Every once in a while I like getting my freak on with a pint of Aecht Schlenkerla smoke beer. Actually the correct term for these is Rauchbier, and in this case a delicious Oak-smoked Doppelbock produced with fire-kilned malts. Delicious!
Rauchbier is one of the earliest types of beer. Back in the day, (say Medieval times), you had your choice to either air-dry or kiln-dry malt over a smoky fire. Weather being what it is, that means that most of the year’s production of beer malt would have a smoky characteristic due to the mostly damp conditions of the European weather.
So smoke it is! Actually, if we were living in our hovel or hütte, say in the 1200’s there’s a lot of other more pressing issues to contend with, primarily finding enough food and avoiding the Bubonic Plague. Potatoes hadn’t been brought in from the undiscovered New World, and the year’s grain was wet, rat-infested and rotted. You can’t drink the river water and there’s limited meat! Smoky beer malt was the least of your concerns!
For that matter, darned near everything else probably had a heavy smokiness as well. How many of you have been around a campfire or bonfire and went home smelling of smoke? Well, if that was your only way of staying warm, and the clothes you are in are the only ones you own, you bathe twice a year and have a dirt floored one-room shack, everything you have probably reeked of smoke, your clothes, your blanket, your feet, your hair, your wife, your kids, the fire-pit, the smoky lard candles - the whole place stunk! Not to mention the animals you bring in to keep from the cold! You might not even notice the smokiness of your wooden-mugged beer!
So let’s raise a pint to our hearty and smoky ancestors who somehow survived those days living in European Dark and Middle Ages, Medieval times and all the squalor! The water made you sick, but you could drink the beer, yeah! Beer made it happen! Prost!