In his 2000 Zymurgy article on old North German beer styles, Randy Mosher discussed seven lost and strange styles of ale from Northern Germany, an area he called “the heart of whacky beer country.” The styles include several that we now see commercially or at least home-brewed, especially Gose. For some reason Englisch-Köstritzer has been largely ignored. Mosher wrote “this one is definitely not the inky, near-porter lager we associate today with Köstritz,” i.e., schwarzbier. The recipe he gives for Englisch-Köstritzer makes two pale beers using a parti-gyle procedure, so a single mash is performed and the first runnings are used to make a stronger beer while the second runnings are used to make a weaker beer. The grain bill is 80% Pils malt and 20% wheat malt. Mosher gave the first beer’s target gravity as 1.079 and the second’s as 1.032. In addition, he wrote that the second runnings beer is probably sour. The beers are fairly heavily-hopped. They also have small amounts of several flavorings, including orange peel, nutmeg, and coriander. This is pretty different from schwarzbier. I once wondered how they moved from one to the other, but there doesn’t have to be a relationship between the two beyond their common town. Just because Köstritz is now known for their schwarzbier, it doesn’t mean they couldn’t have once made some other beer that was well-known at the time.
Mosher gave a recipe that’s a little low on detail, no doubt due to the space constraints of the magazine article, but also probably because his source doesn’t tell us all we’d like to know. He referenced Ladislaus Wágner’s Handbuch der Bierbrauerei from 1877. (See also his book Radical Brewing.) I found a copy of an 1884 edition of this book, and I’ve attempted to translate the relevant section. Wágner’s text has a lot of detail but skips many things, like the original gravities of the two worts, and the mash rest times and temperatures. While this is frustrating, in a way it’s freeing. Since I don’t have the option of rigorously following his recipe I’m more comfortable modifying it, as long as I feel like the new version will give something plausibly close to the original, or perhaps a modernized version. That approach give us a lot of options, with Wágner’s text providing guidance. I’ve now tried several variations of these recipes, with some quite good results.
In the following I'll give a more complete description of Wágner's recipe. I'll then discuss recipes I've tried, and finish with scans from Wágner's book, and offer my translation. In one place Wágner calls the strong beer Englisch and the weaker beer Ordinairisch or ordinary, so I'll latch onto that sentence and call them English and ordinary.
Andreas Krennmair, author of Historic German and Austrian Beers for the Home Brewer, graciously checked my translation, corrected some of my mistakes and clarified text that puzzled me. I will include a few of his comments that help clarify Wágner's intent. Remaining mistakes are mine, of course.
There are four of these pages, each with links to the next and previous pages.
References
Mosher, Randy, “The Outlaw Beers of Germany.” Zymurgy, vol. 23, no. 5, 2000, p. 18, September/October.
Mosher, Randy, Radical Brewing. Brewers Publications, 2004
Wágner, Ladislaus, Handbuch der Bierbrauerei. Bernhard Friedrich Voigt, 1884.
No comments:
Post a Comment