Beer Style Guide: Get to Know Rauchbier with Em Sauter
The final frontier for beer geeks, the rauchbier is definitely an acquired taste, even for beer lovers (I struggled with smoked beers for a while myself) but once you fall in love with the style, there’s no going back.
Rauchbier is the beer of Bamberg, a city in the Franconia region of Germany north of Nuremberg. It has a storied past for beer making and is also home to Weyermann Malts, one of the best-known premier malt producers in the world. Bamberg brews many styles of “rauchbier” (Rauch is the German word for “smoke”) but for this column, we will talk about rauchbier as the Beer Judge Certification Program sees it which is a smoked märzen, an amber-colored lager that was featured in my last column. In Bamberg you can get smoked helles, bocks, strong lagers, weizens, and schnapps!
Smoked beers have been around for millennia as technology did not exist yet for large-scale indirect fire kilns until the 18th and 19th centuries so most beers were going to be slightly tinged with smoke flavor and aroma. Bamberg and its surrounding areas kept the “rauch” tradition alive and it is now a popular beer destination, beer heaven, and UNESCO world heritage site with several breweries in the town, the two most well-known smoked beer breweries being Schlenkerla and Spezial. Schlenkerla has been in business since 1405!
The base of the rauchbier can be 100% beechwood smoked Vienna-style “rauchmalz” malt. In Bamberg, the traditional beer is usually 100% of the grist. That can be a little overwhelming for breweries outside of Bamberg, so most other breweries use a lower amount of beechwood smoked malt (20% and up) and supplement the rest with regular pale and dark malts. Lager yeast and noble hops round out the recipe. A good rauchbier should have a light bacon/ham quality without being greasy. It should be slightly sweet and enriching with a toastiness to it. There’s something about a rauchbier that tastes like drinking the past.
Rauchbiers are great food beers and add smoky quality to dishes like hearty stews and roasted meats. Its sweetness and dry, pleasing finish would make it an excellent dessert beer as well. Maple bacon donut and a rauchbier sound like the ultimate brunch combo!
Beers to Try
This is THE beer of Bamberg and is thankfully easy to obtain in the U.S. Quite smoky. New beer drinkers can have a hard time with this one; I know I did when I first got into beer. I have heard that by your third pint, you should love it.
Smoaktoberfest photo credit Live Oak Brewing Company
Austin, TX-based Live Oak are smoked beer experts and make a wide variety of smoked beers. Their smoked marzen is excellent but try their other smoked options including their grodziskie, a Polish style of beer made of oak-smoked wheat malt and served highly carbonated.
What I believe to be the best beer of the excellent lineup, Chicago-based Dovetail brews an authentic and traditional rauchbier that’ll transport you to Bamberg in one gulp.