BrewLab SF Resurrects the All-But-Forgotten Grätzer

, BrewLab SF Resurrects the All-But-Forgotten GrätzerBringing anything back from the dead takes effort. Just ask the Jurassic Park geneticists or the poor publicists responsible for Lindsay Lohan’s reputation. So it’s no shock that the folks at Bay Area homebrew collective BrewLab SF faced a few more challenges than they expected when they recently set out to resurrect an all but extinct Polish beer style.

For the Grätzer Project, the collective called on dozens of members of the San Francisco beer community. And we mean everybody: yeast engineers, a barbeque-and-brew joint, an army of homebrew hobbyists, and a pro brewpub.

“It’s about capturing a piece of history and taking a snapshot of what people were drinking in some ancient – or even more recent – time,” said Matt Smith, one of BrewLab SF’s leaders. “It was about bringing together all these people.”

The result: Not one, but a dozen varieties of the smoky, hoppy, slightly sour wheat beer that died out in its native Poland more than two decades ago. Members of the collective lined up to taste test each and vote on their favorite version of the Grätzer. Some of the 15 barrels BrewLab SF produced from its best recipe are now on tap at San Francisco’s Thirsty Bear Brewing, among other watering holes.

So what exactly is a Grätzer (pronounced grate-zir), and how did it die out? Glad you asked.

The more authentic Polish name is Grodziskie (Grätzer is the easier-to-spell German moniker), and the style is thought to date back to the 14th Century, according to the much cited EuropeanBeerStyles.net. Grätzer was produced right up until 1993, when the last brewery making it closed its doors and effectively killed the style for years.

BrewLab members discovered the nearly forgotten Grätzer in beer writer Evan Rail’s essay “Why Beer Matters,” now also a short book by artisan printer Sharp Teeth Press.

“Homebrewers love excuses to brew weird beers,” Sam Gilbert, another BrewLab leader, wrote about the allure of reviving old beer styles.

Pro brewers are just as crazy about the challenges of brewing historic beers. In the 1980s, Bay Area brewing pillar Anchor Steam reached back 4,000-plus years to produce Ninkasi – a beer named for the Sumerian brewing goddess. The German sour Gose style now brewed by dozens and dozens of commercial breweries basically flickered out in the 1960s.

The lengths to which an enthusiastic brewer will go for the sake of reviving a piece of beer history are seemingly endless. When salvagers found a 19th Century shipwreck in the Baltic Sea in 2010 that contained the oldest drinkable beer ever discovered, scientists and brewers lined up to pick apart the recipe.

, BrewLab SF Resurrects the All-But-Forgotten GrätzerOf course, BrewLab’s effort didn’t require SCUBA gear, but they did find themselves sleuthing through centuries-old texts on the style and translating 1970s-era Polish newspaper articles looking for clues as to the beer’s intended taste and how to brew it.

Aside from heated beer-nerd debate over what precisely a Grätzer should taste like, the collective discovered major challenges procuring the two ingredients that most define the style: the yeast and the oak-smoked wheat that’s used in place of more traditional barley.

“We knew it was going to be difficult. It was part of the appeal of doing it,” Smith said. “We didn’t realize quite how difficult it was going to be.”

Cue the community.

Startup yeast lab GigaYeast snagged a sample from a bottle of Grätzer produced in Germany and grew a culture for the collective.

For the wheat, they’d have to go to even greater lengths. The only commercially available oak-smoked wheat wasn’t organic. And the professional brewers who agreed to scale up the BrewLab’s Grätzer recipe – Thirsty Bear Brewing – only brews organic beer. Enter brewpub Southpaw BBQ, whose brewmaster agreed to smoke 200 pounds of organic wheat for the recipe.

Smith said all that hard work turned out to be a lot of fun. “There’s absolutely another revivalist beer in our future,” he said.

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