When Paul Arney launched The Ale Apothecary in 2011, he deigned to create beers that were more art than industry. One of his first recipes was an interpretation of a Finnish farmhouse ale known as sahti. But he was clear to point out, "This is not a farmhouse brewery. This is a mountain brewery." A dozen years in, he's still making interesting, dare I say exotic beers inspired by not "the land" but by many lands. His latest is a Gotlandsdricka, inspired by the farmhouse ales indigenous to the small island of Gotland off Sweden's mainland. It is, to the best of this writer's knowledge (and to the best of my Googleabilities), the fourth commercial interpretation from an American craft brewery.
The first one, rather shockingly, hailed from the largest craft brewer in America, Boston Beer, makers of Sam Adams. Walking through downtown Boston this summer, I found myself at a nanobrewery with a large and crowded taproom. As I sat at one of the bars, I overheard customers ordering myriad IPAs, several fruited sour ales and the flagship Boston Lager. No one ordered the beer called Land of the Goths. No one but me. I was instantly enamored of the light-bodied beer's dual whiffs of smoke and juniper, the traits I'd learn are the hallmarks of a Gotland-style Gotlandsdricka (also spelled Gotlandsdricke). The beer style always has a light touch of smoke since farmers and brewers on the island in the Baltic Sea (south of Stockholm and practically as close to Lithuania and Latvia as it is Sweden) still use malts dried by fire.
You hardly taste beers with smoke flavor since industrialization allowed for barley to be dried and malted in electric kilns, but being isolated from industrialized Sweden, the style manages to survive, in part thanks to a Norwegian beer writer and historian named Lars Garshol who's known to outlying brewers like Arney.
Full disclosure: I told Arney about the Sam Adams Gotlandsdricka I enjoyed knowing full well he was the most likely candidate to recreate the beer, given his history with the equally arcane sahti, and impressed upon him it had a deadline; it would make a great addition to the lineup of Diff'rent Smokes: Smoke Beer & BBQ Fest taking place at GoodLife Brewing on Saturday, Oct. 14 (full disclosure: I organized the event). GoodLife is adjacent to The Ale Apothecary's tasting room on SW Century Drive. The festival, founded during the terrible fire and smoke season of 2021, is a benefit for the Oregon Volunteer Firefighters Association.
Whereas The Ale Apothecary's beers heretofore were all inoculated and partially fermented with locally cultivated wild yeasts, this new Gotlandsdricka is the first in The Ale Apothecary's "clean" side, The AlePharm. In this case, clean refers to beers fermented with standard brewer's yeast and without any wild yeast that lends beers a funkiness and/or sourness. To brew the beer, Arney placed a special order for cold smoked malt from a malting company called Sugar Creek Malt that just so happens to specialize in smoked malts and others used for Nordic-style farmhouse ales.
One thing AlePharm's beer doesn't feature is juniper. Arney noted that our local common and Western juniper aren't as good of a fit as Swedish juniper. This leaves his Gotlandsdricka to rely more on the smoke element. Unlike other smoke beers, also known as rauchbiers thanks to its ancestral homeland in Bamberg, Germany (the word directly translates to smoke beers), which can boast an aroma and flavor closer to bacon, this gotlandsdricka has a more subtle smoke characteristic for drinkers who fear rauchbiers taste like liquified ashtrays.
While Diff'rent Smokes features more common (by comparison) smoked Märzens or other Germanic lagers, as well as smoked porters and even a pair of beers featuring smoked pumpkin, AlePharm's offering is not only the sole Swedish farmhouse-inspired beer, it's the only gotlandsdricka from the western half of the United States.
