So it was that last Thursday I decided that the time could be spent, squandered if necessary, on a deeply experimental brew. For some time I have been following the blog of Lars Marius Garshol, a Norwegian IT developer who takes his beer hobby very seriously and writes a very honest and engaging blog. He is currently researching some of the more obscure and ethnographic parts of the Baltic and Scandinavian beer world. He is telling us about Norwegian farmhouse beer – maltøl (more on that later) – and also about his travels in Lithuania and beyond. Now it so happens that my mother-in-law is Lithuanian and she is on her last legs as I write this; so I have been reading @Larsga blogs with interest. One of the styles he describes from Lithuania is a baked beer called keptinis and his latest blog describes the scant information recorded by historians and ethnographers. Responding to a challenge laid down by @thornbidgematt in a recent tweet I thought I would have a go.
I say that the information is scant: there certainly isn’t a
recipe and some of the information is contradictory. The outline of the keptinis
process is that the grains are made into loaves and baked, then mashed and the
wort is fermented without boiling. It is a raw beer. What I don’t understand yet
is, why would you do that? By all accounts it is hard work and time consuming,
so there must be a good reason to make beer this way. What possible reasons could
there be?
In broad terms any process (like baking) must either produce something that you want (like breaking down complex ingredients to something simple, creating some colour (from Maillard
reactions) or developing flavour) or else it is there to prevent a problem, like infection by
bugs that you would rather avoid by sterilisation.
If you do bake the mash it seems to me like a great way of
destroying the enzymes that the maltsters have carefully generated from the barley. The job of those enzymes is to convert the starch in malted grains to maltose (a sugar) so that the yeast can
ferment it. It seems wrong to subject the enzymes to heat and very likely destroy them. Along the way you may get some flavour and
colour but it does seem rather dodgy. On the other hand, if you are not planning to boil the wort before
fermentation you need some way of controlling the bugs you don't want; like killing off the naturally occurring bugs such
as Lactobacillus that live on the
grains, or otherwise you will always get a sour beer. Keptinis is not reported
to be especially sour, at least not when it is fresh.
So I went in to this brew day not quite understanding why
they used this method and having to best guess the exact ingredients, quantities,
temperatures and timings.
The guidance given by the ethnographers in papers that was reported
by Lars is vague and contradictory. While farmhouse 'styles' are
notoriously variable there are a number of features that seem quite impractical
to me:
1. The malt bill suggested by the historian Juozas Petrulis (1975) was "1 kg pale barley malts,
2 kg rye malt, and 2 kg oats". I regarded this to be the perfect recipe for a
stuck mash. The quantity of oats in particular, without the use of rice hulls
to aid the flow, was asking for trouble.
2. One wonders if there are enough enzymes present to
convert the starch, from only 1kg of pale malt.
3. Would the baking process not destroy what enzymes there
were?
Here is what I did, intending to make 19 litres of beer by the Brew in a Bag method:
3kg Pale Maris Otter malt
2kg Rye Malt
0.5kg Flaked oats
100g Green garden Goldings hops
250ml Yeast slurry (cultured from a bottle of Helsingborgs Kaffestout)
The dry malt bill was mixed in a large bucket until even. Then
1.5kg at a time were put into a large mixing bowl and about 1.4 litres of near boiling
water added, enough to wet all the grains and make a stiff mix.
This was quickly put into a shallow baking
tray to form a flat 'loaf' and turned out onto a newspaper. Four of these were
produced, which fortunately was as much as I could fit in my oven. The
instructions in Larsblog said to lay them on a bed of straw but I didn’t have any
straw, so I used newspapers, as I guessed that the purpose of the straw was to absorb
excess liquor during baking.
They were taken to the kitchen and placed on oven
shelves and baked at 190C for one hour. At that point three of the loaves had
developed a toasted crust (a little darker in one corner) but the fourth (see second shelf up) was
still soggy and pale, so it was placed back in the oven for another 30 minutes
until it looked like the others. This contradicted the guidance in Larsblog
which said bake at 177C for only 20-30 minutes but my loaves hadn’t cooked much
by then and certainly hadn’t developed a toasty crust which is mentioned. One
report in Larsblog said to bake the loaves until black and crisp but I thought that was just too
extreme, and unlikely to produce any fermentable wort at all, so I ignored it.
The newspapers absorbed a fair amount of strong sticky wort
that oozed from the base of the loaves. The original instructions called for
straw but I didn't have any. A certain amount of the straw must have stuck to the loaves, so it must have been
added to the mash too. I tried to remove as much of the paper as I could but it was
very sticky. I might think of something else next time, if there is a next time.
The loaves were quite flat and apart from the crust were
still very moist inside, despite being baked for much longer than the
recommended 20-30 minutes. I took them out and set them to one side. They began to harden up a little as they cooled, as a cake would. They looked like giant flap-jacks.
I quite forgot to add the hops to the mash, so 100 g of
green garden Goldings were taken from the freezer and boiled separately in a
couple of litres of the wort for 20 minutes. This was thought to be equivalent
to 50 g of dried hops that should have gone into the mash to give an estimated
IBU of 25 units.
After nearly 5 hours the temperature was still 64C (good duvet!).
The hopped wort was added and the wort was strained off through a brew bag into
a freshly sterilised bucket. The mash was gelatinous and very reluctant to run through the fine mesh. In the end I was satisfied to use only a 1mm sieve,
then a after that collapsed under the weight I settled for a conical stainless sieve but it was still very slow because the mash was
so gelatinous.
It seems like a huge amount of work (no, it WAS a huge amount of work) and the extract is not
very good. I recovered only around 9 litres from the first runnings at a gravity of
1055. Vast amounts of liquor have been absorbed by the gelatinous grain and weren't running out. In
total 16.8 litres of liquor went in and only 9 came out (before sparging). Should
I sparge? It was half past midnight.
I sparged with a relatively small amount of boiled water, as
I didn't want to reduce the OG too much. It came down to 1050 and at that point
it was one o'clock in the morning. I pitched yeast cultured from Helsingborgs
Kaffestout, aerated with an electric hand blender (whizzer), put it in the airing
cupboard and tumbled in to bed at 1.30am.
...
The next morning I whisked the wort again to aerate it and encourage
the yeast to grow. By the evening there was no discernible fermentation activity.
I was concerned about infection, so I whisked again with my blender and tipped a packet of T58
in to the wort. By Saturday evening there was still no activity. On Sunday
morning the wort was flat still and it looked disgusting (below). I tasted the wort.
It was not especially sweet, had a certain acidity but most crucially had an thick mouthfeel,
like engine oil. It was horrible. I had a feeling that there were no fermentable sugars in the
wort at all and it was just jam-packed with unfermentable dextrins. Whatever bugs survived the baking
were probably beginning to sour the mash. I thought that with that slimy
mouthfeel and the growing acidity, this wasn’t going to produce a beer that I or any body else would
want to drink!
Out of sheer curiousity I have put the brew back into the
airing cupboard, just to see what happens. But I have every expectation that it
will end up going down the drain. Was it a wasted day? It was certainly
exhausting and I am still recovering from the late night. I doubt it will produce
anything drinkable but it has been an experiment and even failed experiments teach us a lesson. What would I do differently next time, if there is a next time? I will hopefully be armed with more knowledge (maybe resulting from this blog) but at least I won’t be attempting it for the very first time; I have some experience now. I must certainly look at the malt bill and the baking times and the temperatures; they must be critical. Maybe I baked it too hot and/or too long; maybe just too much was loaded into my oven. Maybe...
It cost
me a day but I now have more experience in making keptinis than almost anyone
else alive. I just don’t have any keptinis yet. Ha ha ha. Cheers.
