ia on holiday anyway, don’t miss out on the beer scene. As yet, to my knowledge, no one has written a guidebook to the craft beer bars of Catalonia, but if you contact any of the brewers I’ve mentioned here I’m sure they will make recommendations in their local areas.
Many thanks indeed to Ariadna Ribas and Elisabet Pagès of the Catalan Tourist Board for all their considerable hard work in organising this trip, and look after everybody so well, it was a great experience, and grateful thanks to all the brewers, restaurateurs, bar owners and hoteliers for their hospitality and generosity – may you all continue to thrive and prosper.
Kveik: a word we’re likely to be seeing a lot more of in the beer world. But what is kveik? Here are a couple of things it’s not:
Kveik is NOT a beer style. It’s the name given in parts of Western Norway to yeast used in the local tradition of farm brewing, it looks to be derived from an Old Norse word meaning “kindling”, as if the kveik kindled the fire in the brew, and it is apparently related to the English word “quick” in the sense of “alive”. In particular, kveik is NOT the Norwegian equivalent of Saison. Kveik is just one of half a dozen or so terms for “yeast” used in Norway, the others including barm (also found in Britain, of course), gjaer, gjest (from the same root as “yeast”) and gong, with kveik limited to the south-west of the country, but competing, even there, with the latter three words, which all had wider distribution.
Some similarities can be found in the brews made across the area where the term “kveik” is used: north of the Jostedal glacier they will generally be “raw” ales, that is, made without boiling the wort, and hop usage will be light to non-existent: generally restricted to leaving a bag of hops in the stream of wort running from the mash vessel. All will be made with water that has been boiled with branches of juniper in the pot, which gives a sharp, lemony/citric flavour to the ale, as well as helping to preserve against bacterial infection.
Kveik is NOT a particular strain of yeast, and saying “kveik yeast” is a bit tautological, although the term looks to cover a distinct family of yeasts. However, within that family are dozens, perhaps hundreds of different individual strains, and any one person’s kveik can contain between two and ten different individual strains. This use of multiple yeast strains appears to be important.
Some kveik are bottom-fermenting, some top-fermenting, and some intermediate, depending, basically, on where the brewer collected the yeast from at the end of fermentation. According to Lars Marius Garshol, who literally wrote the book on Norwegian farmhouse brewing, “in some areas, such as Sunnmøre and Nordfjord, there was a tradition that yeasts should be mixed every five years or so, and kveiks from those places show a much greater variety of yeast strains.”
Richard Preiss, co-founder of Escarpment Laboratories, based in Guelph, Ontario, whose company has done perhaps the most research into kveik of any on the planet, has suggested that these different strains need each other, that one makes a vitamin that the other ones need, and vice versa. According to Garshol, Preiss “always seems to get slower fermentations with single-strain yeasts from kveik cultures than [we see from others] with the mixed cultures. So they can survive without each other, but fermentation goes faster and easier with the help of the others. But doing an experiment to prove or disprove that in a way that’s reproducible by others is very difficult.”
That is not the most interesting fact about kveik, however. The aspect of kveik brewing that is most likely to ensure its adoption outside Norway is the range of flavours it is possible to get from the yeast, fruity and deep, which chime with the search for more flavour that seems to power much of the innovation in craft brewing right now. But there are other wonders: the high temperature tolerance exhibited by kveik strains, for example, many of which are happy fermenting at up to 40ºC.
Preiss, a tall, bearded and friend