What's cool about brewing with kveik yeast strains? Burnt City Brewing explains (and is hosting a whole festival for it)

There are beer festivals celebrating barrel-aging, fresh hops, and styles ranging from juicy IPAs to stouts, but it’s rare for a beer fest to hone in on a single category of yeast. Then again, a yeast as distinctive as kveik (pronounced “kwīke”; rhymes with bike), a category of Norwegian farmhouse ale yeast, certainly deserves that special attention—according to Burnt City Brewing.

The Chicago brewery announces the Inaugural Kveik Fest at District Brew Yards, taking place Saturday, Sept. 7. The one-day invitational festival sponsored by Omega Yeast features traditional and experimental kveik beers from 30 local and national craft brewers, as well as an appearance by special guest Lars Marius Garshol of Larsblog, a leading expert on this distinctive beer ingredient and Norwegian farmhouse brewing techniques. Tickets ($75) are available through the Burnt City website.

Burnt City explains kveik

Ben Saller Burnt City Brewing — Brewer Ben Saller ponders the question and explains below. Photo credit: Burnt City Brewing

We were unfamiliar with this yeast strain and asked Ben Saller, head brewer of Burnt City and founder of Kveik Fest, to explain what’s cool about kveik and why more brewers should consider using it:

Kveik gets brewers excited for a few reasons. It’s very easy to work with because it ferments beers quickly without much temperature control. It lets us produce beer faster than other yeasts do, which increases the potential production capacity of our breweries.
However, the overwhelming reason I personally am enamored with kveik is for the flavors it’s adding to my beers. There are many strains of kveik derived from different farmhouse breweries in Norway. We’re finding that different strains give our beers different fruit notes in a very different way than the Belgian, English and American ale yeasts we’re used to working with do.

Voss kveik, for example, adds a pleasant note of lemon pith, and a hint of peach. Hornindal kveik gives a bit of tropical fruit and a little acidity. These yeasts add none of the banana-like esters or clove-like phenols that fruity Belgian yeasts do, making them much more versatile. Among the various styles we’ve used kveik for are farmhouse ales, IPAs, imperial stouts, and barley wines.
Kveik has a romantic quality to it that I find refreshing in our current era where marketing is more important for a brewery’s success than the quality of its beer. We’re able to work with kveik because farmhouse brewers held on to these strains and were generous enough to share them with the world. It’s a yeast handed down for generations, unknown to most of the world until relatively recently. When most brewers see what kveik is capable of for the first time, their astonishment is palpable.

Where can you get some Kveik?

Kveik, which is one of the words for “yeast” in Norwegian, has only recently become readily available to American brewers, thanks in huge part to Chicago- and St. Louis-based Omega Yeast, which currently offers three kveik strains. These strains ferment well at even at up to 95°F with little difference in ester production, meaning they can produce hoppy American ales. These products are game changers for brewers who want to be energy efficient with temperature control, or who lack temperature control in warm climates.