Imagine brewing a beer where you grow your own barley, malt it yourself, dry that malt in the smoke from a traditional sauna, skip boiling the wort and ferment it with a yeast culture handed from brewer to brewer.

It sounds like someone deliberately trying to make the most rustic beer imaginable.

In Latgale, in eastern Latvia, it’s simply part of an old farmhouse brewing tradition that has somehow survived into the modern world.

Latgalian smoked ale is difficult to squeeze into our modern idea of a beer style. There isn’t a neat specification telling brewers exactly how strong it should be, how bitter it should taste or precisely what colour it needs to be. Instead, it’s a brewing tradition shaped by local agriculture, equipment, ingredients and generations of farmhouse knowledge.

And to understand the beer, we need to start somewhere you wouldn’t normally expect to find a malt kiln.

In the sauna.

The black sauna

Latgale is the easternmost region of Latvia, a landscape of farms, forests and lakes bordering Russia. Among its traditional buildings is the melnā pirts, or black sauna.

Unlike a modern sauna with a chimney carrying smoke away, a traditional black sauna uses a fire beneath a pile of stones without a chimney. During heating, smoke enters the room, blackening its interior.

For farmhouse brewers, however, that heat and smoke could do another job.

After barley was steeped and allowed to germinate to produce malt, it needed to be dried. In the Latgalian system described by farmhouse-brewing researcher Lars Marius Garshol, a hatch in the sauna ceiling allowed heat and smoke to rise into a malt-drying area on the level above.

The farmhouse had effectively become its own maltings.

Alderwood was traditionally used for the fire, although practices vary between brewers. As the malt dried, smoke passed through it, giving the grain the character that would eventually appear in the finished beer.

That’s an important distinction.

Smoke wasn’t necessarily added because somebody decided a smoky flavour would make an interesting beer. It was a consequence of how malt was produced.

Latvia’s official tourism information still points visitors towards this tradition today. Mājas Alus Kolnasāta, near Lake Lubāna, is described as brewing in wooden vessels using malt made from barley grown on the farm and dried in a black sauna.

In other words, this isn’t simply a reconstructed historical recipe. Elements of the tradition are still alive.

Smoked beer, but not Rauchbier

For many beer drinkers, “smoked beer” immediately brings to mind the famous Rauchbiers of Bamberg in Germany.

Latgalian ale belongs to a very different brewing culture.

There’s a closer conceptual connection with traditional farmhouse beers such as Norway’s intensely smoky stjørdalsøl, where brewers also produce their own smoked malt. But even that comparison only gets us so far.

Latgalian ale is its own tradition.

And smoking the malt is only the beginning of what makes it unusual.

They don’t necessarily boil the wort

One of the fundamentals of modern brewing seems almost ridiculously obvious: after mashing, you boil the wort.

Except that historically, not everybody did.

Traditional Latgalian ale follows what is known as a raw ale process. The malt is mashed with hot water to convert its starches into fermentable sugars, then the sweet wort is separated from the grain and cooled before yeast is added.

There is no conventional wort boil between those stages.

That matters because boiling does much more than simply heat beer. Among other things, it changes malt and hop compounds, drives off volatile substances and helps create the flavour profile we associate with modern boiled-wort beers.

A raw ale therefore isn’t merely a normal beer with one brewing step missing. Avoiding the boil can contribute to a different malt character and mouthfeel.

The hopping method can be unusual too. Garshol found that a number of Latgalian brewers put hops directly into the mash rather than boiling them separately as a hop tea, a technique seen in some other farmhouse traditions.

Once again, we’re a long way from the standard brewery process most of us recognise.

Then there’s the yeast

Farmhouse brewing traditions weren’t built around ordering a fresh packet of yeast every time somebody wanted to make beer.

Yeast was a resource worth keeping.

Much of Latgale’s traditional farmhouse yeast appears to have disappeared, but Garshol reports surviving cultures in the northern part of the region. Laboratory analysis places these within a broader family of farmhouse yeasts that also includes Norwegian kveik and Lithuanian farmhouse cultures.

That doesn’t mean Latgalian yeast simply is kveik. Rather, it points towards fascinating relationships among northern European farmhouse fermentation traditions.

Like kveik and some other farmhouse cultures, the surviving Latgalian yeast can be pitched remarkably warm — around body temperature — and ferment quickly.

To a brewer trained to worry about pitching an ale yeast too warm, that can sound like brewing heresy.

To generations of farmhouse brewers, it was simply how beer was made.

So what does Latgalian ale taste like?

This is where we need to resist turning a tradition into a tidy tasting chart.

There can be considerable variation from brewer to brewer. Garshol’s research found enormous differences in the amount of malt and hops being used, meaning strength, bitterness and flavour aren’t fixed in the way we’d expect from a tightly defined modern style.

His detailed tasting account came from the beer of farmhouse brewer Dainis Rakstiņš, who lives in Bērzpils and operates Mājas Alus Kolnasāta with his wife, Ilona.

Rakstiņš is about as close as you can get to the literal meaning of farmhouse brewing. He malts his own barley in the sauna, uses locally grown hops and maintains a yeast culture obtained from another villager more than two decades ago.

Garshol describes Rakstiņš’s beer as dark, intensely smoky and caramel-forward, with powerful bitterness alongside fruit and mineral notes, finishing with a delicate blackberry-like character.

But that shouldn’t become a universal flavour specification for every Latgalian farmhouse ale.

The smoke itself can vary according to how the malt is dried, including the wood used and the brewer’s preferred smoking intensity. Recipes and processes also vary across the region.

In southern Latgale, there is even a surviving tradition of stone beer, in which heated stones play a role in the brewing process.

What we’re looking at isn’t one standardised recipe.

It’s a family of related farmhouse practices.

A beer style before beer styles

That’s what makes Latgalian ale particularly interesting.

Modern beer culture loves classification. We talk about colour ranges, bitterness units, original gravity, alcohol percentages and whether a beer fits neatly within the boundaries of a recognised style.

Those classifications are useful. They allow brewers, judges and drinkers on opposite sides of the world to have a reasonable idea what someone means when they say Czech Premium Pale Lager, American IPA or Dry Irish Stout.

But traditional farmhouse beer reminds us that beer didn’t develop from style guidelines.

It developed from people making beer with what they had.

If you grew barley, you malted barley.

If your method of drying malt involved the smoke from your black sauna, your beer tasted smoky.

If your family or neighbour maintained a good brewing yeast, you kept using it.

If your brewing process didn’t involve boiling the wort, you made raw ale.

Over generations, those practical decisions became traditions — and those traditions created distinctive beers.

That’s arguably the most fascinating thing about Latgalian smoked ale. The smoke, raw wort and farmhouse yeast aren’t gimmicks designed to make an unusual beer.

They’re clues.

Each one tells us something about the people, place and process that produced it.

Can you actually drink one?

Yes, although finding one in Australia would be quite an achievement.

Latgale’s tourism authorities still promote Dainis Rakstiņš as a traditional Latgalian beer brewer, where visitors can learn about the brewing process and taste his beer. Latvia’s national tourism organisation also lists Mājas Alus Kolnasāta as an example of traditional farmhouse brewing using home-produced malt dried in a black sauna.

For most Australian beer drinkers, then, Latgalian smoked ale probably isn’t going to be the next style appearing permanently at the local bottleshop.

But perhaps that’s part of what makes traditions like this worth knowing about.

Beer is now a global industry. Malt can arrive in a sack, yeast in a packet and brewing equipment from a catalogue, allowing remarkably similar beers to be produced thousands of kilometres apart.

Latgalian farmhouse ale comes from another way of thinking about beer.

The barley comes from the farm. The malt gets its smoke from the sauna. The hops can grow nearby. The yeast passes between brewers. The process belongs to the place.

Sometimes a beer style tells you what should be in your glass.

This one tells you where it came from.