Germany isn’t the first place we associate with farmhouse brewing, but you might be surprised—zoiglbier, for example, from southeast Germany, was once a farmhouse beer.
It also appears that farmhouse ales were widespread in northern Germany until World War I. Most of that brewing was undocumented, as far as we know, except for a pocket in Westphalia; the region’s Folklore Commission reported on the practice in the 1950s.
Now, if Germany is a surprising place for farmhouse ale, then Westphalia—northeast of Köln and Düsseldorf and just east of the Dutch border—should be downright shocking. It’s home to the Ruhr valley, one of the densest concentrations of industry anywhere on Earth—one of the last places on the planet where I would have looked for the survival of ancient farming traditions.
Harvest Tradition
By the early 20th century, the custom in Westphalia was to brew the beer in March and drink it for the grain harvest in autumn.
That should be a familiar story to anyone who knows anything about traditional beers: As you may recall, farms produced saison and bière de garde that way, and it was the same with gammeltøl in Denmark. Indeed, the English harvest ale, German märzen, and Lithuanian morčėnas all may have come from similar traditions. The Westphalian farmhouse ale is yet another example of a custom that may, in older times, have been very widespread indeed.
In the Folklore Commission documents, several of the farmers in Westphalia say their farmhouse ale was not too different from altbier. Now, altbier comes from Düsseldorf, capital of the state known (since 1946) as North Rhine–Westphalia. While not within Westphalia’s historical borders, Düsseldorf is only about 80 miles from Münster and the farms that were still brewing in the 1950s.
Incidentally, “altbier” means the same thing as the Danish “gammeltøl”: old beer (or old ale). It may well be that this is the true explanation for why altbier has that name: that it was originally stored over the summer. Certainly, when Düsseldorf’s Schumacher brewery first used the term “altbier” in 1838, it referred to beer that was cellared longer than others.
Oddly, the brewers of Westphalia apparently brewed that farmhouse ale only one time per year, and the reason is probably that brewing was taxed. The farmers had to go to the local customs office and buy the right to brew a certain amount of beer. That made the farmhouse ale expensive; even in this relatively developed region, the farmers seldom bought any food or drink—instead, they made it all themselves. They would have had to report each brew to the customs office, keeping a log of each batch near the brew kettle—presumably so customs officials could do spot checks.
Smoke, Juniper, and Salt?
The farmers brewed from their own grain, so the farmers made the malts themselves, from barley. They dried the malt on a kiln called an est, which was a stone shelf on top of a brick firebox, with a fireplace on the floor. Originally, those shelves had lots of little holes, but on some farms, those holes had been filled with nails—apparently, then, it was originally a smoked beer, but most farmers had stopped smoking it by the 1950s. The firewood was mainly beech, as with Franconian rauchbier, but otherwise the malt-drying sounds very similar to that of Stjørdal, in central Norway.
This being Germany, you’d think they would use a decoction mash, but these farmers used a normal infusion mash followed by a long boil of the wort—one source says four hours; another says one to three hours. So, the brewing process is effectively the same as that of Norwegian heimabrygg, surprisingly. (Not everyone brewed the same way, though: Some farmers boiled the mash but not the wort.)
There’s another connection with Scandinavian farmhouse brewing: While the Westphalian farmers added hops to the boil, it was also common to add juniper or juniper berries to the kettle. Juniper does grow in Germany, particularly in high heaths—but also in pastureland because the animals don’t eat it. So, juniper was probably easy for farmers to find. It shouldn’t be a surprise that they used it: In traditional brewing, juniper appears to have been the second-most important spice in beer, after hops. It’s only rarely been used in commercial brewing, however, probably because it would be hard (or expensive) to get enough juniper.
Some of the Westphalian farmers also added salt, like in gose—but the Folklore Commission’s documents say nothing about why.
Fermentation and Hopping
In the Folklore Commission documents, fermentation is all over the place. One farmer reported getting ale yeast from a nearby brewery and pitching it at 46–50°F (8–10°C), while another was pitching at 77–86°F (25–30°C). It’s not clear what yeast the second farmer was using. Some farmers were collecting the yeast that came out of the bunghole of the beer cask, presumably to use in next year’s beer, so there may have been a hardy Westphalian farmhouse yeast culture. If the warmer pitching temperatures were closer to the norm, the culture might also have been highly heat-tolerant, much like kveik and other farmhouse yeast.
What the beer was like is hard to say. One source says the taste was different from year to year, from farm to farm, and even from barrel to barrel, since the beer fermented in wooden casks. Perhaps the comparison with altbier is the best hint, though these Westphalian farmhouse ales must have gotten much more character from homemade malt.
Altbier is relatively hop-forward, and these farmhouse ales appear to have been, too. One was even hopped at a rate of 10 grams per liter of beer—more than 1.3 ounces per gallon. The hops used would have been nameless, homegrown landrace varieties, low in alpha acids.
The beer appears to have been quite light in strength, somewhere around 2.5 to 3.5 percent ABV—probably just as well, since it was meant for harvest workers. For the fieldwork, the laborers would bring wheat rusks to eat and a mug full of beer—probably just a simple stoneware krug with a metal lid. The idea was to give them energy to keep going.
Most farmers apparently brewed this way until World War I, and one reason they stopped was that the military confiscated many copper brewing kettles for the war effort. Farming also became increasingly mechanized, meaning that harvest ale for people working in the fields was less necessary—and having tipsy workers operate farming machinery was not necessarily the best idea. Coffee appears to have taken its place.
Still, brewing continued on many farms until World War II, and some kept going longer still. In 1953, one Folklore Commission source wrote that he’d gone to a farm near Steinfurt because he knew they’d been brewing until quite recently. They weren’t home, but he spoke to the neighbors, who said they were still brewing. As proof, they showed him a customs documents for that same year, 1953, giving them permission to brew 2,000 liters.
I’ve heard claims that brewing on some farms continued as late as the 1970s—and, in a village near Steinfurt, they still have a complete brewhouse and made a film of themselves brewing a re-creation of the original farmhouse ale.
In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether they ever stopped brewing. So, did Westphalian farmhouse ale ever die out completely? If you scour the villages around Steinfurt, who knows what you might find?