BeerBorg

Big PapaG and I were chatting about various old beer styles and got onto Dampfbier which I've made before and it was delicious. This kindled my desire to make some more. So I did.

Its very simple, because it's poor mans beer. It's simply an all barley beer brewed with wheat yeast and without good temperature control and low hop bitterness - no hop presence otherwise. Flavors are malt and yeast driven.

Peasants would use whatever hops they had on hand which were generally just backyard hops with low AA. They would bum wheat yeast from the regional wheat beer factory - which made wheat beer for richer folks - but they were not allowed to use the wheat for beer of their own making, so they used barley.

The barley was roughly malted by hand with some grain probably ending up something like a darker munich and others like pale malt and probably more often then not a few extra dark burn't bits got in there.

Modern versions may be more pale, but I like to make it closer to how it would have been, which is easy enough, just a pinch of chocolate malt or roasted barley will do it.

So simple recipe I used:

1# Munich (10L German)
1oz Chocolate Malt (475L british chocolate)
Above was mashed @154 for 90 minutes.

Added 2# pilsner DME

Topped up for a 2.5 gallon target volume boil

1/2oz 4.2AAu Tettnanger @60

OG 1.042

Cooled, pitched a pack of WB-06 that I needed to use up @72 degrees.

I'm going to let this hit 78 degrees a couple of days into fermentation if I can find a place to put it where it will get there.

It is supposed to be estery, and the only way to make WB-06 make a good bit of banana and bubblegum is to get it up that high.

Even with a liquid wheat beer yeast you should generally ferment this kind of thing in the 70s if you want it to be authentic and your not a banana/bubblegum wimp.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong this beer is also delicious if you were to ferment it cooler and make it more clove oriented, but to be authentic it needs to be fermented warm to get a good bit of esters. Dampfbier literally means "Steam Beer".

Man you are working on a lot of different styles lately! How did the Trippel come out?

Although I do tend to brew "all over the place" style wise, I actually have not made a straight up trippel in a while, so I think you might be confusing me with someone else. I might have helped some folks with a tripel of their own manufacture, but I didn't make it.

So basically this is a simple blonde ale + choc malt + wheat yeast? Hm... that works for my blonde / cream ale experiment.

I thought Dampfbier was 'steam' beer, you know, an ale done with lager yeast at ale temps?

Monty

monsteroyd wrote:So basically this is a simple blonde ale + choc malt + wheat yeast? Hm... that works for my blonde / cream ale experiment.

I thought Dampfbier was 'steam' beer, you know, an ale done with lager yeast at ale temps?

Monty

It is "steam beer". That's what Dampfbier means. But it's not like California common beer at all in it's profile. It's an ale done with wheat yeast at temps on the high end or even exceeding the normal ale yeast range. Using a top cropping wheat strain at high temperatures would make the fermentation very aggressive with a look of boiling bubbles. They may have then lagered the resulting product in caves/cheese cellars so it would keep for a long while, but that wasn't what gave the beer it's flavor / special properties, it was more for "storage" reasons.

It was very much a common mans beer, a very regional style (pretty much all German styles were back then) and it was made with what was available to the folks in that poor region of Bavaria, which was bummed wheat beer yeast, backyard hops, and barley they grew. Imagine as dirt poor farmer in Bavaria you grew wheat and barley but the wheat was too spendy for you to make beer with (or even illegal at points) - so you sold it to the bakers, or the wheat beer factory to make wheat beer which you were too poor to buy. But when delivering the wheat to the factory you would bum some of the yeast and bring it home, and try to find a use for it. This is what happened.

That does give it some similarity to California common beer, which was made with the yeast the immigrant settlers brought with them out of it's normal temperature range, barley they grew, and what amounted to backyard hops - which were not Northern Brewer back then - Northern brewer didn't even EXIST when they started making California common beer. The real hop would have been Cluster because it was the native wild hop, and was free for the picking. And the idea of going "outside the box" in the process of brewing which is what Dampfbier also was.

So you can say that both are regional styles that evolved around what was available to those that made it by folks who thought "outside the box" out of necessity in order to make beer.

But they aren't directly related beyond that.

Thanks for the explanation, Mashanencyclopedia.

Monty

monsteroyd wrote:Thanks for the explanation, Mashanencyclopedia.

Monty

I've actually got distant relatives that live in that area of Germany, so making this kind of beer is almost like honoring my ancestors.

Hey that's even cooler. I think this will be a nice variation of the blonde / cream ale thing I'm doing. I've made one a kolsch, I think, with what I think is Lallemand Kolsch yeast, K-97, so I should make a dampfbier with some Wheat yeast. I think I have some Lallemand or Safale wheat at home.

Monty

Bottled at 1.011

I never got this to 78, it topped out at 74. But I still got some mild banana esters. No bubblegum, I'd have to hit 78+ for that with this yeast.

It's going to be tasty.

Nice! Sure sounds like it's gonna be real good!

Trub bottle is cracked.

It's a bit tart on top of the light maltiness, with some hints of banana. No hops noticeable but that's to be expected. Pretty much a straight forward beer that is what it is and will be good to drink when I get back from a long bike ride. Much simpler beer then the Dandelion Saison, but that's not a bad thing depending on my mood.