RECIPE, 16th-century English beer
Bryan J. Maloney
Francis Drake, a 16th Century English Beer
Copyright © 1997 Bryan J. Maloney
All Rights Reserved
Ingredients
Malt: 17 2/3 cups Pale Ale
Specialty Malts: 7 1/4 cups Brown Malt (from Hugh Baird)
2 cups Lightly peated malt
5 1/2 cups Wheat Malt
Adjunct: 5 1/2 cups Oatmeal
Hops: 1.4oz British noble hops (I used 4.5AA% Fuggle leaf)
Yeast: Wyeast London III (#1318)
Priming: Wort equivalent to 1.5oz sugar (I used wort)
or 1.5 oz (by weight) corn sugar.
Tech. Summary SRM 36.8, IBU 27.8 (calculated via SUDS)
Measured OG 1.060; FG 1.014 (5.9% alc. v/v)
Method
Since the complexities of ionic chemistry were unknown to most Renaissance
brewers, Do not treat water beyond boiling eight gallons water to gas off
chlorine. Bring 4.5 gallons of water to 175°F and add malts. Bring to
153°F and mash 2 hours, stirring every 15 minutes and reheating to 153°F
every 30.
A more historical method to reach strike heat is to simply watch the
water. As soon as your reflection is completely obscured by steam, the
water is ready. If you use this method, do not reheat the mash, simply
stir it from time to time. This will probably result in a less converted
mash. I actually used this method when I brewed the beer, but it's not for
those who don't want to surrender the security of the thermometer.
Draw off wort, add 3.5 gallons warm water to the grist, and mash as
before. Draw off second runnings and combine with the first. I transferred
the mash to my lauter tun and just let it run out completely. Ideally, you
should have a spigot at the bottom of your mashing vessel.
Add hops and boil 90 minutes. Chill and rack to primary. Next morning rack
wort off trub and freeze the priming wort. Historically, English brewers
would not have settled out the trub--they used an open fermentation system
and either skimmed their fermenting beer for the first 2-3 days or had
scum sluices at the top of the fermenter. Since I use a closed fermenter,
I settle the trub out. Pitch in yeast starter. After primary is finished,
rack to secondary and allow to settle until completely clear (this was
known as "blinking" the beer in the 17th century). Prime with gyle and
bottle.
This does not quite follow 16th-century practices, wherein the wort would
be cleared with the aid of oak boughs added to steep for a time and
removed before the boil. Then, instead of clarifying in a secondary before
bottling, the green beer would be bottled directly and allowed to "ripen"
for a year (Markham).
Background
This recipe was redacted from the following original:
To brewe beer x. quarters malte. ij. quarters wheet ij. quarters ootos
xl. ll weight of hoppys. To make lx barrell of sengyll beer
--arnold chron. (x-um 20), fol.xciv.r/b.
In modern English, this would be: "To brew beer: Ten quarters malt, two
quarters wheat, two quarters oats, and 40 pounds of hops to brew 60
barrels of single beer."
A quarter was (and is) a unit of volume equal to eight bushels (Zupko
1968, 1977). A bushel in the 16th century was equal to 8 "gallons".
However, these gallons were gallons of wheat, which did not correspond to
the "gallon" used for beer or for wine (Zupko, 1968, 1977). Fortunately,
an English Royal Standard Bushel measure from AD1496 has survived to the
present day. Measurements in the 20th century showed that this bushel
holds 2144.8 cubic inches (Zupko 1968) (in contrast to the US bushel of
2150.42 cubic inches). Simple calculation tells us that the recipe used
around 79.8 US bushels of malt and 15.9 US bushels each of wheat and oats.
We'll use those numbers later.
The hops quantity is deceptively familiar. After all, 40 pounds should be
40 pounds, but it's not that simple. In the England of 1502, there were no
less than three different pounds in common use and two others that had
only recently fallen out of favor. The pound specified by law was the Troy
pound, 0.82 US pounds. There was also the Livre Avoirdupois, 1 US pound.
Finally, there was the Mercantile pound, 0.96 US pounds. The old Tower
pound (1.03 US lb.) and an
"error" pound (1.10 US lb.--short-lived because it was introduced by an
error in a 1497 statute) were also known in some locales (Zupko 1968,
1977).
Regardless of what the law of the day said, the Troy pound was used for
drugs, precious metals/stones, and minerals, the mercantile and
avoirdupois for most other goods (Zupko 1968, 1977). I have decided to use
the mercantile pound, for no other reason that it allows me to pay homage
to generations of English brewers who also were likely to have used it.
So, presuming a mercantile pound, we have 38.6 lbs. US of hops.
The barrel in question was a beer barrel, which was 36 gallons (Zupko
1968). But this is also deceptive. How much was a gallon? While members of
the Society for Creative Anachronism (a medieval-themed club) that I
consulted claimed that the Renaissance beer gallon was identical to the
wine gallon, 231 cubic inches or 1 US gallon, scholarly publications claim
that Elizabeth standardized the beer gallon to equal an ale gallon of 282
cubic inches (Zupko 1968, 1977). For me, the clincher came from consulting
a German-language source that covered the 13th to 19th centuries in
northern Germany. A 15th-16th century barrel for "Bier" was given a volume
of "36 Englische Galonen". It was also listed as having a volume of
166.356 liters (Witthöft). Simple calculation led to a gallon of 281.9
cubic inches!
Since we already know that the English beer and ale barrels had
significantly different "listed" volumes, we can use this as evidence to
allow a guess that the gallon we wish to use was the 282 cubic-inch
variety.
To arrive at our final figures, we need to know that a modern US liquid
gallon is 231 cubic inches, and 16 US cups make up a US gallon. Several
series of divisions and multiplications give us the final volumes to use
for a 5-gallon batch.
You may wonder why I did not then attempt to "convert" the volumes of
grain to weight measures. I used to work in a grain storage laboratory,
and I can tell you for a fact that the weight of grains due to differences
in moisture content can vary by as much as 20% without causing noticeable
differences in volume. Thus, simply plugging in formulas for converting
quarters to tons of grain and then converting down to pounds cannot give
accurate results. Dishing out measured volumes of grain is hardly any more
difficult than weighing it.
The mixture of barley malts is meant to reflect one interpretation of malt
kilning in the 16th century. Their malt was kilned with a hardwood or
dried straw fire instead of a closed kiln (Harrison). The resulting malt
was known as "brown malt" in the 17th and 18th centuries (Noonan).
There is a modern brown malt that is said to be darker than the old brown
malt (HopTech, personal communication), and it is low-diastatic, so it
only makes up 30% of the grist. Original sources make it plain that the
ideal malt was light in color. Furthermore, smokiness seems to have been a
matter of taste--avoided by some maltsters and accepted by others
(Harrison).
Therefore, I added a little lightly-peated malt to reflect the fact that
peat may have been sometimes used instead of oak or straw when kilning,
probably not in London, but in boggy areas of Britain. However, my mixture
is only one possible interpretation. A light mixture of pale and brown
malt could be just as correct. Crystal malt would not be at all
appropriate, since they are 19th-century inventions, as are the darker
roasted malts (Noonan).
The wheat may very well have not been malted in the original recipe, since
the use of ordinary coarse flour (or "meal") is documented in at least one
source (Harrison), but I happened to have malted wheat on hand.
I have not been able to determine whether or not malted oats, oat berries,
or something resembling modern oatmeal was used. So I used oatmeal, again
since it was what I already had.
The original receipt gives the hop quantities in pounds. This could be a
recipe for disaster if one does not know that pre-19th century hops had an
alpha acid content of between 2% and 5%. Furthermore, "bittering"
varieties were developed in the 19th and 20th centuries as a money-saving
measure (Noonan). Therefore, I use a low alpha acid variety.
The mashing method is based on the traditional English system. English
practice was to use an "excess" of grain (by continental standards) and,
to avoid wasting extract, mash it twice or thrice, either making a strong
and one or two weaker beers from the single mash or possibly combining the
liquors (Markham, Harrison). I chose to combine the liquors in this case
because my second fermenter was already in use. The use of yeast starters
(and bottling) is well
documented by the 16th century (Markham).
Forced wort chilling is not documented before the 18th century as far as I
know. However, I don't want to run the risk of infection that a slow
chilling brings.
References
Harrison, W. 1587. Description of England.
Mr. Harrison was kind enough to supply us with details on malting,
clarity of beer, and even how his wife brewed. It's currently in
print in
a fairly cheap paperback edition from Dover Books.
Markham, G. 1615. The English Huswife. M.R. Best (ed).
This is a collection of recipes, advice, and essays by the most prolific
fussbudget and busybody of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. It
exists in several reprint editions.
Noonan, G. 1996. Scotch Ale. This is part of the AHA "Classic Styles Series".
It is useful as an historical source in that it details many
practices as
beginning in the 19th century--and thus not appropriate for earlier
styles.
University of Michigan Early Modern English Index.
This is a WWW index of words that appear in a collection of on-line
manuscripts. I found the original receipt by searching for "beer".
Witthöft, H. 1979. Umrisse Einer Historischen Metrologie zum Nutzen der
wirtschafts-und Sozialgeschichtlichen Forschung.
A German-language source, mostly a list of various items of measurement
with modern SI measure equivalents.
Zupko, R.E. 1968. A Dictionary of English Weights and Measures.
A scholarly work that summarizes the history of English measuring
systems
from the Norman Conquest to the 20th century. Has extensive quotes from
original sources and modern measurements of original standards in many
cases.
Zupko, R.E. 1977. British Weights and Measures.
An update to Zupko's 1968 work, with some new data, but without many of
the original quotes in the Dictionary.
So, how does it taste? My wife has *INSISTED* that I bring it to the
hospital to be the beverage of celebration for the birth of our next
child. In fact, she greatly resents that her pregnancy means she cannot
have more than a sip of it whenever a bottle is opened. The beer is
slightly peaty (very slightly), full-bodied, a little malty, with a nice
head and all-around agreeable. There is no detectable hop aroma, and only
a light floral essence, but just a hint. The hops balance the maltiness
nicely, although as I said, the emphasis is just a bit more to the malt
side.
--
To respond via email, switch the elements of my domain.
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/bjm10/
"If there is no human nature outside social construction, no needs or capacities other than those constructed by a particular discourse, then there is no basis for social criticism and no reason for protest or rebellion"
--The Nation, June 9, 1997.
Cookie Monster
bj...@edu.cornell (Bryan J. Maloney) writes:
> Francis Drake, a 16th Century English Beer
> Copyright (c) 1997 Bryan J. Maloney
> All Rights Reserved
[ much snipped ]
>So, how does it taste? My wife has *INSISTED* that I bring it to the
Well done, Bryan. This is what advanced homebrewing can be, and I admire
you research and attention to detail, particularly the differences in
measurements (and we think the metric/US/UK conversions are confusing) and
your dispensing with the use of a thermometer.
Did you only make this once or have you tried variations? What about
the hop variety? Obviously there were no high-alpha Columbus, and
Saaz would have been as unavailable as if it were grown on Mars.
I'd be interested to see any other fruits of your efforts.
cm
--
--
CUTE PURPLE DINOSAUR = CVTE PVRPLE DINOSAVR
= C V V L D I V
= 100+ 5+ 5+ 50+ 500+ 1+ 5 = 666
Robert Pastor
I brew medieval beers, but have been off this list for awhile. I'd like
more info on this thread, if possible.
Thanks,
Bob Pastor
Cookie Monster wrote:
> bj...@edu.cornell (Bryan J. Maloney) writes:
>
> > Francis Drake, a 16th Century English Beer
> > Copyright (c) 1997 Bryan J. Maloney
> > All Rights Reserved
>
> [ much snipped ]
> >So, how does it taste? My wife has *INSISTED* that I bring it to the
>