The Smoke Post

Hello again!

I’m quite taken by the intro-bullet point list-outro format, so today we’ll be doing just that in a discussion of smoke flavors in beer. And while I’m sure most of us have heard of Smoked Porters, probably fewer have heard of German Rauchbiers or Grätzer, all of which beg two questions: where do smoked flavors “work” or “belong” in beer, and what smoke sources are appropriate?

The Historical Perspective

It may not be obvious that virtually all beers made before, say, the early 19th century (Wheeler is a reasonable signpost) utilitized smoked malt, but if I were to ask you how you might generate large volumes of steam-less (indeed, deliberately dry) hot air around that time, I’m guessing you’d land on wood-based fire as one of few viable options. And, yeah, that was basically the only option for malting (if you couldn’t use malt relatively quickly after air-drying it, which necessitated building a malting facility next to your brewhouse, which was expensive and I believe fairly rare, though it happened here and there).

The game went like this: take the grain from the field, clean it, malt it (a whole other post, it’s complicated), a process involving moist grain, and then dry said moist and malted grain using, say, something akin to a fine-mesh barbecue grate over a low fire. Your choice of fire material (wood or otherwise) affected the flavor and aroma of the malt, obviously, but also to a degree the evenness and thus quality of the malt, both of which led to a short-list of favorites. The big historical players were:

• Coke/Coal

  • This was the creme de la creme of fuels, since the production of coal basically entails burning off most everything except carbon, meaning that burning it produces little more than heat, CO2, and water, making it the ideal choice of the day. The rub? It was very expensive relative to the other options, and although you could use it to make paler malt, it took a minute for the hydrometer to pop into existence and prove the overall economy of using this fuel source for malting (the other side of the equation being the higher efficiency of said malt, meaning less was needed for beer).

• Straw

  • Good ol’ wheat straw - plentiful, cheap, and making malt about which one dude in ye olden times said, “in all my Travels, I never tasted any Malt-Liquor more pleasant than that dryed with Wheat-straw.” Hell of a dear-diary, old chum. (Source)

• Oak

  • The first of two common woods, this fuel source was certainly commonly used, though with one caveat: the bracken (get it??) was aged for a few years in order to drive off some of the oils, and thus mellow its flavor. This is still apparently done by Schlenkerla but with Beechwood, which is baller.

• Beechwood

  • This is the option that’ll be familiar to all homebrewers, and, speaking of Schlenkerla, is the wood that, when used to smoke malt, imparts that incredible hot dog water vibe. I’m not joking, and I absolutely love the stuff - our last head brewer would stare at me in disgust when I would tell him how much Smoked Malt was in my recipes. 50:50 Smoked Malt to Munich turned out alarmingly well, but yeah, you’d have to be a glizzy gulper to enjoy it.

• Scraps of wood

  • They...yeah, I mean, when they didn’t have anything else, they obviously just used whatever. I doubt it tasted all that good, but then again I hear there’s this new string of colonies in the New World that’s facing perpetual grain shortages, so no problem.

Modern Smoke

While fat, sicko mode Rainbow Sherbet vape rips are the future of modern smoking, modern smoke flavor in beer is all about wood, and particularly about Oak, Beechwood, and Fruit Woods. And gender reveal parties/national forests.

• Beechwood

  • I state without proof that Weyermann’s Beechwood-smoked malt, i.e. Rauchmalz, has the biggest share of the smoked malt market, and understandably so. To this day, I have not seen a smoked barley malt in any homebrew store that made use of anything besides Beechwood; it’s possible that some homebrew store out there smokes their own malt, but that’s literally what it would take. Examples include Schlenkerla, and probably the vast majority of smoked porters - obviously breweries don’t love sharing their recipes, so who knows, but I can’t imagine Oak-smoked Wheat being a more frequent player.

• Oak

  • Speaking of, yeah, Oak-smoked wheat is the other smoked malt you’ll see in a homebrew store. It’s used in Grätzer/Piwo Grodziskie, and quite possibly a few of those Smoked Porters (note: I’ve never seen a smoked-anything else in person, beyond the german offerings, which is an understandable shame), though I’m dying to see it used in a Berliner Weisse/Hefeweizen.

• Fruit Woods

  • Finally, there are the fruit woods. Cherry-smoked malt is something I’ve seen on brewing forums and probably in stores, and these are the special smoked malts about which the talk is most fervent.

• Peat

  • Peat-smoked malt is worth mentioning, because it’s hot garbage in beer. To quote the indispensable Designing Great Beers:

“[Greg] Noonan relates that, even among Scots brewers, the old timers can only remember one ale that possessed the peak smoke flavor, or reek, as it is called.”

• Alder

  • Finally, Alaskan, which makes my favorite Porter to date, uses Alder apparently (it’s an Alaska thing, you wouldn’t understand)

Conclusion

This was the obligatory smoke post, and we’ll never speak of it again. I regret writing it, but here we are. Not everything is worth learning, and this is coming from the guy who finished the 200+ page book on Smoked Beers.

Also, I want to try using one of those smoke infusion guns on a bottle of beer and see what happens, but even if that works, I won’t waste this hallowed space on a discussion. Thanks for reading!!1!

- Adrian