Beer Connoisseur article on traditional Lithuanian brewing. No-boil + hop tea?

It's not online that I know of, but Beer Connoisseur has an article on the ancient and secretive world of traditional Lithuanian farmhouse beer. It was light on technical details, but there were two interesting things: 1) One of the styles involves making spent grain bread then crumbling it back up into the wort, pre-fermentation. The author described the resulting flavor as "torrefaction." 2) No boil + hop tea seems to be the order of the day.

I found the latter very interesting. I had wondered if it was a viable technique, but he made it sound like they were all doing it over there. No one on this forum has admitted to trying it...yet, so I was wondering if anyone here had any insight on this method. The article said that the beer, of course, comes out very malty and with a lot of earthy flavors and strange aftertastes, but some of that has to be due to the yeast (wild yeast cultured for decades!). Has anyone here had any experience with rustic Lithuanian brewing or any of these methods?

I read that article and was wondering it myself. Getting nowhere on the Google front - just Berliner recipes, and that's not what I'm going for.

My wife has Lithuanian heritage, and I thought this might be a nice surprise for her.

I'm thinking you would still have to mash at temperature, right? I don't see conversion happening cold. So maybe you still mash, but get it down to temperature directly after and add the hop tea and yeast.

I am Lithuanian, and helped Beer Connoisseur with their trip to Lithuanian beer country. A couple of insights you might find useful.

As for grain bread beer, it's called "Keptinis" and it is mentioned as a style in some old books. The bread is made not from spent grain, but from mash dough, then baked in loafs, crumbled and filtered by pretty much the same traditional filtering method as in other farmhouse beers (see below), before fermenting.

As for no-boil + hop tea process, it was and still is quite common way of producing local farmhouse beers by traditional homebrewers and small brewers alike, but the methods vary, as the process would be changed/evolved by every brewer in his family. There was a study/survey of existing brewing procedures published by a Lithuanian ethnologist before WWII, where there seemed to be a lot of variations. Of course, the basics are the same. I have tried no-boil beer from at least four commercial brewer(ie)s who are still producing beer in such manner (namely, A. Grigonis, A. Udrienė, J. Morkūnas, Kurklių bravoras), and several non-commercial brewers in Lithuania North.

In short, the grains are mashed and then filtered through a combination of wooden chips, hay bed and/or branches, and sometimes hops. Different sources of those materials would impart certain flavors to the final product.

After this, the hop tea is added, wort cooled and the yeast (most often brewers yeast, but sometimes even baking yeast could be used) pitched. The fermentation temps vary widely across regions, families and yeasts used. A few times I was surprised to hear about fermentation temps as high as human body temp (37 Celsius). I was brewing traditional beer with a friend from that region, and he chose to use exactly this temperature as this is what the brewers in his family were always using.

As you can imagine, such fermentation is rigorous, happens quickly and imparts more aggressive flavors. Not yet completely fermented, so called "green beer" or "young beer" would be racked into wooden barrels, closed tightly and kept cool - during this process the beer would finish fermenting, get some condition and "start walking" (the pressure built by fermentation would sometimes even break the barrels). There's a different story, art and folclore about dispensing and consuming a beer from those barrels.

Generally, there were two groups of beers - for fast consumption, and for keeping. The fast beers could be drank already a week after racking, and the keeping ones could be matured for months, maybe longer, in cold places - cellars, water wells, dug in ground and so on.

Hope this helps.

This is great, thanks marsav!

So if I were to try to approximate one of these farmhouse beers, what commercially available White Labs or Wyeast yeast could I use? Any idea the amount of IBUs in them? Which grains can I buy to approximate, as well?

Sorry for all the questions, I'm just excited someone with some knowledge responded to the thread.

Hey bdkelly - for your approximations, you could use heat tolerant and either neutral, yeasty or mildly spicy profile yeasts. I know that some brewers in the area are using Fermentis Safbrew S-33/Edme yeast which is a very popular general purpose ale yeast tolerant to wide range of temps. I guess other British ale yeasts should do the job, too. For S-33, I saw WLP005, Wyeast 1187 mentioned on this same board as substitutes.

On the other hand, seeking to imitate funkier versions of Lithuanian farmhouse ales, I think you could try some less pronounced Belgian or French farmhouse/saison/biere de garde strains, especially with the lower FG.

Local brewers mostly use local lager/pilsner malts which have a very toasted character - if you can get your hands on Czech or German malts, they are next best fit.

As for hops, I would say the majority of Lithuanian farmhouse beers are not too bitter and a good balance is prefered - even though there are many exceptions to this rule. It's difficult to say about the amounts as hop tea doesn't have the same absorption rate as wort. I would say flavor perception is often at 25-35 IBU or lower. Some brewers still use local wild or cultured hops, but the majority just use any available German and Czech hops (Hallertauer Traditional and Tettnager are quite popular).

marsav, would you happen to have a mash dough bread recipe?

Again, this is awesome, thanks marsav! In my head, I was using pilsner malt and saison yeast, but it's good to know that I can use S-33, and that others are using it.

Mongrel, in my research, I found this thread: http://www.alaus.info/forumas/alus-salyklo/467-kaimiskas-keptinis-alus-mieste.html

Roughly translated through translate.google.com, you come up with this for the bread recipe:

5 kg pale malt
1 kg rye malt
1 kg amber
1 kg Vienna
0.2 kg of sugar

From what I can gather, he mixed it all with hot water until it was wet and formed loaves, then put them in the oven. He has no idea what temperature his oven is, but said he left them in for about two hours, checking on them periodically and removing them when they turned brown.

Then he used about 1.75 oz. of Northern Brewer in a hop tea (mentioning it wasn't bitter enough for him) and use Brewferm Top yeast.

I think I'm going to try just doing the mash version before the bread version. How does this look for a recipe?

Assuming 65% brewhouse efficiency, 5.25 gallon batch size
9.5 lbs Pilsner
1.5 lbs Amber
1.5 lbs Munich
.5 lbs Flaked Barley

Should be about 1.059 SG, 7.9 SRM. I have both Hallertauer and Tettnanger on hand, so I can decide on that and research a bit more on how to prepare a hop tea - I'm thinking pouring boiling water over hops in a french press. Then filtering through wood chips or hay.

Thoughts?

On second thought, I think I'll boil the hops separately for 10 - 20 minutes. It seems like you'd get better utilization that way. Or possibly draining off some wort at the end of the mash and using that to boil the hops in and add it back.

marsav, any insight on the hop tea?

@bdkelly - that seems like a fairly good recipe based on the description of "Keptinis" brewing process from another book on Lithuanian fermented beverages. The translation is accurate enough. I have the original book, but not at hand. By re-reading the thread, and recalling my own experience of trying to replicate Keptinis, here come a few more tips - that should help Mongrel as well:

1) the mash dough is made from mixing hot water with ground grains, probably a very thick dough. If you can form loafs, you can do that and bake as such, if it's too thin, you can bake in trays like in the pictures of that thread

2) while baking, the edges will caramelize and that's necessary but probably it shouldn't burn too black. Different brewers would bake it to a different degree of caramelization, and that would impact both resulting colour and flavor - plenty of space for experimentation. Not sure about temperatures, but it's quite likely originally the brewers were using the same ovens that were normally purpose-built for bread - so the temps can be similar too.

3) after baking, crumble the bread, add some hops, hot water and mash for long hours. For me it sounds like most of the conversion should happen during initial phase of baking, and later the enzymes are killed by high temps, but that's what our ancestors were doing - they didn't know much about chemistry, but maybe they liked the resulting flavors, or had some other beliefs about that

4) filter, add hop tea, cool, pitch. You are right for the hop tea - it has to be boiled, the bitterness and preservative qualites were more important than aroma. I think I read that sometimes hop tea was even added to mash, and then wort filtered as usual.

As for grains, the post mentions (probably a quote from the book) that long time ago, the grain bill was mainly based on local bromus grain malt, while barley and oats would constitute only a small part of the bill.

I started thinking I have to get back to that book and go to the market to fetch some bromus

And subbing this too!

Thank you, marsav. This is more than I could have hoped for.

OK everyone, I did my first test of this today. The equipment I used was a 10 gallon stainless kettle with a false bottom. Here was the recipe assuming 70% brewhouse efficiency:

7 lbs 12.0 oz Pilsner (1.6 SRM)
1 lbs 8.0 oz Amber (27.5 SRM)
1 lbs 8.0 oz Munich 10L (10.0 SRM)
4.0 oz Barley, Flaked (1.5 SRM)

Est Color: 8.5 SRM

2 oz Tettnang (4.5% AA) pellets
1 oz Mt Hood (6.3% AA) leaf/whole

1.0 pkg SafBrew Ale (DCL/Fermentis #S-33)

Est. OG 1.053

I mashed at 152 with 6.75 gallons of water for about 90 minutes. After 60 minutes or so, I drained off about 1/2 gallon and when it came to a boil, added 2 oz. of 4.5% AA Tettnanger. I boiled the hops in the wort for about 20 minutes. I'm estimating this will give about 21 - 22 IBUs.

When the hop tea was done, I took a large strainer that fits over a fermenting bucket and filled lined the bottom with straw (the closest thing to hay I could get) and an ounce of Mt. Hood leaf/whole hops (the closest thing to a Noble I have on hand in leaf/whole form). See the picture below for the wort going into the fermenter. I got a bit more than 5 gallons out of it.

After that, I used an immersion chiller directly in the bucket to get down to 68 degrees and pitched a packet of rehydrated S-33. OG measured at 1.054, so very close to what I was expecting.

I'll update in a couple of weeks when I have a keg empty and get it transferred. Keep your fingers crossed.

Thanks again to marsav for all of his help in helping figure this out.

Looking forward to seeing how this turns out. Keep us posted.

Hey bdkelly, just wondering how the brew was in the end?

It was...different. Very grainy and earthy. I'm not sure if I did anything wrong or if it just wasn't my style, but it was tough to get through that batch. It made for a good story to tell, but I don't know if I'll be trying it out again.

I feel like i want to give it a try! My mother and father in-law are Lithuanian and are going to show me how to bake bread the traditional way at christmas, so makes sense to do a brew too. Ill post as soon as i have something to show for it!

Hey guys,

So my background is Lithuanian (both parents were born in Canada but are Lithuanian too), I still speak, read and write the language reasonably well thanks to my folks, grandparents and Lithuanian community in which I grew up (Toronto).

I too came across the article in the Beer Connoisseur magazine a while back, and archived it in my mind for something to try at a later date. Since moving to Chicago about 7 months ago (which also has a HUGE Lithuanian population) I have had to put brewing on hold due to ongoing renovations at our new place. I finally couldn't stand waiting any longer and got back to brewing this past weekend. However, since renovations are still ongoing I still haven't been able to set up my electric system (no space yet), but I was able to do a BIAB version on the stovetop.

The equipment I used was a 10 Liter (2.5 gallon) stainless pot on the stove top, and like other BIAB brewers a nylon bag to hold the grain. Here was the recipe:

1.25 lbs 2 row malt
1.25 lbs 6 row malt
1 lbs Crystal 80 malt
1/2 container Bries Amber LME (not sure of the weight)

2 oz Hallertau (3.5% AA) pellets


1.0 vial WLP665 Flemish Ale Blend
1.0 vial WLP005 British Ale Yeast

Est. OG 1.080

I milled all the grains separately. I added 1.25lbs of the 2 row and 1.25 lbs of the Crystal 80 to my bag and tied it off. I filled my kettle with 7 L of water and brought it up to 165F at which point I added the grain bag and turned the heat way down. I mixed well to make sure there were no dry spots within the grain bag.

At the same time as mashing in, I mixed the other 1.25 lbs of 6 row with 1.5L of water in a bowl, mixed thoroughly and spread it on a baking sheet lined with aluminum foil. I proceeded to bake the "bread" for 1.25 hours at 375F.

After 1.25 hours I scrapped all the caramelized "bread" from the tray and added it to my mash bag.

In total I let the mash sit for 5 hours. Monitoring the temp and maintaining somewhere between 155-165F.

While the mash was resting, I measured 1 L of water into a smaller pot, added 2oz of Hallertau hop pellets and brought the mixture to 165F and let it sit for an hour.

After mashing for 5 hours I brought the temp up to 170 and left it for another 15 min.

After this I removed the grain bag and turned the burner up to high to get the wort to start boiling. While that was going on, I placed the grain bag in a collander over a pot and poured 1.5L of 170F water over it to extract the remaining sugars. This second running wort was added to the kettle.

In total, after grain absorption I ended up with 7.5L of wort (pre-boil)

Once the wort was boiling, I added 1/2 the hop "tea", at 30 min I added the rest.

Total boil time 70 min with a nice rolling boil.

After that, I used an immersion chiller directly in the kettle to get down to 80F. I ended up with an OG of 1.084, a little higher than expected (boil off was a little greater than expected)

I siphoned off equal amounts into 4 cleaned and sanitized growlers. Pitching the Flemish yeast into 2 of them and the British yeast into the other two. As of this morning they all look like they're fermenting quite nicely.

I'll update in a couple of weeks. And let you know how it went

Labas! Adopted Lugan here my best friend is Lithuanian


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Could anyone scan and post the original article? Would appreciate it


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I'll take a look for it this weekend.

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You are awesome, thank you!


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Great thread! Thank you all. My grandfather came here from Lithuania, but I never met him. While I don't think I'll, try to brew this, I'm interested in your results. If I ever get to Lithuania, I'll surely try their beer.

Subbed. Not sure when, or how, but dang it I'm going to make this this summer.

Love me some wild brewing.

They have a Lithuanian beer here (assuming state-side as well) called Svyturys...might have butchered that...it's pretty good stuff


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rocketsan said:

They have a Lithuanian beer here (assuming state-side as well) called Svyturys...might have butchered that...it's pretty good stuff


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We have that, it's a bit bland to my palate, sorta ricey like kirin... Touch hoppier though...

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Rocketsan where is here? (I know the LCBO in Ontario sells Svyturys) They do carry a variety of svyturys, kalnapelis and utenos here in the US as well. Those three are all very tasty, though as they are owned by Carlsburg (i think) they have gone the way of many other macro brews and become more generic. From what i've read and what ive been told by a close friend who is currently living in Lithuania, some of the traditional and craft brewers are making some really cool really funky stuff over there.

After doing some thinking last night, I think I've got a plan -

1) Make loaves from milled grain and bake until crispy
2) Line MLT with a partial slice of alfalfa and loose hops(grab one from the farm next time I'm over)
3) Mash crumbled bread at 151 @ 2.3qt/lb for 90min, with mashout 170F
4) Sparge 212F to fermenter volume.
5) Quick boil for 5min (not part of the original recipe but for piece of mind)
6) Cool, place in fermenter with hop tea.
7) Pitch with S33 and hope for the best.

Look solid? I was going to wait until summer, but I may try this one sooner - it just looks like a ball to brew....

Hamilton, Ontario...


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Sumbrewindude sounds awesome. Try it and let us know how it goes.

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hammis said:

Sumbrewindude sounds awesome. Try it and let us know how it goes.

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Can do - it'll be a few weeks or so, though, I'm three batches staged (re-using yeast so I try to double/triple up on yeast once the primary is open), not to mention I've got to find leaf hops and get out to the farm for the slice. I figure it'll be at least a month, unless I can run down and grab another bucket/carboy sometime in the next few weeks.

The only thing (looking at the steps I posted above) I'm considering changing to break out of the traditional recipe, would be to add the hop addition during the 5min JIC boil to kill any stragglers. Thought process is, if I'm boiling it anyway for a few minutes, might as well toss the hops in then and skip the tea as the approximate AA's would be close without having to deal with the tea part. Who knows, I might end up doing the tea anyway - this is still in the "planning" phase trying to get a feel for something I've never tried.

Hoping for a double brew day here pretty quick, so that'll push it forward a bit.

Will keep you updated!

Love brewing off the wall stuff like this... :rockin:

This thread got me searching a bit. A good source is LithuanianBeer.com. There are some good blog links there, and information on Lithuania's commercial breweries. It seems that the bigger brewers make German style lagers, but the farmhouse brewing is alive and well, even using a unique strain of yeast.

I didn't get a chance to look for the magazine this weekend. I'll try and take a look sometime this week and get it posted for you guys.

Please do, thanks...


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Can't wait. Thanks dude!

as promised

continued

ill see if i can scan and attach as pdf as well

Sweet. Thanks Hammis!

In doing some more homework, trying to get a handle on this and figuring out a system so that "beer" will be made, I had to do some looking into Kvass. I know it's not really the same, but it's the only thing I can think of that uses bread as part of the mash, so I wanted to see that implementation so that I could formulate a better idea for this one.

So far, I think it'll end up like this -

- Get a third more grain than necessary, and separate that from the base recipe
- Toss this 1/3 into a blender/processor and process finely, combine with sugar/water/whatever to make the loaves and bake.
- Once finished baking/cooling, tear up and soak overnight in 190F water
- Use immersion blender to blend "bread" into water, heat to 151F and combine with mash water volume
- Add in mash grains, mash 90min
- Continue on with before mentioned concept.

AFA hops go, I know that they're using German hops for their tea. I've seen a couple articles where they say there's a hop presence, but no actual IBU's. I'm thinking of trying for 20-25IBU and end up "balanced", as the hop requirement to hit 30-40IBU is insane (like double Pliney insane - which for me is insane).

I could go with Bravo for the hop tea, but there's this evil side of me that wants to use Summit and a saison yeast and just let this whole thing go wild....

A PDF would rock but appreciate it already! Thanks!!!


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pdf's

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