Water buckets, Norwegian Museum of Cultural History

In older times there were a whole host of detailed social customs around the drinking of beer, but the only one I'm aware of that has survived into the present day is oppskåka. Oppskåke is a party for friends and neighbours held after primary fermentation, when the beer is transferred from the fermenter to the cask. When Terje invited me to brew with him, he also invited me to stay until oppskåka, since that was only 48 hours after the brewing.

The name, by the way, literally means "to shake up" (å skaka opp), and refers to the racking. Oppskåka is the definite form, oppskåke the indefinite. If that's not clear, oppskåka = the oppskåke.

In the old days, people would see when a particular farm was brewing. They would note the tuns being laid in the brook, the smoke from the brewhouse, and so on. And since the fermentation time was usually the same every time, they knew what evening to show up in the brewhouse for the party.

People would find seats in the brewhouse wherever they could, and the brewer would pour the beer directly from the fermenter into a wooden bowl. The bowl would go round from drinker to drinker, and since every person present was a brewer, they would comment on the beer.

Of course, to tell someone straight to their face that their beer is bad is difficult, so there were many customs around this. Some places people would discuss the beer in direct terms. "Could use more hops, I think". Or: "I think you let it ferment too long." And so on. Other places there were set phrases that people would use to comment on the beer.

Lars Olav Muren carrying water, Norwegian Museum of Cultural History

The brewer might start it off, saying: "Oh, you can safely drink the beer. I've tasted it enough to know it's not bad." It was a fixed phrase, but not an empty one, because fungus on the grain might make it bad, so that the beer would make anyone who drank it vomit. This was one reason why brewers would taste the wort the moment it came off the strainer, so that they would know if the beer would make people sick. Since they were making the malts themselves, this was the only possible quality assurance.

His neighbours might then reply "oh, I can tell the well was far off when you made this. Either that or you were too lazy to carry much water." Implicitly: this is strong and good beer. If they said "I can tell you live near a great lake," that implied the opposite, and was almost an insult.

Some places, the visitors would make no comment on the beer while in the brewhouse. Late that night, leaving the brewhouse, they would stop on the way home and scream. The louder the screams, the better the beer. In some areas people had fixed places where they'd always stop to do the screaming. If the beer was poor the screaming would be half-hearted at best.

In parts of western Norway, inviting all the neighbours was an inescapable duty, no matter what you might think of your neighbour. After a few beers this might lead to fighting, and sometimes did. Other places, the custom was not as formal, but anyone who dropped by would be invited to taste the beer. In these places, some of the people dropping by on "necessary" errands were often suspected of having timed their visit carefully.

The full-on formal oppskåke seems to have been common only in western Norway, roughly from Kristiansand to Molde. The farmhouse ale survey has questions about it, but some people even in western Norway deny knowledge of the formal party. Yet the ethnographic literature is full of descriptions of the ritual. What that really means I'm not sure. In eastern Norway it was more common to send a boy round to nearby farms with a bowl of the new beer. This was called "skokubolle" (shake bowl).

Party in the brewhouse, Innvik

When we visited Terje's uncle Rasmus I asked him if he'd ever been told that he "lived by a large lake" (he literally does). He laughed, and said nobody had ever told him that. In fact, one of the first times he brewed, at the oppskåke, one of the older brewers had told him it was "damn annoying to see a young whippersnapper like you brew better beer than us oldtimers (det va da som fan at en ungstrik som deg sku' bryggje betre øl enn oss gamlekarane)". Rasmus then laughed again. Clearly the memory still warmed seven decades later.

I'd read a lot about oppskåke, but I had never actually been to one. From what I can tell, not many people have. The reason there are no photos of one above is that as far as I know, hardly any exist. I know one book that has a single photo, and a movie (not publicly available) that shows it. That's all. Literally everything. So, as you can imagine, I was pretty chuffed to actually be present for this rare and famous ritual.

Fresh raw ale

It was kind of odd in several ways. For one thing, we were not drinking beer in a pub, but in a rough, old wooden building. The table was the one we'd put the strainer on during the brewing. The chairs were just simple plastic folding chairs, and the glasses were also plastic. People had their jackets on, because it was cold in the brewhouse. The background noise was not music, but the sound of the brook running through the brewhouse.

It was only 48 hours since we'd finished brewing the beer, but fermentation had already calmed down, and the foam on the beer had shrunk. Terje served the beer with a steel ladle right out of the fermenter and into the glasses. Served this way the beer was flat, with hardly any carbonation, and sweet, with citrus, earth, and pea flavours. Rather different from the matured beer, but good. I could feel the alcohol warming in my mouth. Even this early it was a great beer, almost too drinkable at 7.5%.

Conversation in full flow

Some of the people at the oppskåke were there for obvious reasons. Terje's father-in-law was there because he has the job of cleaning, drying, and freezing the kveik. Roger was there because he was with us when we brewed. Roger's father was there because he used to brew with Terje. The farmer who owned the brewhouse was there because we borrowed his brewhouse. The last two people probably had some reason for being invited, too, but I never found out what it was.

After people had a couple of glasses the conversation really got going. I remember discussions of the laws on energy production (there's lots of waterfalls and steep streams in the area, which people use for small power plants), cherry growing, local politics, and so on. After another couple of glasses they turned to stories, and these grew wilder as the evening went on.

Racking

Terje brews 150 liter batches, so people had brought big white plastic containers for the beer. The beer was racked off with a siphon, but Terje started the process a little too early. After the fermenter was empty one of the guys wanted another glass. That problem was solved by pouring from one of the big kegs.

Pouring

In the end, we had to wrap it up, as the others had to go to work the next day, and I had an early flight home. I flew home with two precious bottles of Hornindal ale in my suitcase.