{"id":345310,"date":"2025-12-15T13:27:57","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T13:27:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/recipes\/category-a-b\/beer\/morana-tmaves-birthday-in-america\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T13:27:57","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T13:27:57","slug":"morana-tmaves-birthday-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=345310","title":{"rendered":"Morana: Tmave's Birthday in America"},"content":{"rendered":"


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This Thursday is the 15th anniversary of the day I spent at Devils Backbone Basecamp brewing the first ever batch of Morana<\/a>, a Czech style dark lager that I designed for them. I had spent the previous months diving into archives, emailing with multiple brewers, and beer experts, in various languages – English, German, Czech, and Slovak – to learn everything I could about a family of beers that at the time only consisted of about 5% of Czech beer production. Obviously, having only fairly recently decamped from Prague to Virginia, I was also relying on my own remembrances of beers that I had got a taste for in the last couple of years there, when I moved beyond the realms of Gambrinus, Staropramen, and Velkopopovivk\u00fd Kozel.<\/p>\n

My go-to dark lagers at the time were brewed by Kout na \u0160umav\u011b and available at the fantastic U Slovansk\u00e9 lipy<\/a>, but it was the 14\u00b0 version that I was using as my model for Morana. They also had an 18\u00b0 that as a 0.3l mal\u00e9 pivo made for a wonderful nightcap.<\/p>\n

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Back in 2010, Czech style dark lager wasn’t an accepted “style” on sites that advocated for the rating of beer and it didn’t exist in the BJCP style guidelines until 2015. Fun fact, there is a post in BeerAdvocate in which I pointed out that tmav\u00e9 is different from both schwarzbier and dunkel and thus deserved it’s own category, a point met with howls of “too many styles” already, meanwhile black IPA had a moment in the sun and immediately got recognition from the gatekeeping banshees<\/strike> mods.<\/p>\n

From my research and deep diving since, I am convinced that Morana was in fact the first authentic Czech style dark lager brewed in the modern American craft brewing industry. By “authentic” here I mean using appropriate ingredients and methods, so yes it has always been double decocted, as well as giving it the time to lager extensively. When it was first released, I was transported, Anton Ego style, back to the pubs of \u017di\u017ekov, Nusle, and Karl\u00edn. It has since been brewed about half a dozen times, and as Jason and co have invested in open fermenters, horizontal lagering tanks<\/a>, and the like, it has got better and better with every brewing.<\/p>\n

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All of this came rushing back to me this last weekend, as I was lazily scrolling through the Memories feature on Facebook and saw something mentioned about looking forward to being at the brewery to help make the first batch. With that in mind, I changed my homebrew plans for this weekend, out went my next batch of Vienna lager, and in came a 15th anniversary brew of \u010cern\u00fd Lev<\/a>, my homebrew version of Morana.<\/p>\n

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Previous batches have used the traditional German malts from Weyermann, but as you may know if you’ve been following my social media for a while, I am committed to using my local malting company, Murphy & Rude<\/a>, for all my malt needs. As such, a slight redesign was required. My grist for this weekend then is:<\/div>\n
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