Thor’s Hammer – Norse Porter

Todays brew is a blast from the past – a recipe which I developed way back in 1998, and which was my most brewed beer (or, at least, base-recipe) for the better part of 10 years. This beer goes back even farther – in the early 90’s there wasn’t much of a craft beer scene in Western Canada, but this one beer store used to bring in the odd European beer. There was this porter, from Norway, they’d bring in a couple of times a year – the name was unpronounceable (and long since forgotten), but it was good. In fact, it was the beer that started my love-affair with the porter style. Through a lot of trial-and-error (this was before there were many good online brewing resources) a friend and I managed to make a fairly respectable clone of the beer…but could never get it just right. We knew it was a baltic-style porter, and we did everything we could to learn about the style to find our error. One day a chance encounter with a Norwegian brewer online solved our problem – unlike most baltics, this brewery used an ale yeast instead of a lager yeast. Vola – the next batch was spot-on.

From there this brew evolved a lot – substituting English for noble hops, removing the darker malts, brewing an all-Munich/Vienna base malt version and the addition of cherries were all tested at one point or another – and each produced a fantastic beer.

Todays brew goes back to the first “eureka – we got it” recipe; the closest to cloning that one great beer that brought light to an otherwise fairly dark beer-decade.

EDIT: forgot to add, this brew makes use of the Nøgne Ø yeast, kindly provided by Sam of Eureka brewing (also, yeast #113, my commercial yeast bank). Historically I used the old wyeast Scandinavian ale yeast – which apparently was just goold ol’ ringwood…

Recipe below the fold.