Farmhouse Roots

In a country in which the written record extends back only 500 years, its difficult to say how long farmers have been making beer, or how it may have evolved. What we can say is that the more traditional methods are weird.

If you want to go deep, you can read about these processes at Lars’ blog; he visited breweries and took great photos over the course of years. (Try this post on Lithanian beer generally, keptinis, and raw ale—or read his short, free book.) But briefly, let me mention just a few. One is the practice of mashing the grain, then pulling the wet malt from the mash, putting it in pans, and baking it. Brewers break up the caramelized and darkened “bread” and return it to the mash, and these flavors go into the beer. In another technique, brewers ferment the beer after mashing—without boiling it. Brewers want some bitterness in the beer, though, so they make a hop tea they later add to the wort. Finally, there’s a “stone beer” tradition, but it’s not like Germany’s. In these beers, brewers heat just a few stones add them to the mash (or sometimes the boil?). They certainly help raise the temperature, but they don’t taste volcanic in the way of beer that is boiled entirely via hot stones. They do caramelize the wort a bit and add a hint of flavor, and possibly add some body. Brewers seem to use them almost like an ingredient to flavor the beer.

I tried beers made in each of these ways (I believe the techniques can be mixed and matched, as well). They taste unusual, but not bizarre. Because the techniques usually don’t involve wild inoculation, heavy yeast character is not the main driver of flavor in Lithuanian farmhouse beers (with a caveat). Instead, it’s those malts that come into play. Although the farmhouse brewers don’t malt their own barley, they and most of the small breweries use local commercial malts, which have their own particular flavors. The character of the pale malts is characterized by cracker or flatbread. It’s a distinctive flavor one can identify after a few pints. Dark malts are also unusual; they’re not roasty. They can have notes of toffee, red fruit, or chocolate, but they’re sweet rather than acrid.