Stone brew – Moko Maukas

Having brewed today‘s one fashionable beer after another, we came to realize that we have been moving away from our roots. It just struck us that we paid little attention to our local traditional beer, so this year we are resolute to fix it. We introduced the first beer dedicated to the Lithuanian beer brewing tradition – Kurko Keptinis back in January, so the next step was to brew stone beer Moko Maukas while using this ancient mashing technique that has survived to this day – heating up the mash with stones. It‘s not only that we‘ve brewed this beer in an ancient way, the whole process was rather mystical to us as well.

Mashing with stones is a way to raise the mash temperature with white-hot stones taken straight from bonfire. Such a method of heating up liquids has been passed on from the old days when metal things were a luxury and there were no containers available that could be heated directly on fire. So the only way to heat up the liquid was by throwing hot stones into it. The heated stones not only raise the mash temperature, but they also caramelize and toast the malt, thus giving the beer a sweet, robust malt flavor. So it doesn‘t come as a surprise that “sweet beer” is mentioned upon in Lithuanian folklore. While brewing this batch of Moko Maukas stone beer, we emphasized the technique of mashing, so the hops wouldn‘t dominate the malty body; no matter as to how much do we love the hop bitterness, this time we controlled ourselves and used little of the hops, so that the maltiness could dominate. Moko Maukas – is moderately strong – 5.8% ABV, a bit sweet but is not obtrusively sticky, a little upright, smells a little of smoke from the campfire too just as it suits the one coming from the village.

P.S. A few words in regards to the name of the beer. The word „Mokas“ is as old as the first inhabitants of Lithuania that came to the region following the reindeer; the word literary means a “walking” stone. In the gloomy Mesolithic, and perhaps even in earlier times, when the vocal cords of our ancestors were not yet well developed, such a two-syllable word described the stones that were carried by on the icy tongues of a shrinking glacier. When the glaciers melted, the stones remained in our territory, so their name did remain as well. Many of these stones have become a place of sanctuary. Well as to „Maukas“, it means „a gulp“ in Lithuanian. So let’s have a large gulp of Moko Maukas now!