The Making of a Classic: Schlenkerla Märzen

During this time of pandemic, when we have more time for reading than sampling new beers, I thought it would be a great time to explore some classic, much imitated (but rarely equaled) beers and what makes them tick. Click here to see other beers in the series.

Flavors, like fashion, have their moment. Flip through a food magazine from 1978 and you’ll see what I mean. The human propensity for something new produces a constant, exciting churn of change—and with it, the loss of the old. It’s why so many beers eventually fade away. Their flavors are time-specific, and they seem weird to our modern palates—gastronomic fedoras to a culture that wears ball caps. Fortunately, in some places locals value tradition enough to keep the old flavors alive, and there you find living artifacts that have survived the turbulence of human fickleness. Take for example the whiff of wood smoke that drifts over the rims of glasses in some of the hausbrauereien of Bamberg.

Rauchbier

Malting and brewing are ancient human inventions. Indirect kilning, however, is far more recent. Until an enterprising Viennese-Bavarian duo brought back English malting techniques, lagers were dark, roasty affairs. For centuries, maltsters placed their germinated barley over open flames to dry, curing it with the unmistakable scent and flavor of smoke. Newer techniques allowed maltsters to make darker malts without the smokiness, and new flavor profiles emerged. As time marched on and preferences changed, smoky beers became rarer. Somewhere along the way they ceased to be the norm, and because of their unusual charred flavors came to be called “rauchbier,” or smoke-beer. The lager breweries of Bavaria transitioned to the newer, sweeter dark malts and left smoked malts behind. Yet they survived in a remote part of lager country.

Franconia, now the upper part of Bavaria, is one of the historic lager-brewing regions. More remote and rural, it lies beyond the fashionable trends that drove change among the breweries of Munich. Old traditions survive there, including the production of smoked malt, and the center of this ancient art is Bamberg.

Among German beer styles, rauchbier is unusual; most of the other old, weird styles of are ales from further north. Rauchbier is a remnant of older lager-brewing traditions, the kind of beer that would have been common in Franconia and Bavaria up until the early 19th century. However, by the 20th century rauchbier had become a decided specialty, with only four Bamberg breweries still making it, and by the 21st, it has nearly disappeared. Two breweries in Bamberg still make smoked lagers, Speziel and Schlenkerla, both with august histories and traditional kilning methods. (Weyermann, a malthouse in Bamberg, also prepares traditional rauch malt.) Of the two, Schlenkerla makes the smokier beer, and also has a greater international presence. Their 600-year-old tavern in the heart of the old city is also the most impressive in Bamberg—and for my money, the world. Spezial’s beers are sessionable and toothsome; Schlenkerla’s are startling and intense. Both keep the tradition alive in Bamberg, but Schlenkerla sends it out to the world.

Schlenkerla

Around a thousand years ago, the town of Bamberg drew regal attention, when Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor, decided to make Bamberg a bishop’s seat and turn it into a “second Rome.” The city was laid out like a cross with churches at the four cardinal points, and the seat of the prince-bishopric went through a period of opulence still evident in the church and residence buildings perched on the highest ground. (Visiting them is a good way to get a visceral sense of what led to the reformation—they are way over the top.) Bamberg was remote and non-industrial enough that it didn’t get bombed during World War II, and remains intact, the entire Old Town within the city walls designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is a remarkable place, and except for the dress of the 21st-century pedestrians, one could imagine having time-traveled to the middle ages while gazing at the classic half-timbered architecture.

In the town below the ecclesiastical pomp on top of the hill, the townspeople bustled about their daily business. Breweries teemed there, and one opened a tavern in the early 15th century. It had exposed beams and wood paneling painted in oxblood, with heavy tables and antlers and crucifixes on the wall. Today it’s home to Schlenkerla, and that’s more or less how it still looks. The brewer is Matthias Trum, the 48-year-old sixth-generation owner/brewer. Like fathers and sons before him, he took over the brewery as his father neared retirement age, and is responsible for introducing a number of the breweries “newer” beers to the lineup.

The name of the brewery dates to 1877, the first in the current incarnation of the brewery’s line. Matthias told me the story of the line’s founder, Andreas Graser, when I visited in 2011. “According to legend he had an accident in the brewery and he was limping afterwards,” Trum began. “In Franconian vernacular when you limp and you dangle your arms, this dangling is called schlenken. So a schlenkerla is a diminutive, or the nickname for a person who dangles, who walks like that—very much like a drunk person would walk. That’s the second meaning and why it stuck around. People say, ‘Okay, you drink smoked beers, so you’re going to schlenka, you’re going to dangle.’”

Matthias was born and raised in the brewery, knowing that he would one day succeed his father. It’s hard not to when so many generations of brewers had inhabited these walls. How many? Thirty, according to the research he could unearth.

“Which brings us to the second question of when the brewery was founded, and that’s something we can’t answer, either. There’s a number of records in the town hall, trial notes—you know, when there was an argument with a neighbor. The earliest record we have for the Schlenkerla tavern and building is from 1405. It’s not a record of a brewery—it was owned by coopers.” They shared a guild with the brewers, he explained. So for at least 615 years, people have been drinking in this pub—thirty generations of Bambergers—and all of it rauchbier.

Beechwood kilns and Smoked Beer

Matthias earned an economics degree at the university in Bamberg and then studied brewing at Weihenstephan, where he had a focus on brewing history as well as the craft of beer making. At Weihenstephan, “they don’t teach you anything about smoking [malt],” he explained. “They teach you that there is such a thing and they do it in Bamberg. But there is no research or doctoral theses on the details of the smoking process.”

No one may have studied the process at a highly technical level outside the walls of Schenkerla, but the family has perfected the process over the century and a half of kilning over fire. “We often get questions from American craft brewers and American homebrewers—how do you do this, and how do you do that? And we always have to decline and say, ‘sorry, that’s a family secret that we have been working on for centuries.’” (This is true. Alan Taylor at Zoiglhaus is one of those brewers who has tried to get a tour with Matthias. He received a polite “nein.”) Matthias paused to reflect on this before adding: “Personally I’m happy that Weihenstephan does not research in that respect.”

He did describe some of the process to me. The fire starts cool, around 100 degrees. “We control very exactly how much wood we put in at what time because we want to have a certain temperature curve for the entire process. This is one of the things we don’t pass on to others. It’s quite tricky to do it the right way.” All the malt is smoked to one color—there’s no pale, Munich, caramel, and so on. “The thing with the smoke kiln is that we get a variance in the color. We cannot do it as exact as in modern, fossil-fuel-driven maltings. Plus, the wood never has exactly the same heat. We get small variances in the color of the malt and we level that out by a little bit of roast malt to get that homogenic color in the final beer.”

The production methods are totally standard for Franconian brewing. Schlenkerla’s pretty little brewhouse dates to the 1930s and is gas-fired. They do a double-decoction mash, and lager the temperature in ancient cellars that once served multiple breweries. They’re more than 30 feet underground, cooled to 41 degrees Fahrenheit. Matthias lagers the helles six weeks, the märzen for eight, and the bock (a fall seasonal) three months. The brewery makes excellent, consistent lagers (one one weissbier), but of course it’s the malt more than the brewing that really defines them.

Three Seidlas

Don’t go looking for a standard helles at Schlenkerla. (They do offer one, and it’s made with conventional malt. Yet even that beer tastes singed. Matthias uses repitched yeast from batches of märzen, and it contributes a definite smoky note.) Instead, prepare for one of the most unusual drinking experiences of your life. The märzen is the standard beer, and is synonymous with the brewery. That’s the workhorse, the classic rauchbier for which the brewery is famous. A dark, malty beer (not all märzens are amber!), it has an intense smokiness that overwhelms other flavors. For those new to rauchbier, the first sip is a doozy. Even if you’re familiar with the beer, the smoke will dominate until you attune your palate—a process Schlenkerla has been coaxing drinkers to attempt for decades.

“If you visit Bamberg and have not visited Schlenkerla, you have not visited Bamberg.” Matthias begins. “The proverb continues that you have to drink three seidlas in order to acquire the taste. So after the third pint, you’re gonna shlenkerla, so it’s really a self-fulfilling prophesy.” (In Franconia, seidlas are “small” glasses, or half-liters.)

“At the first sip, the smoke flavor is extremely dominant on your palate,” Matthias began. “If you’re new to the taste you will notice nothing but the smoked flavor. Only as you go through your first two or three pints does the smokiness step back in perception and then the malty notes come out, the bitterness, the smoothness. So the second Schlenkerla is for you, the first-time drinker, a different beverage than the first one. And yet the third one is different than the second one. From the third one on, you have the system running, so to say, and the locals who come here regularly don’t notice the smoke as much. For them it’s the maltiness from the first sip on.”

You could accuse the brewery of deploying a self-serving ritual to sell more beer. Or, if you’re being more charitable, you might credit them with having figured out how to train drinkers to enjoy a beer a century out of date. Having enjoyed the beer in situ and seen this experiment play out in my own mouth, I am of the charitable bent. What happens over three glasses seems like magic.

The first glass (or bottle, if you’re drinking at home), is intense. The beer is substantial, hearty, and the smoke seems to infuse everything. Beech creates a clean, campfire smokiness in which I detect hints of savory herbs. It’s bracing. As seidla two empties, the smoke seems to diminish. It’s almost as if the shock of the first pint becomes something your tongue begins to chase. It’s impossible to recapture the initial blast, though. Slowly the smoke ebbs, revealing sweet smoothness. Then comes the final glass, and I kid you not—it’s as if the smoke has vanished. You discover the lager underneath, with rich, plummy malts and a dry, slaking finish. That’s when you begin to appreciate the base beer and Matthias’ skill as a brewer.

It is a remarkable beer, and so unusual. Thanks to Schlenkerla and Spezial, many breweries in the US and Europe now make rauchbiers. Few smoke their own malt, though, and so taste of the Weyermann or peat of commercially-available malts. Those who do attempt to smoke their own malt don’t have 143 years of experience, and it shows in the beer.

With most rauchbiers you couldn’t imagine drinking three pints—or sometimes, even one. With Schlenkerla, especially if you have the fortune to drink it in Bamberg, you never want to stop.