Öl avföring
How much time you got? Lars Marius Garshol Mar 25, - 13 min read. In , the manager of an ironworks in Söderfors, Sweden, was about to retire.
When handing his responsibilities over to the next manager, he worried about one issue in particular: the future of a beer barrel. This was not just any barrel, he explained in the letter to his successor. This was a barrel he had been given by the previous manager when he himself took over the ironworks half a century before, in In fact, he wrote, the barrel still contained beer from when it was first filled—in What the retiring manager wanted was for his successor to continue taking care of this barrel.
AccèsD - Desjardins
Those three words were underlined in the letter, just to make it clear how strongly he felt about it. How far the manager got his wish is not known, but in the barrel—by then more than years old—was still being maintained in Söderfors. This all might sound more than a little odd. But why was this going on in Sweden?
Puno to Juliaca Bus
And why at an ironworks, of all places? One of the things that enabled Sweden to expand like this was its iron mines and ironworks, located in a belt just northwest of Stockholm. Söderfors, as it happens, was in the midst of this belt. So, the Swedish kings invited specialists from the Low Countries and Germany to settle in the iron belt.
That region was long famous for its iron production. This beer was barrel-aged for a year or two to become highly aromatic and quite acidic. Belgium, of course, is home to certain traditions that resemble that description, including lambic and Flemish red ale. It might be that they share an ancestor with that now-lost Wallonian brewing tradition. It was traditional for these wealthy families to drink the beer for Christmas out of small wine glasses, just as they would do with particularly noble wines.
I often talk about how I see our brewing history as being divided in two: farmhouse brewing and modern brewing. All over northern Europe, aristocratic families had large estates, and they kept themselves, their guests, and their workers supplied with beer brewed on those estates—usually from their own grains. These manorial brewhouses had economic and social incentives that were sufficiently different from those of modern brewing and farmhouse brewing, such that in some cases they ended up producing their own styles of beer.
The hundred-year beer is just one example.
Hundraårig Öl: A Hundred Years (or More) in the Making
Another is the English October beer, which was a manorial beer that was barrel-aged for years, essentially for purposes of showing off. October beer, famously, was the precursor of IPA. As for how hundred-year beer was brewed, there is an account from that describes the brewing in Söderfors. They used 60 kilos of malt and five kilos of hops to make 75 liters of beer. For a five-gallon batch, that would be about 33 pounds of malt and almost three pounds of hops, potentially hitting gravities above 1.
What kind of malt is not known, but one source used Vienna malts. The hops were most likely Swedish-grown and similar to landrace European hops in bitterness and aroma. In other words, this must have been a strong and bitter beer, although the bitterness must have faded quite a bit before anyone got to drink it. The brewing began in the morning by stirring cold water into the malt.
They left this mash until about 2 a. Once this was done and the mash had settled, they ran off the liquid, brought it to a boil, and poured it back over the mash.