Pillars of Tradition — How a New Generation of Brewers Returned to Decoction Mashing
Earlier this summer, as the U.K.’s third COVID-19 lockdown slowly eased, I visited London’s newest Czech beer pub, Pivo. It was a joyous evening, one spent sinking pint after pint of Czech Lager served from side-pour taps. For those of us in the capital, it was the first chance to drink beers like Cvikov Sklar 8°, Kutná Hora Gold 12°, and Muflon Semi-Dark 12° without boarding a plane to Prague.
The Kutná Hora in particular was a glorious beer, gleaming a deep, burnished gold beneath its generous and glossy plug of foam. It was rich with grainy maltiness, with a satisfying toastiness and caramel sweetness, but somehow still fresh and light, all perfectly balanced out by noble hops. And it was gone before I was ready for it to be over, every damn time.
I ended up drinking the most beer I’d had in a single session since the early days of the pandemic, if only because everything I ordered was so damn drinkable. But that wasn’t incidental—for the brewers of these beers, that trait is very much by design.
Adam Brož, the brewmaster at Budweiser Budvar, says drinkability is one of the most important characteristics in beer. “I define it in the simplest way: to enjoy the beer and to want to repeat the experience,” he says.
Speaking over Zoom, Brož comes across as a neat and careful man. With his shaven head and buttoned dress shirt, he reminds me of the sort of chemist-brewer who might stalk the brewhouse in a white lab coat. But don’t mistake careful for dry; there’s passion, too. He cares very much about both Budvar specifically and beer in general.
“I hope that [all] Czech beers, not only Budvar, have very high drinkability,” he tells me. If you’ve ever enjoyed a foam-capped glass of deep golden Pilsner in the Czech Republic, you’ll know what he’s talking about.
THE ROOTS OF DRINKABILITY
Could this quality have something to do with the way these beers are brewed? Many credit the character imparted by decoction mashing—a technique frequently used when brewing Czech and German Lagers—for making these beers so utterly quenching. Surely it’s no coincidence that the Czechs drank the most beer per capita of any nation in 2019: 188.6 liters each (that’s 399 pints, stateside). The Germans came fourth with 99 liters, or 209 pints per head.
At its core, decoction mashing consists of taking part of the mash (the grain and water mixture that becomes wort), boiling it separately, and then mixing it back into the main mash to raise its overall temperature. As it boils, the decocted mash develops Maillard-reaction flavors, which deepen the longer you boil it. A minute gives the finished beer an extra hint of grain character. Ten minutes will get you toasted bread crust, toffee, and caramel notes, similar to those that brewers seek from specialty malts.
Double decoction is just as it sounds: You do all this twice, as brewers at Budweiser Budvar have been doing for over a century (Josef Groll likely also did so to brew the world’s first Pale Lager, Pilsner Urquell). You can even do it three times. Triple decoction was so popular in Munich during the early 1800s that brewers called it “the Bavarian method,” while Anton Dreher, who developed Vienna Lager, also used it.
Decoction mashing is still so integral to Czech beer that it is mandated for any breweries that want to use the České pivo Protected Geographical Indication. PGIs like this are legally enforceable seals of quality based upon how and where a product is made, as well as which ingredients are used.
Budweiser Budvar goes one step further and uses the stricter Českobudějovické pivo and Budějovické pivo PGIs. Those indications enforce standards that Brož refers to as the four pillars of traditional production: quality ingredients, decoction mashing, cold fermentation, and long maturation.
“All of the pillars of tradition [are vital] in the brewery,” says Brož. “If you change it, you break the effort of the previous nine brewmasters of this brewery, and you break the joy of the customers because you break the taste profile. So I feel it’s vital to keep it.”
But how did decoction become so popular in the first place? Perhaps it was because the method allowed brewers finer temperature control over their mash—during the early 1800s, they did not have access to thermometers and heated their vessels directly over open fires. Or maybe it was because the technique allowed them to make the best use of the malts that were available at the time, smoothing out the natural variation in grain from one year to the next. Or perhaps it was simply decoction’s impact on the finished beer: It can darken a beer’s color, impart richer malt flavors, give a smoother mouthfeel, and even result in more stable foam.
NEED OR WANT?
To understand decoction, you need to have a handle on malt—and in particular a process called modification. Brewers need grain for its starch and protein. In their natural state these are locked away inside the grain, so the grain is malted first. Malting—germinating the grain before drying and kilning it—breaks down its cell structure to reveal the starch held within. It also breaks down the grain’s proteins, some of which become amino or fatty acids; these important yeast nutrients help fuel fermentation. Most importantly, malting produces enzymes that will later be essential for turning the starch into fermentable sugars (a process called conversion).
Modification refers to these changes taken together. You can think of it as a shorthand for how well, or to what extent, a grain has been rendered suitable for use in brewing. Before the advent of modern farming, malts were often poorly modified. Decoction essentially finished this modification off in the brewer’s kettle.
If you read about decoction for long enough, you’ll come across the claim that it’s no longer necessary now that we have modern malts and brewing tools at our disposal. “It’s true that if you use the modern malts, high[ly] modified malts, then it’s nonsense to use decoction mashing,” says Brož. “Our way is different. We always use the lower modified malt combined with decoction to reach the same quality beer for 126 years.”
Maybe it’s no wonder that, apart from a coterie of traditionalists, brewers use decoction infrequently these days. A triple-decoction mash can take many hours to complete. It costs more to keep the brew kit running, and it requires more effort from the brewer. Meanwhile modern malts are well modified and give a very high extract (lots of sugar for turning into alcohol). And today’s maltsters can kiln malt without overheating or scorching it. This leaves it with more enzymes intact, which leads to better conversion in the mash.
Even barley itself has changed since decoction mashing first became popular. If you were to place a stem of barley from the 1820s next to a stem from the 2020s you would see some clear differences. The grain from the 1820s would be landrace barley—farmed and adapted over time to its surroundings, but not cultivated to develop particular characteristics. It would have a long stem topped with an ear of small grains, some of which would be dead (which would be of no use for brewing). The modern grain would have a shorter stem, fatter grains, and a higher proportion of viable grains.
Modern barley is cultivated. It has been selectively bred to meet the needs of farmers who look to grow more barley in the same field and have more of it reach harvest alive. It is a more homogenous crop, as this is what brings farmers the most money. Generally speaking, any impact on the flavor of the beer made from the barley comes lower down their list of considerations.
But if you’re looking at these factors and asking if decoction is necessary, then you’re asking the wrong question. It was never necessary in the first place. Decoction is not some historical leftover of how things once had to be. It’s not like smoked malt, which every brewer once used—because there was no alternative—then dumped as soon as better kilns came along, leaving just a few diehards to continue the old ways. Decoction was always just one choice among many. Even as triple decoction became popular in Munich in the early 1800s, brewers down the road in Augsburg relied on a different method that involved boiling the entire mash, while in Bamberg infusion mashing was the typical technique. Instead, the right question to ask is: Why decoct?
“I must say that as a brewer, you are always free to decide which way you can choose,” says Brož. “If you go in the way to get the most from the [malt], the highest extract from it to have the highest efficiency […] it’s only a part of the story. If you use this ingredient then it is not necessary to use decoction, but be sure that the [beer] will be something different, because if you change the ingredient, you are trying to change the technology.”
Brož isn’t just being obstinate. He knows what he’s talking about from first-hand experience. He studied at the Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague, during which time he says he built a “very proper knowledge about Lagers.” He spent many hours in laboratories and pilot breweries testing and comparing different mashing processes. And he built on that experience on his path to becoming brewmaster at Budvar a little over a decade ago.
TRADITION AND THE PAST
Decoction is entrenched in Czech brewing tradition now, but in Germany, where it was first popularized, it has declined. Swapping from decoction to a step mash (where the temperature of the whole mash is raised in stages) was just one sacrifice among many that traditional German brewers made on the altar of efficiency. Under pressure from the growth of multinational breweries during the last century, they struggled to justify the extra energy cost and time for decoction. And after all, it’s just one small change—just like switching from open fermentation to cylindroconical vessels, or from whole hops to extracts.
“To be fair, it’s not necessary with the malts we have today,” says Eric Toft, brewmaster at Private Landbrauerei Schönram. Yet Toft still routinely decocts his beers.
If you have [malt] that converts the minute you add water, that’s not the point of brewing. I want to be able to create the wort myself, rather than having it done in the maltings. I try to get malt that’s not as highly modified as it could be. I always ask the maltsters to leave the mashing to me. I’d rather spend an extra half hour, hour in the mash. With decoction I achieve this higher degree of apparent attenuation that I can’t with infusion, at least not in the same time.
This may sound like a case of blindly following tradition when there are better options available, but to suggest that would be to sell Toft short. He is one of the best brewers in the world, according to Yvan de Baets of Brasserie de la Senne, who has been quoted as saying that Toft has “an incredible knowledge of malt and hops,” and “the precision of a Swiss clockmaker when he brews.” So if Toft chooses to persist in decocting his beers, you can be sure he has solid reasons for doing so.
“If you have [malt] that converts the minute you add water, that’s not the point of brewing,” Toft says. “I want to be able to create the wort myself, rather than having it done in the maltings. I try to get malt that’s not as highly modified as it could be. I always ask the maltsters to leave the mashing to me. I’d rather spend an extra half hour, hour in the mash. With decoction I achieve this higher degree of apparent attenuation that I can’t with infusion, at least not in the same time.”
Toft runs trial brews once or twice a year to compare the results of infusion and decoction mashing on the same batch of malt. In his 90-hectoliter (77-barrel) brewhouse, a decoction brew will use an extra 10 liters of fuel oil. “By using 10 liters of oil more per brew I get a final attenuation of 87%. If I do a step infusion I save the 10 liters, but I only achieve 84%,” he says.
So are three degrees of attenuation really worth all that extra effort and expense? “There are plenty of beers on the market at 80% to 83% and they’re fine, but they’re lacking that extra something … that extra level of drinkability, in my opinion,” Toft says.
Schönram beers have that extra something, in spades. There’s a harmonious quality, expressive malt and hop flavors that complement one another, a crisp and richly satisfying finish that connects to something deep inside. I say it’s like the whole beer sings. Toft is a bit more restrained.
Of his Helles, he says: “It’s the everyday beer in our neck of the woods. It’s very easy-drinking beer produced to have a drier palate. But the whole thing about it is it becomes a bit crisper and cleaner [with decoction], which allows the hops to shine through a little better. And the interesting thing is through this higher attenuation, you get a higher alcohol content relative to your original gravity. So there is a perceived sweetness, but which actually comes from the alcohol.”
The Schönram brewery will produce about 115,000 hectoliters (98,000 BBLs) this year, which equates to about 24 million pints. Toft says 90% of this will be drunk within 40 miles of the brewery, which is tucked away in Germany’s southeastern corner, just across the border from Salzburg in Austria.
People get through a lot of beer in Toft’s part of the world. “The German average is just a little [under] a hundred liters per capita,” says Toft. “And the Bavarian average is about twice that. Where I live it’s about a liter a day. So, uh, people like to drink a lot. Measuring our success locally, and to see how beloved it is locally, I think is a good indicator that we’re doing it properly.”
Toft is American, born in Wyoming, but has been living in Germany for so long that it’s apparently unusual to see him in anything other than lederhosen. (To my chagrin he wasn’t wearing them when we talked over Zoom.) “I came over here to study with the intent of going back and starting my own place, but I just never made it back,” he tells me.
I ask whether, by brewing in Germany, he feels connected to an ongoing tradition in a way he might not in the U.S. “That’s certainly a part of the charm for me,” he says. “They did a lot of things right in the old days. I really enjoy being part of that and helping actually cement that into the present.”
A WIDER CONNECTION
When I daydream about Lager-based adventures, my imagination heads east to continental Europe. I have fantasies of cycle-touring to Bamberg via Bruges and Cologne, or recreating a trip I once took on an overnight sleeper train to Prague.
Recently I’ve been looking westwards too, across the Atlantic, where breweries like Notch Brewing in Salem, Massachusetts and Dovetail Brewery in Chicago have fired up my imagination (and thirst). And then there’s Bierstadt Lagerhaus in Denver, Colorado. After drooling over their website for … a while, I can confidently say that if I ever get in there, I fear you’ll never get me out.
“We get a lot of flack for not being craft enough because the beer is bright and carbonated and, you know, it doesn’t show all its little flaws. Like it must be made by a bunch of people in a big factory,” says Ashleigh Carter, Bierstadt co-owner and brewer. “There’s just two of us to make 1,800 barrels of beer as perfect as we can every year. Just two people touching every part of the process. It’s not some big operation or anything.”
While researching this article, I was told by several sources that Carter makes some of the best Lagers in the U.S. right now. It’s a claim I’d love to put to the test. But one thing I can vouch for is her passion. That much is clear, even from thousands of miles away.
We get a lot of flack for not being craft enough because the beer is bright and carbonated and, you know, it doesn’t show all its little flaws. Like it must be made by a bunch of people in a big factory. There’s just two of us to make 1,800 barrels of beer as perfect as we can every year. Just two people touching every part of the process. It’s not some big operation or anything.
For instance, she and her husband went over to Germany to find their 1930s brewhouse, and took it back to Denver piece by piece. “You can buy top-of-the-range brewhouses, but honestly they just don’t do what these [old] brewhouses do,” she says.
Carter tells me that most brewers in the U.S. make their beer in the same way, with the same malts and the same hops. They even use the same amounts of water and malt in their mash—something known among brewers as the “liquor-to-grist ratio.” This is what American-made brewhouses are built to deal with, and as a result they are not well suited to decoction.
“American manufacturers, they don’t get it right,” she says. “This brewhouse was designed to handle a high liquor-to-grist ratio. It’s designed for decoction. It’s hard to divorce yourself from how cool it is, you know? The history behind it and how much fun it is to make beer on.”
Decoction brewing can present a steep learning curve for the uninitiated, but Carter has been working this way ever since she started brewing at Dry Dock Brewing Company in Aurora, Colorado. “It’s kinda the only way I ever learned how to make beer,” she says. She was at Dry Dock for a little more than a year and a half before moving on to Prost Brewing Company in Denver, where she first specialized in German Lagers and brewed on an imported German kit. She founded Bierstadt a year and a half after that. 2021 will be her 10th year as a professional brewer.
For Carter, it is the technical aspect of brewing that appeals. “I love trying to make something consistent and perfect and repeatable. I like that people can’t tell the difference between batches. I want it to taste the same every single time you have it.”
Decoction, for Carter, is ultimately about control—like choosing a stick shift over automatic transmission. “If you want to show people how good you are as a brewer, you should make something, you know, no more than three malts, no more than two hops, and ideally under 5%. Those are the building blocks of classic styles,” she says. “A lot of people out there ask, ‘Why decoction? It’s not necessary anymore. Our malt’s too modified,’ or, you know, yada, yada yada. I believe decoction allows for a malt character without sweetness. When you do a double decoction, you’re able to actually dry the beer out a bit more.”
Here Carter agrees with Toft: Drying the beer out makes it more quenching. She says we can’t divorce ourselves from the drinkability of German-style Lager. “It’s a beer that you can have three or four of and not lose your wits. You can drink it all day with your friends, wasting time in a beer garden. And I love that about it. [It’s] less about the beer and more about the experience you’re having with the people around you.”
Carter says decoction is important for darker Lagers as well, because it allows her to brew them without relying on specialty malts. “There’s something that happens in the brewhouse when that mash starts to boil. The aroma changes,” she says. “You’re developing all those melanoidins—everything you love about toast, everything you love about chicken skin and the cheese that sticks to the bottom of the pan. It allows those flavors to develop without adding a bunch of specialty malts, which don’t do a very good job of emulating those flavors. Melanoidin malt in high quantities tastes very metallic. It doesn’t taste correct. And they’re not fermentable. So we have all these crystal malts and caramalt and things like that—they’re not actually fermentable at all. So you’re actually negating one of the most amazing things about Lager beer, which is how dry it is.”
What Carter does at Bierstadt may not be ‘craft enough’ for some, but I reckon that’s a good thing. The craft beer world can sometimes get lost in a narrow, navel-gazing focus. Carter looks outwards and connects to a wider brewing world, and to longstanding tradition.
BEYOND INNOVATION
Khris Johnson of Green Bench Brewing Company in St. Petersburg, Florida also places a high value on tradition in brewing. “I didn’t get into beer just for the sake of—I’m using air quotes here—‘innovation,’ right? This notion that craft beer is supposed to be this Other … that is not what craft beer is. A style does not make craft beer or break craft beer. You can make a Rice Lager and it still be a craft beer.”
Instead of looking to innovation for its own sake, Johnson says he prefers to look back at “all these brewers who have come before us; hundreds and hundreds of years’ worth of brewing history and knowledge that a lot of us in the craft industry disregard. The truth is 90% of the people making craft beer right now have no idea what the hell they’re doing in comparison.”
I think authentic experiences are dope as fuck. That’s why a triple-decocted beer can be dope. It’s an attempt to gain authenticity. When I drink a Czech Pilsner, even here in St. Petersburg, Florida, you know, as wonderful as our weather is, I want to experience a beer as close to if I were sitting in a beer hall in Prague or in Pilsen. It doesn’t mean that a single-infusion Czech Pilsner isn’t going to taste good, but it’s definitely not going to do that style justice.
Johnson says he made brewing his profession in order to spend the rest of his life learning about it, and doesn’t understand the satisfaction others feel with where the industry is. Even so, he recognizes that decoction for its own sake won’t necessarily make a good beer. “You can make a very good Czech-style Pilsner with a single-infusion mash [and] even with a step mash,” he says. For Johnson, the only reason for taking the extra time and effort to make a beer as traditionally as you can is passion and desire.
“I think authentic experiences are dope as fuck. That’s why a triple-decocted beer can be dope. It’s an attempt to gain authenticity. When I drink a Czech Pilsner, even here in St. Petersburg, Florida, you know, as wonderful as our weather is, I want to experience a beer as close to if I were sitting in a beer hall in Prague or in Pilsen. It doesn’t mean that a single-infusion Czech Pilsner isn’t going to taste good, but it’s definitely not going to do that style justice.”
One of the best sellers at Green Bench is its Postcard Pils. For the first three years of the beer’s life, Johnson brewed it using a single-infusion mash. Then he decided to make a decocted version. “Honestly there was a time [when] the single-infusion batches of Postcard were better than the decoction batches, because we were figuring it out,” he recalls. “But once we got the process down—it took two to three months—I was like, okay, now we’re back to being at least as good as a single infusion. And over the course of the next four to six months, Postcard became exponentially better than it had ever been.”
Johnson says Postcard was always “pretty hop-forward” and remains so now, but that the overall balance of the beer has improved thanks to the decoction, which adds an increased depth and complexity in the malt aroma and flavor. “Pilsners should just be Pilsner malt. If you single-infuse highly modified Pilsner malt, then yeah, sure, it tastes like Pilsner, but it doesn’t taste like grain. It doesn’t taste like actual cracked cereal, you know? It doesn’t have that depth of maltose. It just doesn’t have it.”
Where before Postcard was hop-driven, it now shows an interplay between malt and hops that Johnson describes as fascinating. He still drinks Postcard every single day, as he has done for the last seven years, and he believes the improvement brought by decoction is drastic.
“If you want to push your Lager to the next level, that’s when decoction comes in,” he says. “Decoction took our beers from fantastic to memorable, you know what I mean?”
WHAT IS AND WHAT MIGHT BE
Decoction doesn’t just change the beer. Johnson says learning to decoct has also made him a better brewer. “I think we all become better brewers the more time and effort we spend understanding a process that we may think is obsolete—and maybe it is on some levels—but if I can dial in or master decoction, you know, how much better of a brewer are you, if you know how to do all of these different processes?”
What Johnson has learned from making Lager has heightened his understanding of brewing Ales and even mixed-culture beers. “By rounding ourselves out, we become better tasters, drinkers, and brewers,” he says.
That some U.S. brewers are deciding decoction is worth the extra time, effort and expense demonstrates a shift in focus—a movement from what I see as “craft beer” to “crafted beer.” Instead of breaking down and revolting against what came before, these brewers are seeking to build it up again—to make a beer that’s great without being showy. There’s a connection to the long-established brewing traditions of Europe, of course. But in these beers, there’s also the shimmering vision of a brewing culture that might have been, had the U.S. not lived through Prohibition. The brewers sailing into U.S. ports to start new lives during the mid-to-late 1800s were from Lager’s heartlands of Germany and Central Europe. What could U.S. beer have become, had the thread from such brewers to the present day remained intact? Would double-decocted Pilsners feel as commonplace as adjunct Light Lagers do now?
For my own part, as a drinker rather than a brewer, I think decoction mashing yields something special: a harmonious, drinkable beer that fully expresses all of its ingredients. There’s a German word, kernig, that’s sometimes applied to beers over there. It refers to beer that has a fuller and more robust taste—not simply in terms of flavor intensity, as with a potent Imperial Stout, but in how much you can taste the center of the drink. The noun form, kern, translates to core, and shares a linguistic root with kernel. I like to think of it as a quality that lies at the heart of the beer. Its soul, perhaps. You’ll know it when you taste it.
Words by Anthony GladmanIllustrations by Colette Holston
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