My Homebrew Journey - First Own Recipe: Rauchbier

After I did that Porter kit, I felt like I was ready to go on to my very own recipes. Traditionally, and I notice this a lot when a new Belgian brewery comes out with their first beer, they'll come out with a tripel or some sort of other very basic style... I'm not like that. I try to do something different with all the beers I create, so I wanted to apply that as well to the first beer of my own creation.

So I settled on doing a rauchbier. It's a style you don't really see all too often in Belgium, but I love the style, and there's lots of different things you can do with it. One thing I particular that I really wanted to do, was to use a small amount of peated malt. Peated malt is often used in smoked stouts or porters, but I hadn't seen it used in a rauchbier that I knew of yet. I also wanted to create more of an amber/ruby red type of beer, so I added some darker malts to the mix as well.

The complete bill ended looking up like this (and yes, I'm keeping the ratio's a secret):

• Belgian Pale Malt
• Smoked Malt
• Cara/Crystal Malt (20EBC)
• Peated Smoked Malt
• Roasted Barley
• Chocolate Malt
• Willamette hops
• Wyeast 1056 American Ale

I really love how the beer ended up, as far as color goes, it might just be a tad too dark, but if you inspect it closely, you can clearly see it has the dark amber color that I was aiming for. I opened up the bottle below, which is also nearing 2 years of age, today and poured one in a glass to have a taste.

At first glance, head retention is still top, it laces beautifully against the edges of the glass which I love to see. You are immediately greeted by a warm smokey scent with a little bit of sweetness. Taste is still great as well, it has hints of smoked meat but it is rounded out by a certain sweetness, probably coming from the chocolate malt. The smoked malts and roasted barley play perfectly together as well, in the end you'll have a bit of both worlds, the lovely smokeyness from both smoked malts, but it also as a bit of that roasty character you'd expect from a stout.

All in all, I am very happy with this beer. Rauchbier is not for everyone, and considering there's peated malt in there as well, which you can definitely taste, it's certainly quite different than one might expect.