PINtPRESSNote2 November 2026 · Beer history · Malt

Roast is not smoke

Harvey’s print the claim on the pump clip. The malt behind it comes out of a drum that roasts without letting the fire near the grain.

The pump clip says it outright, in capitals, under a figure carrying a torch down a Lewes twitten: a strong ale with a superbly smoky flavour. Harvey’s own notes add that a small quantity of black malt is there to impart the suggestion of smoke. There is something peculiar about that. Black malt comes out of a drum that roasts the grain without the fire reaching it. The ingredient reached for to suggest a bonfire is the one made by keeping the fire away.

So what are we tasting?

Wheeler’s drum, 1817

Before clean fuel, kilned malt tasted of whatever had been burned under it. Wood was scarce in England by the sixteenth century, so straw became the usual fuel, and coal where they could get it, though coal was taxed, impure and nasty in All About Beer’s summary. The fix was coke, an ultra-clean version of it, at work for malting in Derbyshire by 1642.

Then the drum. On 28 March 1817 Daniel Wheeler was granted British patent No. 4112, a new or improved method of drying and preparation of malt: roasting at a high temperature without charring, in a drum adapted from a coffee roaster. Malt went in, the drum turned, and what came out was nearly black, and had never been in the smoke.

What he was after was colour. Colourings had been banned the year before, and London’s porter brewers were stuck with brownish malts, some of them, the same entry notes, reaching illegally for other colourants anyway. Before Wheeler, dark beer meant brown malt dried over a hot kiln, and the colour arrived with the taint attached. After him a brewer could put a very small quantity of very dark malt into a very large quantity of beer, and the fire never touched it. Whitbread took it up the same year, and the other big London brewers followed.

Roast and smoke are not the same event. Roasting is what heat does to sugars and proteins inside the grain, the same chemistry as coffee, toast and the outside of a joint. Smoke is what comes off a fire and settles on whatever is in its way. Hard roasting produces dark, burnt, faintly bitter notes that a nose can read as smoke, even though the drum only ever put heat into the grain. Crisp, who make the stuff, put liquorice, smokiness and nuttiness in their own tasting notes for black malt, and they are describing a grain that has never been near a fire’s breath.

Nor is it only the brewery that tastes it. Drinkers logging Bonfire Boy on Pubs and Beer have been reaching for the same word for years, unprompted and in different counties: “a bit of woodsmoke” at the Ram Inn at Firle in 2016, “hints of smoke” at the John Harvey Tavern in 2012, a “lingeringly dry, smokey aftertaste” at the Garland in Redhill in 2024. The flavour arrives by roasting rather than by contact with smoke.

Toffee and dark malt

The beers that belong to this fortnight are not trying to reproduce a bonfire. They are malt-led, and they run from a milk stout under five to an old ale over six. The warmth is alcohol and specialty malt, crystal and amber and chocolate, giving toffee and toasted bread and dried fruit.

Someone is going to stand in a wet field in Sussex for four hours in the dark, and a sweet, malty ale is the obvious thing to be holding.

The bonfire is already there. It is enormous, and it is on fire. Nobody in the field needs the drink to remind them of it.

Line up the British beers called Bonfire. Harvey’s Bonfire Boy at 5.8%. Three Acre’s Bonfire Beer, an old ale at 6.7%. Church End’s Bonfire Toffee Stout, a 4.6% milk stout. None is presented as a smoked beer.

Bonfire toffee is what the fifth of November tastes like in this country: treacle, dark sugar, parkin, the slab that takes a hammer and most of a filling. The brewers are not reaching for the fire at all. They are reaching for the stall standing next to it. The beer writer Pete Brown, writing the food notes on Harvey’s own page for Bonfire Boy, gets there first and puts it best: it evokes “bonfire toffee rather than the bonfire itself”.

Two kilns in Bamberg

Smoked beer is not missing from the catalogue: seventy beers in PINtPOINT are filed as Rauchbier, eleven of them Schlenkerla’s. None of the bonfire names went looking for it. The other route is to put real smoke in, and it is done sincerely, with beechwood-smoked malt, peated malt, occasionally liquid smoke, the aim being to taste the fire itself.

Schlenkerla’s own history reckons that every beer in central Europe once tasted of smoke, because every kiln was an open fire, though not everyone accepts it was quite that universal. The clean kiln ended it almost everywhere, and by 1900 Germany’s smoke kilns had all but gone. Two Bamberg breweries, Schlenkerla and Spezial, still dry their malt over a beechwood fire, and Schlenkerla’s history claims the pair of them as the only breweries in the world to have kept the fire kiln going without a break. So the smoke in a Rauchbier is Franconian and deliberate and old, and it is the point of the beer. The smoke in a bonfire beer is scenery.

PINtPOINT tracks Bonfire Boy and shows where drinkers have recently logged it.