Between Amateur and Professional
To conclude my Norway blogging, I’d like to noodle on one of the more unusual and intriguing aspects of the farmhouse tradition—its community-scale production. Just about everything in farmhouse brewing is interesting, but the wow factor comes when you see a 50-gallon copper cauldron bubbling over an open fire. This is no ordinary homebrew kit, and it immediately set my mind whirring.
To back up, lets observe what “normal” brewing looks like. On the one hand, we have a highly specialized system for producing commercial beer. It starts with an agricultural industry streamlined to provide brewery-optimized raw ingredients, malthouses that turn out precisely-prepared malt, and breweries engineered to produce large quantities of beer efficiently (even a thousand-barrel brewery makes 250,000 pints). All of this is supported by supply chains and distributors who move raw ingredients, and finished beer around the world. On the other hand, we have hobbyist brewers who make a couple cases of beer at a whack, mainly for personal consumption. For most of the world, these are the available modes.
Norwegian farmhouse brewing points to a third way. Those cauldrons churn out way too much beer for personal use. In May, Kjetil Dale described the typical occasions that called for a brew: the holiday season, a birth, a marriage, or a death. Brewers may have made the odd batch at other times, but these were as mandatory as the thanksgiving turkey—and they performed a similar purpose. They were special beers made for the community. You can see it in many small ways, not least the double-handed kjenges (drinking bowls) passed around from drinker to drinker at these events.
In the context of cuisine, we also buy store-bought food, go to restaurants, and make meals at home for the family. Yet we also still retain the tradition of the community feast. Beer, once a common element of such celebrations, has fallen away. Pockets of community-scale brewing still exist (Zoigl brewing is a good example), but they are the exceptions that illustrate what we’ve lost.
After our long brew day, we retired to Kjetil’s house for a traditional farmhouse meal. (Perhaps two days later, Kjetil and his friends enjoyed another fixture of communal brewing, the oppskåke party.) The Dale family photos hung around the room, including the one below, a wedding in the 1950s. That was the final time Kjetil knows for sure that his great-grandfather used the pot he discovered in the family brewhouse (eldhus, or “firehouse”)—the one at the top of this post. Kjetil picked up the tradition in the new century, learning from brewers still making beer the Voss way. For his own wedding, he made three batches of beer, bringing the tradition back to life. That must have been quite a wedding!
It’s extremely hard to adopt a cultural practice and have it stick. These practices develop out of specific circumstances and evolve slowly. For Kjetil to revive a lost practice is one thing, but exporting it is another entirely. Still, I’d love to see some form of community brewing in the US. The pub serves this function in part, but incompletely—and it’s part of the commercial lifecycle. Having a brewer prepare a beer that requires dozens of people to drink, that requires a special occasion to formalize and even ritualize the moment—that would be a glorious thing. I suppose in the meantime I’ll just have to content myself knowing that a tradition does still live and is only a plane ride away.