Brewery: Laitilan Wirvoitusjuomatehdas (Finland)
Beer: Savuruis (i.e. ‘Smoked Rye’), 5.3% ABV, IBU 30, 500ml bottle
Listed Ingredients: Water, Malted Barley, Malted Rye, Cascade Hops, Yeast
Style: Smoked beer
Rating: 2/5
Vegan Friendly

Laitilan Savuruis

Appearance
Hazy, brown, pours a fairly modest head.

Aroma
Smoky, but not too strongly, a distinct aroma of smoked food rather than anything else. Difficult to discern anything else.

Taste
Fairly mild, the smoke is not particulraly strong, but it’s certainly there. I was expecting more of the smoke flavour. Then again, the beer doesn’t have any other strong characteristics, so even the fairly mild smokyness is enough to overpower other aspects of the beer, such as the rye malt. The Cascade hops is what comes through next, but the malt is somehow in the background.

Overall
I’m not overly impressed with this beer. I do like the concept of a Rauchbier — a smoked beer — but I think the Germans may be better at this… Obviously, if you’re going to do a smoked beer, you better make sure that the other characteristics of the beer are such that they can take the smokyness, or you could go all out with the smoke in which case it doesn’t really matter. But this beer is somewhere in between. It tastes more like a pretty generic beer with a little bit of smokyness. There is a rather similar beer by another Finnish brewery, Karhu (a brand owned by Sinebrychoff, which is in fact owned by Carlsberg — so not that Finnish after all!), called Korpisavu. That one is based on generic, crap beer, but they’ve gone for a pretty smoky flavour, so in the end it might actually be better than the Laitilan attempt. Laitilan does do some other decent beer though, and it’s a much smaller brewery, so worth supporting simply because of that. I hope to try their porter some time soon.