In the rural areas of Norway, there are long traditions of home brewing. Traditionally, farms in the barely-growing areas of Norway used to brew their own beer for different seasons – for the hay harvest, for Christmas, for baptisms and for funerals. There are even laws from medieval times giving fines for those who did not brew the appropriate beer.
The home brewing has dwindled until recently, with serious brewing only taking place in Voss, near Bergen, and in the Stjørdal area in the fertile landscape along the Trondheim fjord.
While commercial brewing has grown, with the big brewers eating the small ones and closing them down, the distance between the local brewers and the commercial brewers has gron, decade by decade. Luckily, there are those who want to make their craft beer available on a slightly more commercial scale, though, given the tax regime and other regulations it is not too easy.
Ølve på Egge brewery is located in Steinkjer, some kilometres from Stjørdal, and the brewer has been bottling his beers for a few years. They are very hard to come by, though. My brother in law smuggled a bottle out for a pub some time ago to give me, but, alas, he finished it off one evening before it got to me.
Last week there was a message on a Norwegian beer web sites that some bottles were available at Fenaknoken, an ole fashioned food shop in Central Oslo, dedicated to traditional food from all corners of the country. I went there during my lunch break to pick up the tow beers available.
The beer, which has been brewed for a few years is called Ølve på Egge, the name giving echoes of beer referred to in the Norse sagas of a millennium ago. This region is thick with history from the Viking age, and it is appropriate to refer to this when you brew a beer according to traditions that have been handed down through the centuries.
This is a pre-Reinheitsgebot stuff, brewed with juniper twigs. It is a cloudy, malty beer that tastes of the malt that is the main ingredient, with no fuss about hops from faraway places. (Well, the hops would be from faraway places, but they are not of any extreme variety.)It has a full, rather sweet flavour, with some hints of summer fruit and even some spices – pepper and cinnamon comes to mind. There is some smokiness here, too, which I think is appropriate to how the malt has been traditionally processed.
This is a dark brew, with a low carbonation from the maturation in the bottle. It is no surprise that this beer is not pasteurized.
The outstanding feature here is the finish, which is crispy dry. The hops may do their thing here, but it mainly the juniper in the mash making a dry, tongue-curling feeling lingering in the mouth which shows that this is a beer that is a very distant relative from the standard Norwegian watery lager.
This is a beer for Norwegian traditional food. Smoked and cured rib of mutton, cured ham, fermented fish or smoked salmon. This is a beer that should have a more general release.
The Jubileumsøl is brewed on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Steinkjer as a township. This is a lighter and brighter brew, but it is certainly not your average pale lager, either. It has a sweet malty, soft flavour. Under pressure, I would say it is a bit too sweet, perhaps. It is related to the German or Austrian old fashioned zwickl or kellerbiers , and I am happy to see a beer of this style available – this is far better than the similar brew from the Atna micro.
Now, where can I get my hands on a bottle of Ølve Bokk? The regulations here in Norway say it cannot be sold in a grocery store, and it probably is no sold in quantities large enough to be distributed at Vinmonopolet. A pub in the region of the brewer, perhaps?