©2008, Randy Mosher for All About Beer magazine
Beer Marches On
It’s spitting sleet. The sky is a dented sheet of lead. The wind, damp and raw, burns the flesh. But amidst the gloom of March, there are signs of the unstoppable change of the seasons. Birdsongs share the air with the heavy perfume of well-rested earth. Trees flush a ghostly green, preparing to burst forth with new life. For brewers in the preindustrial past, these signs announced the approach of warmer weather and a last chance to get the last batches of serious beer in the tanks where it will sleep all summer before it’s tapped as a celebration of the harvest, a reward for work well done and signifying the end of another cycle of seasons.
Modern refrigeration has pretty well stripped beer of its dependence on the cosmic calendar that formerly dominated our lives. This freedom has been hard-won and beneficial for industrial brewers, but the banishing of seasonality takes something with it.
Before refrigeration, most full-strength beers were brewed only in the cold half of the year. In warm weather the heat generated by fermenting yeast spirals out of control, producing harsh and overly fruity beers. The yeast likes the heat, but brewers know the beer is better if it’s kept a little chilly.
Wild yeast and bacteria abound in the summer, and it was nearly impossible to keep them out of the brewery. With small beer meant for quick consumption, this can be overlooked, but for keeping beers, uninvited guests can be disastrous. In addition, labor shifted with the seasons. In rural settings, all hands were needed in the fields during the growing season. So, the town brewer (or at least his helpers) may have been pushing a plow in the summer. Plenty of beer was needed to keep things lubricated, but it was mainly the small, “single” beers that were brewed all summer long. The Belgian brewer Lacambre noted in 1851 that full strength beer was brewed only between mid-October and March. This, he says, is the origin of the widely-applied term saison, meaning any beer brewed in the proper brewing “season,” or saison in French.
Similar seasonal limits had the force of law in Bavaria as early as 1533, and may have been more foundational for lager’s origin than the legendary caves of the Bavarian Alps. As is so often the case in beer history little is known of what such beers would have tasted like. Amber-colored märzens appeared on the scene in mid-nineteenth century Vienna and Munich, championed by the two great brewers Anton Dreher and Gabriel Sedlmyer, Jr. It seems likely that Bavarian march beers existed before that time, but other than being dark, we can only speculate about their nature. Ever since a celebration of a royal marriage in 1810, märzen beers brewed in Munich are also known as Oktoberfest beers, although, confusingly, many Oktoberfest beers are now no longer in the Märzen style.
Lacambre also comments on two beers of Strasbourg: a “young” (small) beer and a bière de mars. The latter was a mix of the first and second runnings, which often yields a beer in the neighborhood of 1.055 to 1.065 OG (13.6–16 °P). While he doesn’t give a specific recipe, he does note that 900 to 1,100 grams of top-quality German hops were used for every 52 to 53 kilograms of malt, a ratio I have used in the recipe below. The malt was kilned very slowly and he says it resembled London pale malt of the day, “light amber, and with a cooked aroma,” but here’s the kicker: it was kilned with “vegetable charcoal,” which added a smoky aroma.
In mid-nineteenth century France, German lager beer culture pushed into Alsace and Lorraine, becoming France’s beer-basket, producing three-quarters of all French beer. French bière de Mars corresponds pretty closely with Bavarian Märzen—luminous amber, aromatically malty, barely balanced by hops. Judging by the old posters,, French bière de Mars seems to have been well-loved. In the Nord region up near Belgium, similar beers were produced under more primitive circumstances, usually via top fermentation. The
An brew named bière de mars also existed in Belgium, but it’s hardly deserving of the name. Made from the last runnings of the turbid lambic mash, it was sometimes sold as a small beer, but more often blended with lambic, sweetened with caramel and sold as Faro. This, the old books say, was the most popular form of lambic in the nineteenth century.
A grander form of March beer existed across the channel. It was a somewhat less illustrious cousin of the famous estate-brewed October beers that were the direct predecessors to English pale ale. Amber, strong and massively hoppy, these were brewed in private country house breweries and long held the reputation as the best beer in Britain, as their owners likely grew and malted the grain right on the property and paid no tax as well. As elsewhere, the idea of a March beer was to use up most of last year’s malt and hops, leaving just enough for summer small beer brewing. Because everything was several months old when the beer was made, it was considered to be just slightly inferior in flavor to October beer, but was still a prized luxury.
The recipe below is loosely based on Lacambre’s 1851 description of Strasbourg bière de mars. I am offering the option of making it either a smoked or non-smoked beer, as surely over time, both versions existed. The gravity is a bit of an educated guess, so don’t be afraid of making it stronger, but at 1.062, it should weather the summer well and taste just merveilleux by the first chilly day of fall.
Strasbourgeois Strasbourg-style Bière de Mars. c. 1850 (after Lacambre)
5 Gallons (19 liters), OG: 1062/15.2°P, Alcohol: 5.5%/vol, Bitterness: 32 IBUs, Color: pale amber (10 SRM)
Yeast: a European ale strain.
All-Grain Recipe (calculated at 75% efficiency)
9.5 lbs (4.3 kg) English pale ale malt*
or
6.5lbs (2.9 kg) English pale ale
3 lbs (1.4 kg) German rauch malt
Plus
2 lbs (907 g) Dark Munich or melanoidin malt 1010
*Some or all of this may be home-smoked.
Mini-Mash Recipe
4.5 lbs (2.0 kg) Amber dry malt extract (or 5.25 lbs liquid)
2 lbs (907 g) Dark Munich or melanoidin malt
2 lbs (907 kg) German rauch malt or English pale ale malt
Hops (calculated for pellets)
1.0 oz/28 gm 60 min Tettnang or Spalt (5% AA)
1.5 oz/43 gm 10 min Tettnang or Spalt (5% AA)
Mash for either recipe should be a simple infusion mash at 150°F/66°C for 30 minutes; then raise to 170°F/77°C for mash out, then begin sparge. Ferment at 55–60°F/13–16°C.
Photo at top: the impossibly adorable town of Strasbourg, France