Scratch Brewing founders Marika Josephson and Aaron Kleidon talked about brewing beer in a wood-fired kettle on a recent Craft Beer & Brewing podcast. It is not as simple as flipping a switch, so I won’t try to summarize and instead suggest you give it a listen.
In the first photo below, from 2013, you can see where they split tree wood to fire their first (much smaller) kettle. Josephson is feeding the fire while Kleidon tames the boil. However, toward the end of the conversation Kleidon mentions now that they have a much larger kettle (under a roof, by the way) the wood for their fire comes from a local company that makes pallets. This is more environmentally friendly than chopping down the trees that surround the brewery.
Not quite as romantic, I know. I remember visiting Weissbrau Freilassing in 2008, said to be the last wood-fired brewery in Germany, and seeing the pile of wood that would be used for brewing (second photo below). Most of the wood is second-hand, although some is chopped. Although this makes perfect sense, I wasn’t expecting it. Curiously, there no wood flames under the kettles at the G. Schneider & Sohn in Kelheim to the north, but but the brewery has its own wood-chip-fired heating system. Kelheim is located in the midst of a forest, where chopping down trees does make sense.
The third photo is from Brasserie Caracole in Falmignoul, said to the last wood-fired brewery in Belgium. To be honest, that’s not wood in the photo, but paper crumbled up to provide a prettier picture when I visited in 2004.
The final photo is from three years ago, on Bjørne Røthe’s farm in Dyrvedalen Valley in western Norway. There it is nice to know that this is not the last wood-fired kettle still being used in Norway.
