The Remarkable Fidelity of Norway's Farmhouse Brewers

Two weekends back, the Norwegian farmhouse brewers had their big celebration in the valley of Lake Hornindal. Called Norsk Kornølfestival, it brings together brewers from around Norway—and a couple from Finland—in an event that has elements of a convention, beer festival, and cultural happening. I’ll have more on the festival itself later, but having everyone serving their beer under one roof provided an epiphany I’m still considering. In Norway, it seems geography is destiny. The farmhouse beers have regional distinctions, and brewers hew to the old ways with remarkable fidelity. As an American who watches brewers instantly absorb and adapt any new process/ingredient they enounter, I found this absolutely astonishing.

If we rewind the tape a couple hundred years, it makes a lot of sense. Western Norway is incredibly rugged country. The sheer mountains fall into the fjords almost vertically. They are so steep that it was easier for people to take a boat miles and miles out to see and back up the neighboring fjord rather than trying to get up and over those soaring ridges. Voss and Hornindal, however, are not fjords. They ring glacial lakes (Hornindal is Europe’s deepest, in fact). The mere act of traveling a few miles as the crow flies up and over a mountain to the next valley was once a massive chore. The people in these valleys weren’t cut off, but they were isolated, and that isolation meant they developed habits and practices specific to the region. So in one valley they made beer one way, and in another another. Thus were habits born and passed along, creating the traditions we still see today.

Needless to say, that’s no longer the case. These valleys are still remote, but they’re connected by trains and roads (and impossibly long tunnels bored underneath mountains), and getting from one to the next just takes a bit of time. (If you consult a Google map, the distance between Voss and Hornindal looks like it’s about 60-70 miles—60 to 90 minutes in rural Oregon. But as the bus rolls, it’s over six hours.) Particularly since the dawn of what we might call “kveik consciousness”—the realization that what these brewers do is remarkably rare and interesting—the brewers now know each other, interact, trade yeast, and get together at least once a year to celebrate their old craft. The geography that once created a tradition no longer limits communication, but nevertheless, brewers stick to the ways of their parents.

If you talk to the brewers, they describe the regional variations as quite large, but from the perspective of the rest of the world, they have a lot in common. They usually do juniper infusions of their mash water, boil water in enormous copper cauldrons, and (mostly) pitch their wort with kveik yeast. It is certainly a recognizable family of beers. Yet important differences mark each region:

Hornindal. This is where they make raw ale. Instead of boiling the wort with hops, they move immediately to pitching the beer with kveik yeast. In this valley, they no longer prepare their own malt, however, but buy commercial varieties.
Voss. Here they boil the wort, and often for very long periods. Ivar Geithung (pictured above) goes for 6-8 hours; Kjetil Dale, whom I brewed with in May, does a four-hour boil. Voss breweries also use commercial malt, however.
Stjørdal. This is where they still malt their own barley over a smoky kiln or såinn. Interestingly, most of the brewers use bread yeast, which is now considered traditional, and some skip the juniper infusion.

In the three regions, we can see the contours of the older practices. Before commercial malts or bread yeast were available, brewers had to prepare or pitch their own. Collectively, these traditions are still alive, yet they have evolved separately. There’s nothing stopping a Voss brewer from malting their own barley now, except that’s not the tradition anymore. Could a Hornindal brewer boil their wort with hops? Sure—but they don’t. And couldn’t a Stjørdal brewer use kveik instead of bread yeast? Yes, and they could even use strains from there. (In fact, Jørund Geving, one of the Stjørdal brewers, did bring a beer to the fest made with kveik yeast.) They just don’t.

When I started learning about beer more than four decades ago, I made a common American mistake. I assumed brewing traditions and beer styles were permanent and fixed. Finding a small farmhouse brewery in the verdant fields of Wallonia was akin to discovering a new species of otter. You understood it could evolve and probably did, over the decades and centuries, but like otters this process was so slow you couldn’t observe it happening in real time. (This is why the early style descriptions were so rigidly prescriptive.) But once you actually met the brewers making traditional styles, you were reminded that they were people, creative and smart. The idea that they didn’t have the skill and curiosity to experiment was laughable. The preservation of tradition came from a deeper, spookier place.

That’s what makes these farmhouse brewers so interesting. The fest holds a competition as one of its elements, and the Voss brewers complained that they never win. Usually it’s a smoked beer from Stjørdal—as it was again this year (One of Jørund Geving’s.) The raw ales have their own scent and flavor, too. Perhaps judges don’t like the “normal” flavors of the Voss beer. (Narrator: they’re not normal at all.) The Voss brewers might say, “Screw this, I’m going to make a raw ale to enter at the festival.” I mean, they’d save 4-8 hours on a brew day! But nope, it seems never to occur to them. They’re from Voss, and the tradition is long boils, and that’s how they—proudly, very proudly— make their beer. While brewers from each region admire each other’s beer, I had the sense that each one was convinced they were making beer the right way.

Looked at another way, however, this is actually just the most potent example of a hallmark of brewing. Brewers everywhere are pretty hidebound—and equally proud. They might make beer of another style as a business decision, but they have extremely strong opinions about the “right” way to do things. Often this is a culture specific to just a single brewery, but the dynamic is the same. The older I get and the more I learn about beer, the more I believe that the secret to beer—and its unanswerable mystery—lies in this very specific fidelity to tradition. And in Norway, it was a potent enough force to preserve regional farmhouse styles for centuries. Truly amazing.