That is because everybody can write articles and they all can fill the articles with whateve they want. Does not have to be acurate. If you can find an article from the Köstritzer guys sharing their recipe and saying that they use crystal malt, I am all ears. Otherwise .......
Gordon Strong, in his
2020 Brew Your Own magazine style profile on Schwarzbier, tells an interesting story about the modern history of Köstritzer Schwarzbier. He says that Michael Jackson's 1990
World Guide to Beer describes Schwarzbier as a "low alcohol sweet beer." But then after reunification "Bitburger purchased the Köstritzer brewery in Bad Köstritz in 1991 with the goal of more widely producing and exporting the beer. They reformulated the beer Jackson first described to a standard strength beer or
Vollbier."
Ron Pattinson seems to confirm the 1990 description of Schwarzbier here:
The beers and breweries of Thuringia (25 years ago)
These are Ron's own 1990 tasting notes on Köstritzer:
Kostritzer Schwarzbierbrauerei, Bad Kostritz | |
Schwarzbier | Black, fairly sweet and malty |
In that Gordon Strong article he gives a recipe based on Köstritzer and it is 50% pale malt (pilsner malt), 43% Munich, and 7% roasted malt, so no caramel malt, but that current recipe is only from 1991 and was created by Bitburger, so not super traditional! And they aren't the only German breweries to brew Schwarzbier, so I have no idea if any of them now use caramel malts, but it wouldn't shock me if some did at some point. Weyermann says you can use Caramunich II in a Schwarzbier:
Weyermann® CARAMUNICH® Type 2 * – Weyermann® Spezialmalze
That being said, I brewed a Schwarzbier in October and it had no caramel or crystal malts:
7.00 lb IREKS Pilsner Malt (1.8 SRM) (63.6 %)
3.00 lb IREKS Munich Malt (10.2 SRM) (27.3 %)
0.75 lb Carafa Special I (Weyermann) (320.0 SRM) (6.8 %) --added at Vorlauf
0.25 lb Carafa Special III (Weyermann) (470.0 SRM) (2.3 %)--added at Vorlauf
I think next time I might reduce the Carafa Special III even lower next time, but the beer is excellent and won my homebrew club Schwarzbier mini-comp. I prefer the modern drier version of Köstritzer, but I tend to prefer Franconian versions of many beer styles, which are in general drier and hoppier than their southern Bavarian counterparts.