uggests a third entire category of yeasts that have not really been explored in brewing.”
I was lucky enough to get to see a “Norwegian farm brewer” in action: Stig Seljeset, whose father was a farmer brewer, and who wanted to maintain the tradition. Stig brews at Borghild Tunet in Hornindal, “tunet” being the Norwegian for “farmstead”, home of Idar Nygård, deputy mayor of Hornindal, who has preserved the old farmstead much as it would have looked a century and more ago. The beer Stig brews is a “raw ale”, made without boiling the wort. The first step is to boil up water (which comes from a borehole up in the mountains, and contains lots of dissolved limestone/chalk) and branches of juniper in a large iron pot, perhaps 100 litres or so, suspended over the fire in the old farmstead kitchen (exactly the same way that Frank Clark does in his reproduction 18th century farmhouse kitchen in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia). All the equipment is then scrubbed down and washed out with the hot juniper-water, before Stig uses milk churns to carry hot juniper-water to the “mash tun”, a blue 200-litre food-grade plastic tub set up in the garage across the farmstead yard.
The malt – on this occasion Munton’s pale lager malt from Suffolk, though Stig is happy to use whatever malt he can get hold of – is added, and mashing takes place at 68-70ºC. Once sufficient time has passed for conversion of starches to sugar, the grain is transferred by buckets into the “lauter tun” – another blue plastic tub, this one with a tap set in the bottom. Beforehand, Stig has set a wooden “filter” in the tun, above the tap hole, augmenting this with leafy twigs of juniper. The wort left in the “mash ” is then poured into the “lauter tun”, and allowed to strain through into milk churns, while more hot juniper-water is poured in to “sparge” the malt. A bag containing loose hops – Challenger this time, though again Stig isn’t fussy, and will use what he can get – is hung in the churn and the hot wort runs over the hops, like a teabag. This is the only contact Stig’s ale has with hops.
Wort cooling takes place by looping a circular length of hosepipe with holes in round the top of the milkchurn and running cold water from the tap through the hosepipe, which trickles down the outside of the churn. Once cooled sufficiently, the wort is carried down to the cellar of the old farmhouse, where it is added to the “fermenting vessel” – one more blue plastic tub. Stig aims for a temperature of 32ºC when he pitches the kveik into the fermenting vessel, but it was a cold day, and his thermometer (the only “technology” Stig uses) showed the wort had dropped to 28ºC, so the last 10 litres of wort were added uncooled to bring everything up. The kveik, a mixture of dried yeast from brewings in 2012 and 2016, is warmed up and brought back to life in a wooden bowl of wort by the kitchen fire, and then added to the fermentation tub and left in the dark cellar to work magic. The final result, in a few days, will be cloudy, slightly lemony and sharp, probably around five per cent alcohol by volume, and delicious.
Sitting 30 feet below the surface at a table in a workmen’s refuge dug out of the soft Bohemian sandstone, drinking unfiltered, unpasteurised lager made in 80-year-old open wooden fermenting vessels and poured from big copper jugs, I reflected on how long it had taken me to make this journey. Being a beer writer who has never visited the Czech Republic is highly embarrassing, like being an art historian who has never seen Florence. But every attempt I had made to get to the birthplace of pale lager, in more years of trying than I want to recall, had gone wrong: until now. Another tick on the bucket list, at last.
Two ticks, actually: one for finally getting to the Pilsner Urquell brewery, and its fabled caves, and another for finally drinking at U Fleků, Prague’s almost legendary home-brew pub, eulogised by Michael Jackson 40 years ago in the first edition of the World Guide to Beer and somewhere I had wanted to drink ever since I read about it. The gods of beer guided