensitive, either to find a fire (and food) or to run away from a wild blaze.

In other words, smoke is a tricky beast to tame. It takes skills to wrestle it into something drinkable.

Thanks in large part to know-how preserved in places such as Bamberg and Scotland, a niche world of smoked beers and malts has persisted. And thanks to their tempting availability, American brewers in recent decades have tried to bend them to their will.

The Dark Canvas

Smoke adores malt. Its relationship with hops is testier. Despite the attempts of multiple savvy brewers, I’ve never tasted a smoked IPA that worked. Hop and smoke phenols just do not play well together.

Where American brewers have excelled with smoke, the beers have often been dark—especially stouts and porters. These are the beer world’s equivalents to warm hugs—beers that envelop you and say, “Hello, friend. Here you are warm and safe.”

However, these days it’s hard enough to sell any dark beers that aren’t imperialized or stuffed with dessert. Take a classically brewed, mid-strength, well-balanced porter that few people are drinking anyway, then add some smoke to it … and forget it. It’s a dead keg. Ask your local brewers. I guarantee there’s a tiny but fierce group who would love to dedicate a tap or two to smoke shows—if they weren’t destined to sit there forlornly, like a once-beloved stuffed animal now forgotten and destined for a culling.

Given the general apathy toward darker styles and the lack of appreciation for smoked beers, it should be no surprise that very few smoked porters have left a mark on the national beer scene. One of those is long gone: Stone retired its Smoked Porter (5.9 percent ABV) in 2016 after a two-decade run. The other is a world classic: Alaskan Smoked Porter (6.5 percent ABV) is one of the winningest beers in Great American Beer Festival history, with 19 medals since 1990 plus seven more medals from the biennial World Beer Cup. Rarely, there are local stalwarts that persevere against long odds—such as Missouri’s O’Fallon Smoke Porter (6 percent ABV), which won GABF gold in 2004 and managed to hang around long enough to win another gold in 2020. These are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Here’s the beauty of it: The essence of craft is brewing what you want to drink—then tinkering to make it great—popularity be damned.

Selecting Your Smoke

Despite its relative lack of use, smoked malt comes in a handful of varieties whose character is more driven by smoke than the underlying barley. The rise of small-batch maltsters has broadened the options in some places. (Notably, the famous Heller-Trum brewery that produces Schlenkerla in Bamberg malts its own barley with local beechwood; see “Exploring the Most Brewery Rich Region in the World,” beerandbrewing.com.)

Though often used by an earlier generation of American craft brewers, Scottish peat-smoked malt largely has fallen out of favor—and with good reason. Its aggressive smoke character tends to overpower every other flavor. It helps that brewers finally realized that peat malt was meant for whiskey and not for Scottish ale. If you must use it, I recommend no more than two to four ounces per five-gallon batch (or no more than three to six grams per liter). Yes, I know there are maniacs out there using more, but I don’t trust that they can actually taste anything. (Another exception worth noting: The aforementioned Stone Smoked Porter used a small amount of peat-smoked malt, and it remains the only peat-smoked beer I’ve ever loved.)

With peat malts in the rearview mirror, the main players in the field are the German smoked malts. Bamberg’s Weyermann reigns supreme with its beechwood-smoked malt, but other German maltsters such as Bestmalz and Ireks also offer their own varieties. These are all far softer than peat-smoked malts, and if you’re a true smoke fiend you can use them as 100 percent of your grist. For the rest of us normies, I recommend starting at 10 percent before increasing it. I tend to prefer 20 to 30 percent for a soft smoke character that doesn’t quite reach Schlenkerla bacon-sandwich levels.

American maltsters, meanwhile, aren’t leaving the game to the Germans. The first I found was a small-batch product from a now-defunct manufacturer. Briess has picked up the mantle with its cherrywood-smoked malt, which leans more rauch than peat in terms of intensity. Again, start at 10 percent and ramp up to taste. (Briess also offers applewood- and mesquite-smoked malts, which are said to be more intense, but I haven’t used them and can’t offer guidance.)

A number of small-batch craft maltsters are smoking their own malts, too. For example: Blacklands Malt in Leander, Texas, has a series of smoked malts that includes a mesquite-smoked brand called Texas Brisket and an oak-smoked one called Classic Campfire.

Smoke Your Own

But let’s face it: You’re a brewer, squarely in the do-it-yourself set. So, how do you smoke malt at home?

The best advice I can share comes from both Weyermann and accomplished homebrewer Jeff Gladish: cold-smoke it. Treat it like bacon.

Like Schlenkerla, Weyermann runs its entire malt-drying process with beechwood—impractical for us. Gladish, on the other hand, starts with malt that’s already kilned. He gives it a very light spritz of water and then runs his smoke through a 16-foot duct, keeping it barely above ambient temperatures. The smoke floats through trays roughly 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) deep to gently permeate the malt.

If you go this route, you’d be in good company. The lauded Alaskan Smoked Porter is custom-smoked at a nearby salmon smokehouse, assiduously scrubbed clean of all fishiness. Alaskan cold smokes the malt with alderwood, like so much Alaskan salmon.

Likewise, you can choose your own regional flavors—just be sure to avoid resinous softwoods such as pine. Here in Southern California, I’ve seen brewers make citrus-smoked malts, or I’ve seen Texan hickory- or pecan-smoked malts. Just keep it cool.

Finding Your Balance

Here’s one of the tricky parts about brewing a smoked dark beer such as porter or stout: You’ll need to balance the highly roasted or “burnt” character of your darker grains against the “burnt” character of your smoked malt. Both smoked malts and darkly roasted grains can add acrid flavors—push too hard, and your beer will taste like a burnt cup of coffee with a stubbed-out cigarette butt.

No need to be overly traditional with the underlying style. I prefer to mix in a bit of the dehusked and debittered darker grains, such as Carafa or BlackPrinz. Getting color this way allows me to get the deep, dark browns and blacks I want without overcooking the roast/smoke bite.

Everything else about the beer is simplicity itself. For a toasty pale-malt base, I prefer Maris Otter because I’m fancy like that. I also want a touch of crystal since we want some residual sweetness to support the smoke. For the smoke character, I start with about 20 percent of (non-peat) smoked malt. If you want more smoke, you can replace your base malt with smoked malt.

Make sure your water chemistry doesn’t get overwhelmed by the roasted malts. Use slaked lime to boost carbonate if needed. For hops, just one addition for balancing bitterness is enough. In this case, I like my IBUs at 50 percent of my gravity—in other words, about 30 IBUs for a beer that starts at 1.060.

For yeast, go for clean and well-attenuating, such as White Labs WLP007 Dry English Ale, or one of my favorites, Wyeast 1272 American Ale II. Light fruity yeast character is not a bad thing in this mix.

There’s another important ingredient to consider: time. Don’t rush smoked beers. One of the weird, deeply organic, chemistry-laden secrets of a smoked dark beer is its incredible longevity. Between the dark malts and those loud-and-proud smoke phenols, these smoked porters and stouts can cellar well beyond their nonsmoked counterparts. If you ever get the chance, participate in a multiyear, multi-decade vertical tasting of Alaskan Smoked Porter. Remember, this is non-sour, 6.5 percent ABV beer—it shouldn’t last that long. The oldest bottle I’ve had was 19 years old, and it was remarkable. I can only attribute that to the brewer’s skill and care, and the magic powers of smoke.

So go out there and brew a smoked porter or stout. Brew something that wafts of ancient comforts and happy occasions. If you absolutely must stay on trend, maybe consider a smoked s’mores stout … in fact, I rather like that idea—just the thing to share around the fireside.

“If it’s a pain in the ass, we usually do it,” says Live Oak head brewer Dusan Kwiatkowski. Brewing the hard way has been a core tenet of the brewery since their start in the mid ’90s. While most breweries launched around the time focused on ales (to distinguish themselves from the “macro” beer of the time), Live Oak committed to craft lager from its earliest days. Its Czech-inspired pale lager, Pilz, has been one of their core beers for more than two decades.

Today, Live Oak maintains that focus by pushing lager even further, through the pre-Prohibition-style pils they call Pre-War Pils, and by brewing and advocating for Grodziskie, which they brew as a lager with oak-smoked malt from a small Czech maltster.

In this episode, Kwiatkowski discusses everything from the ways they’ve sourced ingredients for the Grodziskie to the process behind the cereal mash necessary with corn grits in the Pre-War Pils. Along the way, he discusses the impact of smoked malt in recipes, brewing Grodziskie as a lager rather than an ale, polishing pils so that it sparkles in the glass, spunding tanks for proper finishing, and more.

Live Oak is fond of referring to its Austin, Texas, location as “Bamberg on the Colorado,” referencing the German city’s reputation for smoked beer from breweries such as Schlenkerla and Spezial. While smoked beer is a niche in today’s wider beer world, Live Oak’s passion and focus on the approach are second to none.

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