At the end of June I traveled to Turku with five kilograms of sweet and dark rye breads in my bag. I had baked these special taari breads for a traditional Karelian-Baltic farmhouse ale taari that I helped to brew at the Turku Medieval Market.
Jouko Ylijoki from Olu Bryki Raum brewery invited me to this medieval fair. Jouko is a veteran of medieval fairs and his crew had built an impressive outdoor brewery and tavern where the audience could follow the brewing demonstration and sample the ancient ales of Olu Bryki at the same time. The Medieval Market on the whole is a very large event, and there were 160,000 visitors during four festival days. The fabulous photos of this post were taken by Sami Brodkin.
I have been searching data about taari from Karelian cookbooks and ethnographical texts, and I’m now very close to understanding how this very unusual type of historical ale has been brewed. Perhaps one more test brew, and I can publish the findings.
After Turku I spend a week at a summer cottage by the lake, and there I finally managed to document the last story from my maltøl tour to Norway a year ago: Commercial Farmhouse Maltsters and Brewers Around Stjørdal. This story feature some of the best photos I took on this tour.
Now I’m planning an eight-day sahti tour for August, in which we will be visiting around twenty domestic and commercial brewers all around sahti heartlands. Some of the photos, stories and recipes will eventually appear here at Brewing Nordic and perhaps in some beer magazines. In the meantime, I will throw some snapshots to Facebook and Twitter pages.
Kippis!
Mika
