What makes this beer so unique? It’s a baked, raw ale.

The brewing session took just over ten hours to complete. When finished, this beer will closely resemble a cross between a brown ale and a barley-wine, but with much less bitterness. The body will be huge, and the aroma and flavor will be filled with deep toffee, caramel, and dried fruit (raisin) notes, accompanied by spicy phenolics from the Hornindal Kveik yeast.

According to Lars Marius Garshol, “keptinis is an ultra-obscure style of beer, made only by a few farmhouse brewers in north-eastern Lithuania, and by three commercial breweries. One being Ramunas Čižas, the other two being Dundulis and Kupiškio.” Craft breweries will struggle to make this style because of the amount of oven space required to bake large pans of wet malted barley mash, which is the signature process that makes this beer so unique.

Remember that this is a farmhouse beer. For centuries, farmers would set aside a portion of their grain, whether it was barley, rye or even oats, to brew the family beer, both for nourishment and celebration. Most had a separate small building on premise for the malting process, and the farmers understood this process well. The issue was that they rarely had a kiln, which is where the complex flavors, color and mouthfeel would come from. Specialized malt was expensive and hard to find, and a far distance away. The solution? Make a mash, then bake it at high temperatures to allow the maillard reaction to caramelize the sugars in the malt.

So let’s get into how my ten hour brew day went…

Knowing that the goal was to caramelize as much of the malt as possible, I lowered my mash liquid to malt ratio from 1.420 quarts/pound to an even 1 to 1, which made a thick mash. I mashed in with 15 pound of Viking Pale Malt, and five pounds of Viking Rye Malt.

After an hour in the mash at 156 degrees Fahrenheit, I poured the mash into four aluminum pans, and placed them on my outdoor grill at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. I was only able to fit half of my mash into the pans, so in the future I will need another baking solution to fit more volume. I highly recommend using the aluminum pans so you don’t ruin your good baking pans, and you can bend and peel the aluminum to get the bark-like malt out of the pans after the bake is complete.

The three pictures show my progress at one hour, two hours, and at the completion of three hours.The high temperatures boil the mash and release steam, reducing the liquid and therefore thickening the mash. Eventually, when most of the liquid boils off, the malt begins caramelizing.

After three hours, I pulled the pans from the heat, and added the now carmelized malt back to the mash, and recirculated the mash for another thirty minutes. Note in the picture you can see the varying degrees of carmelization, all which will provide unique flavors to the finished beer.

During recirculating, I also brought three gallons of water to a boil, and added two ounces of Northern Brewer Hops, making a hop tea. After recirculating the mash, as the recipe suggests I added the hop tea to the mash during the sparging process, which would bring earthy, spicy hop flavor and bitterness to the beer.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a raw beer, so the wort was never actually brought to a boil, but the wort did get collected at around 180 degrees F so we can assume any bad bacteria has been killed off and won’t effect the finished product.

Another note worth mentioning is that this was an intensely sticky mash, both from the carmelization and from the heavy use of rye. This made lautering and the collection of wort very difficult. I ended up collecting a half gallon less than anticipated…even after using boiling hot hop tea to sparge.

In the end, I collected four gallons of wort at a gravity of 1.082. The color was a deep amber, with tons of toffee and caramel flavor. I pitched the Hornindal Kveik yeast at 80 degrees F, and commenced cleanup. When I woke up this morning, less than 12 hours later the kveik yeast was doing its job and bubbling away. A successful keptinis brew day complete. Stand by for tasting notes when the beer is finished in a few weeks.

Happy National Homebrew Day!

Relax, have a homebrew!

Cheers!

Karl D. Larson

This is Karl Larson’s first beer (or art, or contribution, or… insert your word of choice here) that I’m getting to review or write about for the blog. Its a long time in coming, and if you know Karl, you know his amazing ability at brewing, his love of home brewing, and teaching about beer and brewing, and his open heart and willingness to share and give. Back at the Ffej of July ’19 we had discussed about me reviewing his award winning homebrew but sadly things didn’t work out that I got a chance to try it and review it.

I’ve known Karl now for quite a while, probably roughly five years or so, dating back to a homebrew competition or event or some such thing where I got to meet him and hang out and chat with him. Its been great seeing him every time and getting to sample his various homebrews. And then him doing small batches for Boneshire Brew Works (the old Piglet series) were all fantastic. So its great to get to see him brewing on the small batch system at Newfangled Brew Works. So on release day of his first beer for them, I had to stop out and try it (after all it is sorta.. kinda… not really… on my way home from work).

He also just released another beer with Newfangled (the plan I believe is a new one each week). I sadly have yet to try the new one, and I imagine its gone by now. I know the Loki didn’t last long (I think it might have lasted into Wednesday, but thats it). So be on the lookout for small batch releases from Karl every Tuesday at Newfangled Brew Works. I don’t believe they even update their Untappd list to include it (I know the Loki wasn’t listed, I had to search for it). You won’t be disappointed!

Beer: Loki – Wild IPA
Brewery: Newfangled Brew Works
Brewer: Karl Larson
Style: IPA – Farmhouse
ABV: 6%
IBU: 30
Untappd Write-Up: IPA with Voss Kveik and Brett yeast blend. Dry hopped with Citra, Callista and Ariana hop blend.

This isn’t a sour IPA, but its getting towards that range. Its a tart Saison esque IPA.

Appearance is light hue, golden, lighter than a typical West Coast IPA, more in the appearance of Saisons and Farmhouse Ales. Nice carbonation with a good bit of foamy head that retains a fair amount of time. And as per typical with a well crafted beer, good interspersed bubbles of varying sizes. Lacing on the glass.

Aroma is interesting, its got the hoppy smell of an IPA, but that unique spice of a Saison / Farmhouse. You definitely pick up the wheat notes and the Kveik and Brett yeast plays into this too. You get a bit of coriander / orange peel like smell that rounds out the hoppy aromatics.

This is a delicious beer. This has the tartness of a Saison but the hoppyness of an IPA. You get a delicious blend from the hops too, both aromatically and tastefully on your tongue. Get notes of coriander, dry stone fruit, little bit of earthyness to it all. A slight musky earthy undertone. The body is deep and complex and full, not watery or thin, and lays great on your tongue and mouth as you drink. Even with the tart and hop it all combines nicely and at only 6% its easily crushable. Would be a fantastic six-pack beer. The Kveik and Brett yeasts add a very complex and complicated system for the beer that really entices you to drink more. Very very tasty, shame its gone so quick.

My Untappd Rating: ****.25
Global Untappd Rating: 3.97 (as of 2.15.20)

As always, I cannot recommend Karl Larson’s stuff enough. Fantastic brewer and even more fantastic guy. If you see him (and he is completely hard to miss at 6′ 20 inches) make sure you let him know just how good his stuff is. He’ll thank you and probably try and get you to adopt a pit bull. (I recommend doing that as well.)

As always everyone, keep on drinking and reading, enjoy and cheers!

-B. Kline