Farmhouse Brewing in Voss
Kjetil Dale’s eldhus, or “fire-house.”
By my reckoning, the brew day started pretty early. Kjetil Dale started running water into his 150-liter copper kettle at 7 a.m., but by then the sun had already spent more than two hours in the Nordic sky. Over the next twelve and a half hours, I got a front-row seat watching Kjetil make beer in Voss, in one of the emerald valleys in Western Norway. I’m hardly the first writer to sit in on the remarkable process that goes back centuries (even on that farm), but this tradition remains largely hidden from most North Americans—and in fact, even those in Oslo. I took careful notes and shot some video, and I hope another account will help move the spotlight closer to this valley. This is truly one of the most special traditions in the brewing world.
The best place to start is this short video, which condenses the entire day into under four minutes. Have a look at it and I’ll pick up the story below. (I think it’s pretty good as a descriptive film, but I didn’t have the time to do a more professional edit—apologies for the DIY quality.) You won’t be able to smell the fire, but the pictures will help bring the descriptions to life.
The eldhus
Kjetil Dale came to brewing relatively recently—about a decade ago. His family has lived on his farm for generations, and he had returned after a decade away. Once home, he decided to clear out the eldhus, a building behind the farmhouse, which had become a storage shed. These small buildings were once central to a farm’s activity. The word literally means “fire-house,” and it’s not a metaphor. The high-peaked buildings have a fireplace in the center of the floor and an aperture at the roofline, covered by its own little roof. This is where farmers smoked meats, baked bread, and brewed beer. In a community of 15,000, Atle Ove Martinussen, CEO of Western Norway Cultural Academy, reports that somewhere between 130-140 eldhuses still stand, and many are in use. Fire and smoke were and remain a big deal in those parts. Snow covers the ground much of the year, so preserving food was essential to riding out the long, dark winters.
While cleaning out the eldhus, Kjetil made an important discovery. Underneath the stored items he uncovered old brewing equipment—a wooden fermenter and the copper kettle—that his great grandfather last used. In the old days, brewers would have made at least three batches a year, plus special beers for weddings, births, and deaths. The last time he knows for sure his great-grandfather brewed was a wedding in the 1950s. For close to seventy years, the equipment just gathered dust, but it remained functional. Apparently this is common—many of the old firehouses still contain treasures like the kettles, which may be hundreds of years old, and carved wooden kjenges, or community drinking bowls like you might see in a viking movie.
Fortunately, brewing is a living tradition, and locals estimate two dozen or more local brewers still make beer around Voss. Kjetil was able to draw on the knowledge of the community to regain his family heritage. Once he understood the basics, he indulged in brewing the old ways, using no technology like thermometers or hydrometers. “I wanted to feel it in my body,” he said. On the day we brewed, he used those instruments, but largely to confirm what he already suspected.
The fire platform inside the eldhus
Opening at the roof of the eldhus
The wedding for which Kjetil’s great-grandfather last brewed beer.
Four Key Elements
What makes the beer in Voss special? When you’re standing next to that open fire in the middle of the room, it can be easy to get lost in the atmosphere. Yet four things make the brewing approach here distinctive.
1. Juniper Infusion
As documented by the intrepid Lars Marius Garshol—now a legend around Voss—brewing with juniper is very common across Scandinavia and beyond. Juniper adds a layer of anti-microbial protection to the beer, as well as a subtle flavor. I was surprised how subtle, too, given how potent Northwest juniper trees are. Those growing in Voss—the same species—are herbal and earthy, and when I inhaled the steam coming off the kettle, I was reminded of incense. The juniper infusion accomplishes two ends—it helps sanitize the beer, but brewers also used the boughs as a filter for their mash.
2. Long boil
Depending on the beer, brewers might boil the wort as briefly as two hours, but longer is more typical. Kjetil’s standard boil runs four hours, but Ivar Geithung, who joined us for most of the day, boils his wort seven hours.
3. Smoke
This is a subtle element in the finished beer, and hard to tease out from the other intense flavors. I thought I was detecting a phenolic note when Kjetil and I sipped on his beer the night before—but kveik yeast famously produces none of those spicy, smoky flavors. Instead, it’s actual smoke coming from the fire. In the video, you see the convection of the steam during the boil. Smoke goes around the lip of the kettle and slowly infuses the beer, too. Not much, but a bit. Further north in Hornindal, the brewers don’t boil their beer at all, so this is a signature feature of the Voss ales.
4. Kveik yeast
This is the one element Americans may know about. Locals have preserved their brewing yeasts through the centuries by drying and freezing them. Each culture contains multiple strains, and locals know them by the name of the farm they came from. They are famously vigorous, and within twelve hours, Kjetil’s beer would be roiling in the fermenters. They, more than anything else, give the beer its characteristic flavors—here they express a distinct candied orange and spice quality. The word “kveik” has the sense of “to bring to life,” and is also a euphemism for starting a fire. In Voss, it seems, everything comes back to fire.
For traditional brewers, these would be considered important markers of what makes Voss-style ale. Yet farmhouse to farmhouse, brewers make each beer their own. From the decision about how to prepare the juniper infusion to the mash temperature (for Kjetil, 68C or 154F is ideal) to the level of hopping (though they’re all very low) and when to add the hops to the length of the boil and the type of yeast—all of these choices are up for grabs. Brewers continued to pop in throughout our brew day, and I was struck by how deferential each one was to Kjetil. In their own brewhouse, the brewer has the final word.
The Living Tradition
The night before we brewed, Kjetil and I sat around a fire outside the eldhus and poured out some of his kveik ale. Before we drank, though, he spoke a few words and poured the beer onto the lawn. I asked what he was doing, and he explained that people make offerings to the “little people who live underground.” I confess I never fully understood who these people were, but whetting their tongues with kveik remains an active practice—you can see Kjetil doing the same in the video. It launched us into a discussion of these little people and their relationship to the farm and brewing. By the time we were done, the story had stretched back into oral tradition.
Farmhouse brewers are concerned with what grows on top of the land, as well. The hillsides around Voss are covered with spruce and birch trees. They were familiar to me, looking much like slightly smaller versions of fir trees in the Pacific Northwest. And there, as here, wood is a big part of life. The local church downtown has an impressive wooden steeple—something I’ve not seen anywhere else in Europe. As in the Northwest, the clear grain of spruce decorates the interior of houses and businesses. Wood, of course, also feeds those fires. Making food and beer wasn’t just part of the farm life; it was an important sacrament for moments of life and death. The farms, the forests, the eldhus, the little people—they are fingers on a hand, not standalone entities.
A glass of kveik ale and a kjenge
Kveik
Even the steeples are wooden in Voss
Many brewers know something of kveik because these strains have been isolated, plated, and recreated in labs. “Nordic pilsners” and kveik IPAs are common. There’s nothing wrong with that—and indeed, it’s fantastic to see this old tradition enter the bloodstream of international brewing. But using a single-strain lab kveik yeast to make a hazy IPA is pretty far from how the brewers in Voss think.
The night following our brew day, we gathered with other brewers at the Finnesloftet, a 700+ year old meeting hall—made of wood, of course. The past lives in the minds of locals, such that events hundreds of years ago are recalled as if in living memory. Much as in the Bostonian mind, Paul Revere is a tangible part of life. in Voss, those traditions aren’t past. We ate the local specialty (smoked sheep’s head), passed around a kjenge full of kveik, and the brewers shared bottles of their homebrewed beer. For these brewers, the value lies not in the beer itself, but that whole, rich experience that leads to a milky amber glass of beer.
I hope more people are able to visit and experience the whole shebang. I will surely never forget it.