New Beer Brewday: Adambier

Today we are brewing yet another new beer! This is another one that I am really excited about brewing. The beer is an Adambier, also known as Dortmunder Adambier and Dortmunder Altbier. This is not a well-known style of beer and the only commercially brewed example of an Adambier that I know of is from a great brewery, Hair of the Dog's Adam. It is a style the originated in Germany, but is no longer brewed there because the popularity of the style decreased dramatically as German consumers began to shift more towards lighter lagers as their beer of choice.
Adambiers are very unique in that they were brewed with dark malts and traditionally would have been smoky due to the malting technology that was available hundreds of years ago. At the time that Adambiers were popular, yeast was not a known ingredient in beer, and so Adambiers were spontaneously fermented. After fermentation, they were aged in oak barrels for about a year before being served. These were high gravity beers that could easily exceed 10% ABV.
So as we attempt to recreate this extinct style, we took a lot of factors into consideration. To replicate the dark base malt, we are using Munich base malt. For the smokiness, we are using beechwood smoked malt. To replicate the fermentation that would have been common to Adambiers, we had to consider what the closest type of yeast would be to what would have spontaneously fermented in Dortmund, Germany. So we settled on a German Ale yeast for our main strain of yeast, but it was obvious that a spontaneous fermented beer would contain some Brettanomyces as well (a different type of yeast than what Brewers typically use).
So now we have a split fermentation with a German Ale yeast and Brett Lambicus in primary fermentation. It will be at least 6 months before the Brett flavors fully develop, so it will take at least that long for us to release this beer, but I can not wait to do so!