The heartiest forms of the style survive today as Baltic and imperial porters. These two porter progeny represent a harkening to British maritime roots as well as a Continental modification. Siblings to the more famous imperial stouts, the strong porters became templates for brewers in Scandinavia, Russia and Poland and adapted to local brewing practices and preferences. Some versions are bottom-fermented, others top, and they range from malty brown to roasty black.

Porter was initially developed as a strong, aged, hoppy version of the sweet brown ales that dominated London during the early 18^th century. The generous hop levels (making it beer rather than ale) and seasoned “stale” character offered a welcomed counterpoint to London browns. Porter was also brewed to compete with upstart pale ales. Both porter and London brown ale were made with brown, or blown, malt, cured over wood fires, a rugged, smoky product that was cheaper than pale malt.

Porter was brewed from a blend of successive mashings and was actually known as entire-butt beer, or simply “entire,” for the first few decades of its existence, “butt” being the 108-gallon cask used for storage. The maturation period of several months to a full year tamed the rough, smoky edge, but also unleashed the wild vinous and tart flavors from the wooden butts and their native microflora.

Entire became the beer of choice for the laboring class and acquired the slang “porter,” as it was so favored by the street and dock workers known by that name, many of whom loaded ships destined for Indian, Australian and Baltic ports. The hops and requisite beneficial aging ensured that it would arrive shipshape.

The Baltic fleets visited numerous ports along the coastal bays and inlets, many of which had established routes inland. This voyage may have been advantageous to the beer, as the conditions were cold and the duration relatively short, resulting in what was essentially a congenial period of cool, cellarlike conditioning. Baltic markets were particularly fond of the strongest porters (stout porter) and in return, would send oak for vessels and isinglass for finings back to Britain. The two materials were essential for production of fine ale, porter and stout.

The Russians concluded that it was nigh impossible to brew porter or stout without water from the River Thames, so the import of those brews was deemed critical. The empress herself insisted on a sustained supply for her and her court. Even when the Russian government imposed a tariff on nearly all British commodities in 1822, porter and stout were exempt, keeping the empress happy.

The brewing industry back in Britain was as robust and far-reaching as ever, especially for those who included these “imperial” dark beers among their offerings. Since the newly invented (1817) and patented black malt was still not in wide use, nor wholly embraced by London brewers, these dark beers were mostly brewed with copious proportions of brown malt.

“Imperial” also came into common usage as a means to designate a brewer’s strongest beer rather than something specifically made for the Russian court. Imperial stout, imperial stout porter, imperial London stout and imperial brown porter were a few of the descriptive names that brewers gave their products in advertisements. The extra designation of “Russian” was routinely attached in the early 20^th century to market these creations.

The beers came from Yorkshire, Scotland, Burton (in Staffordshire) and Dublin, but London unequivocally had the best brewers for these because of experience, conditions and raw materials, especially Thames water. By the mid-19^th century, roasted barley became a fairly common ingredient and helped create the pedigree for subsequent porters and stouts. Baltic, and especially imperial, porters would not be themselves today without noticeable additions of roast.

All of this explains how the Baltic regions fell in love with the strong porters and stouts of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but doesn’t account for the actual brewing of porter in those regions. There were many breweries already in place: from Scandinavia, around the Baltic Russian rim and into Eastern Europe, many of which were poised to cash in on the love for porter.

The conditions were certainly different, being decidedly colder in northern and eastern environs, as were the brewing techniques, being heavily influenced by German bottom fermentation, especially on the Continent. This is where the Baltic style of porter really began to take shape.

Centuries of brewing in different regions of Europe meant that the yeast was selected over time to match the conditions of the brewery. Scandinavian yeast was different from that in Britain, which was different again from that of Estonia and Poland. Continental barley varieties differed from the British maritime cultivars, as did the malt, tailored specifically for the regional styles there.

The first Baltic brewery to specialize in porter was opened by Nikolai Sinebrychoff in Helsinki, Finland, in 1819. Its excellent porter is still made today, a remnant of the English imperial version with loads of roasted character and a base of kilned lager malts and German and Czech hops.

The Le Coq brewery was also opened in the early part of that century, in Tartu, in what is now Estonia. That site was selected because the water was deemed an excellent substitute for Thames water, the single most elusive and essential ingredient. Its beer relied even less on black or roasted barley, and tended to feature the toasty kilned malts favored by German and Austrian brewers. Those are also bottom-fermented and fully lagered, making for a rounded, bocklike profile.

Coincidentally, the early to mid-19^th century was the period in which bottom fermentation and lagering were becoming the norm, as was the fine-tuning of malt production and scientific brewing techniques. This made for a perfect storm in the development of Baltic porter.

In the United States, brewers make the British- and Continental-inspired versions and will generally designate them as imperial or Baltic porters. Generally speaking of European versions, Scandinavian porters resemble those of London imperial pedigree, with a firm roasted presence and top fermentation, while those brewing to the east and south (Estonia, Lithuania and Poland) are similar to the über-malty doppelbocks, with a touch of roast and bottom fermentation. All are roughly 7 to 9.5 percent ABV, with modest to minimal hop presence.

Baltic porters tend to be the tamer of the two styles, but are uncompromisingly deep. They are a brilliant composite of English brewing tradition, intrepid commercial savvy and regional, stylistic metamorphosis. Much of the complexity comes from use of Continental malts such as the kilned Munich or Vienna types for that malty base, as well as dark character malts that contribute notes of raisin, molasses, caramel and licorice. The reserved measure of roasted barley lends a deep reddish-black color as the norm.

Imperial porters rely on a heavier dose of roasted barley or black malt. Fermentation byproducts are usually somewhat muted, without much estery character, a result of subdued fermentation temperature and yeast selection. It is a perfect strategy to showcase the roasty notes and other contributions from dark malts such as the raisin, molasses and licorice highlights.

Porter may not be as highly regarded as stout, but remember that once it was truly the king of the beer world. And at the very top of the heap are the imperial and Baltic porters, beer that will make anyone feel like royalty.

Today, Belgian witbier, bière blanche in French, is among the more popular styles brewed and consumed in North America, and is fully embraced once again by brewers throughout Belgium and beyond. The unmistakable appearance and fresh, bountiful fragrance portends a refreshing, wholesome drinkability.

It has been postulated that the domestication of wild wheat (emmer) and “invention” of brewing were conjoined events some 12,000 years ago, and possibly the impetus for the earliest civilizations. Barley has largely replaced wheat as a brewing grain, but thankfully, not altogether. In more recent times, wheat-centric beers were common from Western Britain to Northeast Europe. Devonshire white ale, Broyhan mumme, lambic, witbier, göse, Bavarian weizenbier, Berliner weisse and Einbecker bock were all popular wheat beers in centuries past. Some of these have vanished, while others have been modernized, and some have even retained their wild, unruly roots.

Witbier evolved as the specialty of Dutch-speaking Flemish Brabant Province east of Brussels. There wheat, barley, oats and sugar beets are grown. The brewing legacy is just as fertile. Witbier breweries thrived in villages, abbeys, cities and farms.

Leuven was the premier witbier brewing city in Flemish Brabant a few centuries ago, but the hamlet of Hoegaarden, where brewing dates to 1318, would become world famous for it. Those brews were made with pale barley malt, raw wheat and oats. Hops were widely cultivated in the region, especially Germany, and the water was perfectly suited to brewing.

It is unknown exactly when witbier acquired its signature spicy character, but it has been part of the profile for centuries. The Netherlands became a prodigious importer of exotic spices after widespread colonization and the formation of the Dutch East India Company in 1602. The witbier style is about 400 years old, so it coincides with that timeline.

Beers flavored with herbal blends called gruit were once the norm in Northern Europe, until those concoctions lost out to hops in most places. It may be that some brewers never saw a reason to eliminate them altogether, using them alongside hops, so a taste for botanical beer never disappeared. At some point, though, exotic botanicals were introduced to witbier. Today, classic witbier is made with a tropical ingredient (Curaçao orange peel) and a temperate one (coriander).

Witbier made Hoegaarden a commercial brewing hotbed for a spell. There were 19 breweries there in 1730 and 38 in 1758. By 1940 there were but three remaining in the village. In 1957 only one brewery remained, the Oude Brouwerij Tomsin. Its doors were closed that year, bringing commercial brewing in Hoegaarden to a sad finale. The brewery’s flagship beer was Oud Hoegaards Witbier, a hometown prototype destined for the dustbin of history upon closure. If not for the nostalgic lamentations of Pierre Celis, who dearly missed his cherished witbier, we’d not be enjoying wietbiers today.

Pierre Celis’ desire to recapture the history and brewing art of his hometown is legendary. The son of a dairyman, he loved nothing more than to relax with a witbier after a hard day’s work. Energetic and enamored with beer, he often helped Louis Tomsin in the brewhouse, next door to his own house. The story goes that while enjoying beers with friends in 1965, Celis vowed to revive witbier. He cobbled together a small brewery (21-barrel capacity) in a cowshed. He modernized a bit from the outdated manual-labor intensive operations of Tomsin, but kept his brewhouse simple and utilitarian.

He fiddled with the recipe for the better part of a year and released his first commercial batch on July 1, 1966, under the auspices of the Brouwerij Celis. His first year he produced 300 barrels, which increased to 250,000 barrels by 1990. The timing was perfect.

The 1960s was a period of great artisanal awakening in the culinary world. Fed up with industrialized food and drink, people turned to more natural, organic items and a rediscovery of traditional, old-fashioned sensibilities. CAMRA was founded on this principle, as was American microbrewing. Celis could not have found a more accepting public for his folksy wheat beer.

He changed the name of his brewery to De Kluis (The Cloister) in 1978, in reverence to the monastic roots of his beer and brewhouse. De Kluis was purchased by Interbrew a few years later, and the name changed to Brouwerij Hoegaarden. In light of those maneuverings, Celis was primed to explore other brewing options.

Celis was fond of the United States, and the blossoming specialty beer industry here loved Belgian beer. He chose Austin, TX, for his new brewery. The water was similar to Hoegaarden’s, and the hard, red winter wheat that he preferred could be grown in nearby Luckenbach. The gleaming, majestic Celis Brewery opened in early 1992. The quality of Celis White witbier was impressive. There is no downplaying the impact that he had on the worldwide scene.

Witbier has traditionally been made with roughly equal measures of Pilsner barley malt and wheat, and, optionally, a small amount of raw oats. The wheat portion is unmalted and raw, never flaked. Unlike some raw grains, wheat converts easily in the mash tun. Raw wheat is unkilned, keeping it lighter in color than malted wheat and giving true witbier an extremely pale, whitish-gold color. The high protein content of wheat and the unfiltered, bottle-conditioned state leaves witbier quite hazy. This also contributes to a fairly chewy, textured mouthfeel for a lower-gravity beer, 4.5 to 5.5 percent ABV on average.

Witbiers present a grainy, cereal profile, less “bready” than German hefeweizens. There is often a lightly sweet/tart complementary background.

Witbier yeast has a fairly neutral profile, though it does share some of the phenolic, vanilla and estery characteristics of Bavarian weizen yeast. Warm fermentation ensures that the footprint of the yeast will be fully articulated, often with notes of plum, apple, peach, apricot or melon. Hop rates are quite low, usually around 15-20 IBU. Hoegaarden uses East Kent Golding for bittering and Saaz for aroma. The bitterness is pleasantly subdued, and the hoppy aromatics herbal and floral. Most witbier brewers follow this general template.

The one thing that sets witbier apart from nearly all other brews is the liberal use of botanicals. Curaçao orange peel and coriander provide a potent but sublime citrusy and herbal nose, playing amiably with the discreet hop, grain and yeast components.

Some brewers personalize these additions, as grains of paradise, pepper, ginger and others are used. It has been surmised that Hoegaarden uses a third spice, but that has been debunked repeatedly, even by Pierre Celis himself. As delicious and quenching as witbier is today, imagine one of yore, with the tartness of spontaneous fermentation and some musty Brettanomyces.

Witbiers are best fresh, as the floral, fruity and herbal notes will diminish over time, but aged, drier ones are also a great pleasure. This is an excellent gateway beer, intriguingly flavorful, yet enticingly mellow. There are numerous excellent examples made by North American micros as well as a dozen or more stellar imports. We can thank Pierre Celis, who died in 2011, for the wealth of outstanding witbiers available today. Brewers were quick to recognize his foresight and genius, and the world was wise to try them. That is witty indeed.

Barley wine was once a loosely applied designation, and the attempt today to distinguish English and American barley wine stylistically is a valuable reference point for brewers and beer lovers alike. Strong, hoppy ales have an interesting lineage, and we can all be thankful that they have been reintroduced in recent decades. Evocative of strength, barley wine delivers great depth and complexity via extensive maturation.

Current barley wines evolved from strong ales regionally cultivated in Britain, where hops were not a common brewing ingredient until the 15th century. This singular inclusion, and its preservative properties, changed the direction of ale brewing there, leading to the development of multiple stronger, more stable and storable types.
Indigenous British strong ale or beer included Yorkshire Stingo, Scottish wee heavy, and London October beer. All were kept for months or years before consumption, and hops were essential to shepherd the ale through this prolonged period.

At Burton upon Trent, the potent, eponymous Burton Ale became that city’s first celebrated export, predating the more fabled romantic IPA. Burton Ale was a strong, sweet and dark ale. Dry-hopped upon casking, it developed an intricate character during maturation. It was exported east via the Baltic Sea in the mid-18th and early 19th century, primarily to Russia, Poland and Germany. Fortitude and copious hopping were insurance against cask invaders, but also made a beer worth coveting. Among the exporters was Michael Bass, a familiar surname in brewing.

When Russia placed a stiff tariff on beer imports in 1822, the eastward export ceased, leaving quite a back stock of long-in-the-tooth Burton ale back home. It was subsequently made less sweet and more hoppy by prodigious exporter Samuel Allsopp, and it eventually won over the home crowd back in Burton.

Exporters turned their sights from Russia to India, and from Burton ale to India pale ale, and IPA subsequently filled the lucrative export void. Lighter and more highly hopped ale than Burton, it was different altogether. IPA and Burton coexisted for at least another century. Burton Ale faded into obscurity, but never vanished entirely, living on as barley wine, the lees of history leaving a residual footprint on our contemporary strong ale.

The term barley wine was sometimes used during the latter 19th century, mostly as a retail descriptor rather than a style, while brewers usually referred to their strongest ales as No. 1 or Strong. These often topped 10 percent ABV and required maturation to temper the flavors and allow full fermentation, while they garnered lusty, fancied Brettanomyces character from the wood. Cask hops helped thwart unwanted off-flavors. Strong stock ales were often referred to as “old,” or old ale. Burton Ale, Old Burton, old ale and barley wine became interchangeable to some degree, given the whim of the brewer, retailer or consumer.

Bass began using “barley wine” on its label around the beginning of the 20th century. The 1903 label of the North American export Bass No. 1 called it “Bass and Co’s. Barley Wine, The Royal Tonic.” In England, Burton, strong and No. 1 ales became known as barley wine, and the Brett character was largely winnowed out as brewers turned away from wood and implemented modern microbiology techniques.

Fairly popular in England into the 1940s and ’50s, barley wines fell out of favor in the ’60s and ’70s. America, conversely, was in its microbrewing infancy, and barley wine was ripe for the picking by eager artisanal frontiersmen.

Barley wine originally gained a foothold in America in 1840, when Scotsman Peter Ballantine brought a little Burton to his Ballantine Brewing in Newark, NJ. Along with his Ballantine Ale XXX and IPA, Ballantine also brewed bona fide Burton Ale, aged up to 20 years in oak barrels, then bottled and given to loyal customers only. It was last brewed in the 1950s.

Ballantine’s Burton ale is long gone, but it allegedly inspired the modern archetype, Anchor Old Foghorn. Minted by icon Fritz Maytag, Old Foghorn was introduced to the public in 1975, becoming the nouveau prototype. Because it is made entirely with American-sourced ingredients, there is no more significant symbol of the Yanks’ spirit and approach to brewing. Old Foghorn set in motion affection for big beers in North America. Sierra Nevada Bigfoot was born in 1983, and within a few years barley wines were seemingly everywhere.

When the world, especially North America, was introduced to the concept of formal beer stylization, there was often little to draw upon with emerging styles. Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion underscored this realization, followed by the beer judge certification program (BJCP) guidelines. Most beers already had some simple lineage that allowed for classification, but the nascent North Americans brewers were reformulating classics, warranting a separate taxonomic niche.

Strong, nondark beers were especially tough to put on a family tree. Old ale and barley wine were never really different historically, so brewers and beer stylists charted their own courses. Barley wine came to encompass two distinct, or at least allegedly distinct, varieties: the supposedly sweeter, less hoppy English style, and the fully hopped, drier American incarnation. Thomas Hardy’s Vintage Ale and Young’s Old Nick were held up as examples of the former, with Old Foghorn and Bigfoot the torch bearers for the latter.

As North American brewers tended to use their own homegrown hops (and lots of them) and malt, their barley wines were often very bitter and hoppily aromatic, as well as somewhat attenuated. English barley wines relied more on a malty and estery presence, subdued hoppiness and a more vinous, aged profile.

Both substyles rely heavily on light base malt, generally English pale ale or American two-row. The light to dark amber color comes from the sheer amount of malt crammed into each mash tun, slight augmentation with crystal malts (most commonly) or a prolonged boil. The extensive kettle time serves to reduce the wort to proper strength, but also imparts depth and complexity through caramelization and Maillard reactions, creating malty flavors and aromas and a degree of unfermentability. A prolonged boil may even eliminate the need for any character malts.

Obviously, English or American hops would further define the desired distinction, as would English versus American yeast. Patience is a necessity, since fermentation may be long, either due to a surfeit of fermentables and the sluggishness of yeast in the presence of the high alcohol content of the finishing beer, which weighs in from 9 to 13 percent ABV.

Like its forbears, a well-crafted barley wine will age gracefully. In that respect, perhaps the barley corn has not fallen so far from the stalk. Barley wines are particularly excellent for barrel aging, a popular technique among American brewers. It is yet another nod, intentional or not, to the conditioning of bygone strong ale, though mostly it is done now to express woody character or former contents rather than to counteract “staling” organisms.

Barley wine is rarely drunk young, so proper aging is imperative. It must be long enough to smooth out the rough edges and temper the strong flavors of such a behemoth. Archival vertical tastings are very popular among barley wine lovers, so get started on your cellar. Buy them now, and drink them next year or far into the future.

We all have moments of epiphany, and for this scribe, that came with my first glass of Hacker-Pschorr Dunkel. The luxuriant malt flavors, smoothness and exotically enticing dark color were captivating. A well-crafted dunkel, straightforwardly robust with a decidedly Old World character, can stand up to any extreme, flavored or wild brew.

Munich dunkel (dark) is the beer that made Munich famous, bringing that city renown as a brewing nexus that endures today. Dark and bottom-fermented, dunkel seamlessly blends depth, simplicity and richness with the clean contours of lagerbier, all in a bundle of modest proportions.

It was long the brew of the commoners, and ultimately refined less than 200 years ago by a well-traveled brewing bigwig, aided by British ingenuity, moving the style into the modern era while clinging to its history. It bears the generous footprint of the eponymous Munich malt, bready and toasty, and remains a virtual symbol of the Münchener beer.

Monks’ Brew

With a brewing history that dates to 800 B.C., the area roughly enveloped today by Munich, Kulmbach and Bamberg makes what would be considered Germany’s most traditional brews: dunkel, schwarzbier (black beer) and rauchbier (smoke beer). We can extrapolate from these three styles that they evolved from a dark and smoky common ancestor, and a period when all beers were of this ilk.

Munich was established in the mid-12th century along the Isar River as a settlement of Benedictine monks (München is Bavarian for monk). Brewing was a common and revered skill among both monks and citizens. Munich’s beer evolved because of its agricultural larder, cool climate and proximity to the Alps, where cold storage (lagering) in the caves of the foothills had been shaping the Munich style of brewing since the 1400s.

Dunkel, which may have existed as a recognizable type, was further refined and protected by the rather misunderstood and oft-cited Bavarian Beer Purity Law of 1516, more commonly known as the Reinheitsgebot. This law was declared by Duke Wilhelm IV and Duke Ludwig X of the royal Wittelsbachs, who ruled Bavaria from 1180 to 1918. They were powerful, heavy-handed rulers who influenced commerce greatly. The law declared that beer could be made only with malted barley, hops and water (and later yeast, which at the time was considered a divine blessing). It helped ensure high quality, but also buoyed the livelihood of farmers and brewers.

The exclusion of wheat and rye parceled those grains for bread making. Wheat was also reserved for royal brews, the rulers being rather smitten with weizenbier (another saga for another column). So the law, whether intended or not, help to distill and define distinctive Munich beer. Add to this a firm grasp of bottom-fermentation and lagering techniques, a 500-year history of hop cultivation, the terroir of local ingredients and maltings and a remote and mountainous location, and we can see how a distinct and early beer “style” took shape.

Though undoubtedly there was some tweaking of the dunkel template after the law was introduced, it would not be until the 1830s that the final touches would be put on the style. The peripatetic and ever-inquisitive brewer at Spaten, Gabriel Sedlmayr II, son of the owner, made several trips to Britain to study its brewers’ methods, and especially their innovative malting technology.

He observed the production of pale malts, made possible by using coke as fuel, and came away duly impressed. His genius was not in trying to duplicate the pale malt back home, but to use these methods to cure his specific Munich malt more cleanly and with greater brew house efficiency. He was able to create his toasty, dark base malt with expert precision, leaving the Munich dunkel style intact and better than ever. It is the malt we home and professional brewers still know today as Munich malt.