Beer, you see, is important in Lithuania. In this small Baltic country, small-scale brewers like Perevicius have been making gyvas alus (“live ale”) for more than 1,000 years. They use practices that make the beers here utterly unique – I know, because I’m a boutique brewer in the UK and I have never tasted anything like the Lithuanian countryside beers. They tend to leave their beer unboiled; use plants like clovers and peas, and strange hop varieties; and are known to bake bread to mash into the beer – all of which are bizarre practices to a conventional brewer like me, but which create a wild and earthy character to Lithuanian beer that is strangely magical.

The key to understanding Lithuanian live ale, however, is the yeast. While most brewers pasteurise or filter out their yeast from the finished beer, here the countryside brewers leave it in as a crucial, living ingredient. It produces a thick, silky palate and is the factor that sets Lithuanian beer apart. What’s more, according to some recent research that has caused a stir in the brewing world, the kinds of yeasts used in Lithuanian beer bear no resemblance to other brewing yeasts. The alus brewers are heir to a truly unique strain.

I’m traveling with my sister and photographer brother on an unlikely family trip and we’ve come on a four-day visit to the north of the country, up near the Latvian border, an area which is considered the beer-brewing heartland. We are being shown around by Martynas Savickis and Saulius Prašmantas, the men behind the Tikras Alus association of beer lovers and its essential blog, tikrasalus.lt (fineale.com, if you’d prefer). They’re so keen to get the word out about their passion they’ve taken time off work to drive us around the country, and act as translators and educators. They’re not only warm, humble, charming hosts, but they’re doing more than anyone to promote a vital part of Lithuania’s heritage.

That history, they explain, is a rich one. While the main towns of Lithuania all have commercial breweries, it’s the farmhouse breweries that have kept the traditional beer recipes alive over the centuries. So important was this business that when the invading Swedes destroyed the town of Biržai in 1704, the first thing the townspeople rebuilt, before the church, the school or the castle, was the local brewery. Beer was so central to culture in this part of Lithuania that brewers would be invited to weddings and funerals, where they would act as “beer DJs,” mixing strong, medium and weak ales to keep the crowd at just the right level of inebriation.