Beer is elemental—an alchemical medley of water, fire, earth, and air that transforms simple raw materials into a complex brew both flavorful and intoxicating.
To carry this metaphor further, the grains and hops represent the earth from which they sprout. The water element is self-evident—not only as a major ingredient, but also as a vital part of the malting process. Fire brings it all together in the kettle, converting disparate elements into a unified solution. That leaves yeast, of course. While that final ingredient represents the air from whence it came, there’s another aspect of the air element that can have an outsized impact on beer’s flavor: smoke.
Smoke was once almost inescapable in brewing. Barley’s germination needs to be halted at the right moment to maximize the malt’s fermentability. Historically, a wood-fired kiln was often what dried the grain and stopped the germination—but it also introduced at least some smoky flavor to the equation. As the art of brewing veered further into a science and brewers optimized their processes for industrial production, they also tuned out the smoky flavors of malt.
There are still iconic producers of smoky beer today, but smoked beer is more than the rauchbier of Bamberg, the grodziskie of Poland, or even the smoked porter of Alaska. After years of exploring new hops, hopping techniques, ever-growing hop doses, flavorful adulterants of the sort usually seen in pastry cases and cereal aisles, mixed cultures, and enough fruit to strain Carmen Miranda’s neck, craft brewers are looking for the next lightning-in-a-bottle trend.
Some are even trying to capture smoke in a bottle.
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Smoking Hot or Keeping Cool?
As the smoked beers of Upper Franconia are often held up as the exemplars, let’s look at what makes them so iconic: It’s the malt.
In Bamberg, Schlenkerla malts its barley in house, kiln-drying it over a beechwood fire. The beech smoke is a feature—it imparts a clean, round smoke character—and the moist malt absorbs that smoke as it dries, saturating the finished lager.
The first sip of a great rauchbier is an experience that makes a lasting memory. The reaction can be visceral, and your first impulse may be to reject the dissonant flavor that’s more expected in a slab of ham than a glass of brown or coppery lager. The magic of Bamberg rauchbier, however, is how it ingratiates itself to your palate if given the chance. Your first glass may water the eyes—but by the bottom of your second, you’ve adjusted to the impact. The careful balance of soft malt and Noble-hop zing rings through what was once a deafening roar of smoke, demonstrating how it can harmonize with them. Sure, there’s dissonance, but—like jazz—that’s where the magic happens.
Hot-smoking malt is effective and efficient, but it doesn’t work as well if the malt is already kilned; the higher temperatures can destroy all those enzymes that the maltster worked so hard to cultivate, besides causing other flavor changes. It’s much more straightforward to treat finished malt with cold smoke, removing it from the fire’s heat. (Consider the delicate smokiness of lox compared to the bold flavor of barbequed ribs.) While cold-smoking is less intense, it does allow for more control over the process—and a subtle finished product.
Cold-smoking finished malt is the most common method employed by smaller American maltsters who offer smoked products or at the few breweries that smoke their own malts. At Riverbend Malt House in Asheville, North Carolina, VP of engineering and production Adam Demchak sums up how they developed their process: “Trial and error,” he says, “and a lot of iterating in our first smokehouse.”
That first smokehouse began as an off-the-shelf metal toolshed kit that Demchak built near the malthouse. “We built that first setup with a McMaster-Carr catalog and a lot of trips to Home Depot,” he says. He added a jury-rigged smoker attachment from a propane grill, and the experiments began. The firebox generates smoke, which flows into a sealed smoke chamber with a small fan. Inside the chamber, the smoke flows through the kiln-dried malt, spread on mesh screens. About eight hours is enough to sufficiently flavor a 500-pound batch.
They played with different types of wood, different types of malt, and every other variable they could think of before evaluating the results. After many test batches, they landed on a handful of combinations of variables they liked enough to give to the sales team.
“It’s a unique product, and it’s not for everybody,” Demchak says. He adds that it wasn’t brewers who were driving the demand for smoked malts—instead, it was distillers.
Where There’s Smoke, There’s Flavor
When I ask about smoked beer, I hear that same “it’s not for everyone” qualifier from many brewers and maltsters. The smoke-forward styles are polarizing and not exactly approachable for the craft-curious drinker.
In the world of whiskey, however, smoke is more conventional. The phenolic twang of Islay Scotch is the most iconic example. But with the boom in new American whiskey producers, maltsters are using everything from mesquite to hickory to domestic Texas peat to flavor their products.
“Distilleries eat a lot more malt than breweries do,” Demchak says. That hunger for unique malt expressions fuels a lot of smokehouse fires. When Riverbend received an order for 25,000 pounds of smoked malt from a distillery customer, they realized it would take about 50 days of continuous operation on their existing smoker to fill the order.
Demchak took what he learned building the first smoker and converted a 20-foot shipping container into the 2.0 version; it can smoke up to 4,000 pounds of malt at a time. That jump in capacity allows Riverbend to offer a pecan wood–smoked red wheat malt year-round. They still run the smaller smokehouse to fill special orders with low 100-pound minimums.
At Ranger Creek Brewery & Distillery in San Antonio, you can taste the synergy of brewing and distilling—they make both beer and whiskey with malt they smoke in house. Operations manager TJ Miller says his appreciation of German rauchbier and smoky Scotch led to early experiments in smoking malt with mesquite wood in a small backyard smoker. The results were promising, and they eventually turned a 20-foot shipping container into a smokehouse capable of 800-pound batches.
As you might expect from a Texas operation, they are as serious about their smoke as any barbecue pitmaster, and the folksy wisdom of the local barbecue culture informed early decisions.
“There’s a night-and-day difference between buying smoked malt and making it ourselves,” Miller says. Not only is there more control over the variables of contact time and wood choice, but there’s also more control over the fire itself. “We don’t want the wood to flame; we want that light smoke that’s clean,” he says.
However, where mesquite and pecan woods reign in the local barbecue, Ranger Creek isn’t beholden to those constraints. They try everything from mulberry to applewood and other botanicals.
“Different woodsmokes hit the palate differently,” Miller says. “Sometimes you want it to just taste smoky; sometimes you want more than that. But our goal is always balance.”
A Rauch Revolution?
Barbecue pitmasters are wise in their ways, but as with any regional cultural practice, there is no consensus on the best way to smoke a brisket or a pork shoulder. Likewise, there’s more than one established method for smoking malt.
Take Epiphany Craft Malt in Durham, North Carolina. Established in 2015 by Sebastian Wolfrum—who brewed at Ayinger in Munich before immigrating to the United States—the idea was to give local breweries access to the kinds of beer-focused maltings that German brewers can access.
“Serious beer needs serious malt,” Wolfrum says. “Lager beer is serious beer, and making malt as characterful as German and Czech malts motivates me.”
Epiphany’s malthouse is a combination germination bed and kiln system, allowing for comparatively large batches of base-malt production. But to achieve his goals of “serious” small-batch malt made from local grains, Wolfrum had to make the specialty malts that brewers demand. Focusing first on chocolate malt, he turned to an oversized, secondhand coffee roaster. Capable of 300-pound batches, the unit was too large for the third-wave, gourmet coffee roasters, but it was just the right size for a few bags of malt.
“We also wanted to offer smoked malt but found using trays of malt in a box smoker cumbersome and inefficient,” he says. So, he designed a smoke-box attachment for the drum roaster. “Traditionally, malt is smoked during kilning, while it’s wet. Smoke doesn’t stick to dry malt as well.”
To overcome this limitation, Wolfrum uses the drum roaster’s integrated water sprayer—usually used to prevent a fire in there—to keep the kernels moist during their two hours under smoke.
Epiphany doesn’t offer any smoked malts regularly, but it works with brewers on demand to make small batches of specialty smoked malts. Meanwhile, Wolfrum is watching the rise of craft lager at smaller, independent breweries.
“There’s a revolution in brewing happening,” he says, “and I want there to be a revolution in ingredients to support that brewing.”
Smoky Show & Tell
A day’s drive from the Carolina maltsters, among the wheat and soy fields of central Indiana, Sugar Creek Malt also is turning local grain into craft-friendly malts.
Caleb Michalke founded the maltings in 2015 on the family farm. He says he’s driven by history, and he wants to reconnect ingredients with the stories of the past. For example: One of the first challenges he faced was that the commodity barley varieties don’t grow well in the specific microclimate of Lebanon, Indiana. It took trial and error, and diving into the history of barley cultivation in America, to find a type that would perform on the farm—an heirloom cultivar first grown in the 19th century.
“Storytelling is a huge part of what we do,” Michalke says.
A couple years after getting the malthouse up and running, Michalke added a smokehouse for cold-smoking base malts for his distillery customers. The offerings were popular, and Michalke experimented with different woods as well as other botanicals, including hops and lavender.
“We mist the kilned malt with water and give it six or eight hours of smoke contact,” he says. The results are a clean, mild smoke character, no matter what smoke source they use. “You can use our cold-smoked malt as 100 percent of the grain bill.”
“[The lavender-smoked malt] is amazing,” says Patrick Chavanelle, senior R&D brewer at Allagash in Portland, Maine. “It’s pleasant and herbaceous and not overpowering. It plays well with our house yeast strain.” Allagash features that malt in several small-batch beers in its tasting room; it’s also one of Sugar Creek’s most popular smoked offerings.
At Sugar Creek, however, cold-smoking isn’t the only method. In 2019, Michalke built a traditional Norwegian-style såinnhaus on the farm. That old-fashioned malthouse allows Michalke to malt and kiln barley over a fire—alderwood, typically. The green malt gets about 15 hours of smoke contact—the fire needs stoking every 15 minutes—and there’s an intensity of smoke and flavor development that sets the finished product apart from cold-smoked malts. The smoky scent of Sugar Creek’s Stjørdal malt is perceptible even when it’s only a few percent of the beer’s grist.
“There’s some mystery and romance to it,” Michalke says. He wants the Scandinavian traditions to spur the creativity of brewers, and he wants the industry to view malt as more than a commodity. Might malt-forward be the next exciting trend in craft?
“Look, smoked beers are not cool,” he says, “but 10 years ago, nobody was making craft lager. Now look.”
Smoke in Your Eyes
I don’t think smoked beer is going to be the next hype-wave that fills tasting rooms and launches 1,000 memes. But perhaps smoke can become a more accepted component in craft beer—in styles both traditional and innovative.
The elusive yet intense influence of smoke can be a love-it-or-hate-it flavor—but it’s also one that takes deep root in the gustatory cortex of the unsuspecting drinker, growing into an appreciation, then a preference, and soon a craving for the primal sensory explosion that we call “smoky.” This is neither the ashy taste of tobacco nor the acrid whiff of burnt toast—this is the clean, sharp scent of woodsmoke, which transports us from our climate-controlled buildings and fast fashion to the safety of the cave and the promise of warmth—and perhaps a high-protein meal—that our Stone Age forbearers enjoyed.
Brewers are used to ingredients that come with hard data. The alpha-acid content or terpene profiles of hops, the extract percentages or friability of malt, the yeast viability—these are all hard numbers that brewers can plug into their equations.
Yet, as Michalke says, there’s romance and mystery in smoke. There’s something unquantifiable in its influence on malt and finished beer. Smoke is ephemeral and elusive, and the only way to analyze it is with our senses. There’s a magical tension between the data and the feeling, and brewers who leverage that tension can make some truly compelling beer.
Ranger Creek doesn’t want the wood to flame; they just want clean, cold smoke. Photo: Courtesy Ranger Creek
Hot-Side Addition: Fort Point Manzanita
San Francisco’s Fort Point Beer uses an interesting and more direct way of getting smoky flavors into their fan-favorite seasonal, Manzanita.
Besides traditional beechwood-smoked malt from Weyermann, the altbier gets some malt smoked with local manzanita wood to capture the fragrant, incense-like aroma of the native California shrub.
While the initial idea was to add manzanita chips to the kettle, the wood didn’t have much impact. “There’s not much flavor in the wood,” says Mike Schnebeck, Fort Point’s director of innovation. “Unless you light it on fire.”
That’s just what they did for the first Manzanita brew day. Tossing a half-
dozen “arm-sized” smoldering logs into the boil kettle bestowed the elusive manzanita aroma into the amber brew. “It is subtle, but you can taste it,” Schnebeck says. “It is cedar-like and complements the beechwood smoke.”
The beer is quaffable and transportive—especially for this California native, who grew up hiking and camping in the manzanita-covered chaparral hillsides. “It’s got a good story,” Schnebeck says, “and it’s a fun brew day.”
