If you include its historical and specialty styles category, the BJCP (Beer Judge Certification Program), the organization most often cited regarding beer style definitions, recognizes over 100 different beer styles. There are a lot of reasons beyond judging homebrew to recognize different beer styles, including differences in cultural traditions, ingredients, processes, and how they’re consumed. Perhaps most importantly, though, it’s the easiest way for brewers and bars to communicate what they’re selling you. When you order a ribeye at a steakhouse, you’ve obviously got some expectations about what’s coming off the grill…if a flank steak comes out on your plate, you’d probably be a little pissed (understandably). In the same way, when you order a Pale Ale, there must be a way of defining what expectations that should carry, even if there are some pretty significant variations between brewers and regions.

When you order a Munich Dunkel, you’re ordering one of the oldest styles of beer that’s been continually brewed since it was recognized. Before the reinheitsgebot was enacted in 1516, and for at least 100 years after it, braunbier, which we now call dunkel, was the most common type of beer in Bavaria. It was so clearly defined from other beers that when the Bavarian royals built two new breweries around the turn of the seventeenth century, the two different locations were assigned different styles—the first brewing braunbier, and the second brewing weißbier (white beer brewed with wheat). Style recognition wasn’t the primary motivation for the two different breweries, they needed the space to make enough beer for the court (you can read more about that in our post on Helles Bock). That there was a recognized distinction, however, tells us that the Bavarians had a good sense for what we now call “styles.”

Dunkel (which simply translates as “dark”) is itself a style that has changed dramatically since those early beers, however. Though malting had at that point been well-understood for over 5000 years, there was a monumental difference between the process then as compared with now: smoke. You can read more about the history of malt in our post on Rauchbier, but for now it’s enough to know that in 1500s brewing, the vast majority of malt would have had smoky qualities because of the drying process (the malt that wasn’t smoky was air dried…a process that wasn’t efficient and was therefore small scale and quite rare). What that meant for braunbier, in other words, is that it would always have been smoky. When unsmoked malt became available, it was adopted by nearly every brewer, and drinkers were left with more flavor from the grain and less from the malting process.

One of my favorite beer memories, and one of the best beers I’ve ever had, was a well-made dunkel from a brewpub called Giesinger bräustüberl on Munich’s southeast side. This beer had an incredible richness and depth of flavor while remaining light on the palate and easy to drink. Though it’s been overtaken in popularity by its brighter cousin helles, it’s offered year round by the liter in Munich’s beer gardens.

At Black Flannel, we’ve worked tirelessly on our own method for making a rich, full-flavored dark lager that’s still easy to drink a lot of at once (we even ran it through what our brewers refer to as the “volume” test just to be sure). What you’ll get from a pint of our dunkel is rich bread toast and toasted walnuts against a backdrop of light cocoa. Who wouldn’t want a liter of that?