Some friends and I have taken to brewing beer. I gotta say, I'm hooked. I enjoy beer, and not in a "Whooo! Let's get ripped off of a couple cases of Milwaukee's Best Ice" way, but in a "I really like these flavors" way. Beer is good food, and really life is too short to not experience as much of it as possible. It really only seems natural given my love of history that I would try to combine history and beer.
Luckily for me there are plenty of folks doing just that. From wonderful programs like
Kevin Cullen's Ale and Archeology sessions at
Discovery World Museum to full production run brews by places like
Dogfish Head Brewing, history is alive and well in the modern beer scene. Also luckily for me, the internet is filled with research and documentation on history and gastronomical culture. My two brewing partners, Scott and Rick, are also members of the
Trayn'd Bande group I'm a part of and have an interest in this line of though too. All avenues began pointing to producing some historic ales.
The one we chose for our first group brewing session was our of William Harrison's Description of England. This is a 1577 recipe (based on the publication of the book) and covers a household ale brewed by Harrison's wife. Now the recipe itself makes enough beer for a household, as in a crap ton. We needed to scale it down to fit into our modern equipment levels of 5 gallon (US) batches. So using math from the help of
Bob Davis's site on some historic brewing, we adjusted the grain and additive levels to the following:
11 lbs of Marris Otter Malt
1 lb of Wheat
1 lb of Oats
1 1/2 oz Cascade Hops
Pinch of Orris Root
Couple of Bay Laurel Berries
1 tsp Wheat Flour
Wyeast London Ale Yeast
Following the recipe recommendations we boiled off 3 gallon batches of water and added it to the mixture of grains. This was to steep while we set another three gallons to boil. The steep time varied a bit from cycle to cycle but ended up being about 50-60 minutes per steep. The first running didn't give us a whole lot of liquid. We really weren't expecting that though. Having all that grain, you expect a bunch of water to get sucked up.
The subsequent steeps and runnings gathered substantially more liquid as the grain was already saturated. The wort we ended up with had a nice cloudy golden color and smelled wonderful. We did a total of three runnings to get the 6 gallons we needed for the boil.
Once we had our 6 gallons we did a fourth run to gather any left over sugars the grains may have been hanging on to. The goal for this was to create a small ale. Small ales are low alcohol versions of regular ales that were consumed by all levels of society as a common drink during the 16th century. Our aim for this was to create a VERY low alcohol version that we could use at events. Here's a look at the super pale color the small ale had before boil.
We proceeded to do our hour long boils with both beers adding our additives as needed. We did use a bit of Irish moss to clarify the full version of the 1577 in the last 15 minutes of the boil. We then got the batches into the fermenters and pitched the yeast.
