Reciprocal Arrangement

Normally, January is a time to set resolutions and delete the endless stream of “Near Year, New You” emails from all the brands with lazy copywriters* flooding your inboxes. In many ways, we’re also looking ahead with the launch of our Do What You Can campaign and plenty of exciting community events coming up, but the first beer release of 2025 has us looking backward—all the way to the Middle Ages.**

As any student of beer history knows, much of what we now know as beer was created in the early Middle Ages when St. Hildegard von Bingen first discovered that adding hops to “gruet” (a precursor to modern beer) acted as a preservative and extended the life of beer long before the days of refrigeration. In those days, it was common practice to brew beer with whatever cereal grains grew best in your region, whether it was barley, wheat, or even rye.

This is how the “Roggenbier” first came to be. Literally translating to “rye beer” in German, this historical style might surprise folks familiar with the German Purity Law (the dreaded Reinheitsgebot), which mandated that all beers brewed in Bavaria could only be made with water, hops, and barley. As it turns out, the Roggenbier predates this law, which was first enacted by William IV, the Duke of Bavaria, following several bad harvests of wheat and rye (which they wanted to prioritize for bread).

Because it was essentially outlawed following this fifteenth law, the Roggenbier never became a widely known style, and while there are now a few commercial examples throughout Europe and the U.S., it’s still relatively obscure.

Last year, for Pittsfield’s 10x10 Arts Festival, Sarah brewed a Roggenbier as one of the ten small batches that we released during that time. To write this recipe, she consulted the BJCP guidelines for this style for basic information like color, ABV range, bitterness, etc, and while she doesn’t always like to conform to the rigidity of these guidelines when writing recipes, this was helpful as she was essentially flying blind on this.

Because the small batch Roggenbier was pretty well received, we decided to scale up the recipe for a full seven-barrel batch, which we launched at the start of this year.

As is the case when scaling up any test batch from a five-gallon recipe to brewing it at a commercial scale, there were some unexpected challenges. For example, because a Roggenbier requires a grain bill comprised of at least 50% rye, sparging*** this beer was a huge pain in the ass. What normally takes about 45 minutes or so took 4 hours because rye is a husk-less, dense grain. Because of this, Sarah declared she’d never make this beer again, though much to her chagrin, our staff has enjoyed this rye lager so much that we’ve disabused her of that notion.

When it came to naming this beer, I—like the lazy copywriters responsible for corny email subject lines—immediately wanted to make a Catcher in the Rye reference being the book nerd that I am. While going right to this novel was a little bit of a lazy move, I wanted to find a passage in the novel that might resonate with some part of the brewing or origin of this beer. So after wading through all of the semi-annoying rants from Holden Caufield, I arrived at a conversation the protagonist has with Mr. Antolini, one of the few teachers he actually respects.

In that conversation, Mr. Antolini talks at length about the value of history, writing, and reading. He describes the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next a “reciprocal arrangement,” and since this beer is our attempt at recreating a style first created by medieval brewers, this transfer of knowledge across centuries and generations felt like a fitting reference.

We’ve got Recirpocal Arrangement, our take on the Roggenbier, on tap and in 4-packs, so if you’re in the area and feel like sipping on a taste of history, stop in and check it out!

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 *I was once one of these copywriters. I hated writing subject lines like these.

**Admittedly, I do this quite often,

***Rinsing the grains after the mash is completed to make sure that all the sugars are transferred over to the boil kettle during brew day.