Category: Medieval Brews

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Passing Times With Good Company

And apologies to Henry the Eighth. (For the uninitiated, the title of this post refers to a drinking song written by the Corpulent King in his younger days, and wildly popular at many a RennFest.)

The Mead Hall

This weekend, I had the great joy of attending an overnight SCA event. This particular event, the Red Mountain Mead Hall hosted by the Shire of Isenfir, started as a mostly brewing-focused event. It has added a fair bit of dance and other artistic happenings, as well as becoming known for its delicious (and sizable!) feasts.

For me, the event was a chance to spend quality time with fellow brewers I don’t get to see often–the event is located near the geographic center of the Kingdom, so attracts people from all over. I also took it upon myself to clear a little clutter from my cellar.

A Miscellany of Bottles

Every brewer, with time, tends to collect a group of bottles of various batches. Makers of meads and wines are particularly bad in this regard. These bottles will usually, for one of a variety of reasons, be un-labeled. (Many of my batches simply don’t get labels; other times, they fall off, or fade.) I brought about twenty bottles, planning on opening them all and doing a “tasting and critique” party.

I generally leave my ego at the door when my brews are being tasted, the more so when I’m not sure what’s going to come out of the bottle. Things ranged from a growler (one of a set of four) that has been sitting full and undisturbed for going on four years, through a variety of unlabeled things of various colors, to the single remaining bottle of a batch of Acerglyn (Maple Mead) that I put together something over a decade ago.

Often Surprising Results

The beverages that emerged from the bottles were almost entirely unexpected. Several were given a resounding “meh.” Some were really good. And only one, really, was bad as such.

The best (and first) surprise was the growler. I had completely forgotten what I had bottled up; the rubber gasket was completely dried out and cracked, and I was certain that the contents would be thoroughly oxidized, if not vinegar. Instead, what poured out was an extremely delightful apple cider. Huge apple on the nose, lovely flavor, and not bone-sucking dry on the finish. The only real complaint was a brief period of “dead space” towards the middle, where the cider was trying to decide what to do next. Clarity was magnificent. All in all, quite lovely, and I’m glad I’ve still got three growlers of it.

The worst surprise, on the other hand, was the “bad” one. The liquid was a clear golden yellow. Decent legs. No sediment. But the aroma was… off, somehow. And the taste–wow.  After pondering just what I had bottled, and what exactly happened to it, it struck me: this was a batch I had made for an acquaintance on something of a dare. Tomato wine. Once I had placed it, the flavor was quite clear (and lingering). From a purely technical standpoint, there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. It just… well, it sucked.

Other samples included a bottle of chocolate mead (not ready yet–I’m led to believe that they can take years for the bitterness to mature out), a pair of bottles of Perry (which I brought because I know that’s a good batch), and a red wine that didn’t quite reach its full potential (not bad, but also not great). There were others, but they’re not really all that memorable.

The Exciting Part of the Evening, Sort Of

Having done a fair bit of drinking, obviously no one was in a hurry to drive on home. (Particularly me, as it’s about a 3 hour trip from home.) So we took advantage of the on-site cabins, and racked out for the night.

But it must be mentioned that the cabins are unheated, and while they’re not “open-air,” there are sizable gaps in the walls. And the low for the night was 26 degrees F (that’s negative 3 degrees Centigrade, if you’re doing the math). Indeed, the whole day was quite chilly outside. Fortunately, the Great Hall itself has a large fireplace that was kept roaring all day.

Events like that are when having a Russian persona shows its worth. I was layered up quite nicely (wool socks under the leg wraps; two pair of pants; three shirts–two linen, one wool; a nalbound hood and mantle, and a nalbound hat). Indeed, I had to step out of the hall on several occasions to cool off.

And for sleeping, I had a cold-weather sleeping bag, with a separate fleece liner. Those were atop a wool blanket on doubled mattresses on the bunk, with a small (fake) fur under my head, using my “mundane” clothes rolled up nicely as a pillow. I had another blanket over the top of me, was wearing a T-shirt, long underwear, and socks, and had my hat on my head.

Once again, I found myself almost too warm, and was letting my arms alternate “chilling” in the open air to moderate my temperature. But in the end, I survived, and was relatively comfortable–certainly more so than several of the others attending the event.

Upcoming Brew Day

My next Brew Day will involve a little less mead, and a bit more beer. My friend Cormacc wants to recreate a popular Viking’s Blod mead he’s done in the past; I plan of making an Amber Lager, since the cellar has reached the right temperature range. I’ve also got the makings for a Kolsch-style beer, but that may wait for December (or, possibly, for Spring).

I’ve also got a gaggle of small mead batches that I can tend; assuming I can clear out another fermenter, I may even start a batch of Acerglyn. (Or possibly Berry Melomel. Or something along those lines.) And I’ve a batch of Dark Mild Ale that I have to decide whether to bottle or keg. And then there’s plating up the “wild”/feral yeast I collected from my honey.

But those are topics for next time…

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To Beor or not to Beor

In researching more about medieval drinking vessels, I’ve backed into a thorny issue: what, exactly, was beor/bjorr,  as written about in various Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon sources?

The Background

I’ve been looking at more old drinking vessels, with the intent of trying to reproduce them for my Etsy shop. Again, with some of them, I was struck by their size–specifically, how oddly small many of them are. I have previously mentioned the Jelling Cup, at two inches in height. There are also “Sutton Hoo bottles” (pictured below). They also clock in at two inches or less.

Sutton Hoo bottles
Sutton Hoo bottles; the originals are bottom center.

Even the somewhat larger bottles from Sutton Hoo are “only” five or so inches:Large Sutton Hoo bottle

There was commentary online to the effect that whatever they were drinking from these vessels, it was likely strong. But what, pray tell, was it?

Strong Drink

A minute or two of playing with Google led me to a mention of there being debate in academic circles as to the nature of a particular “Viking drink,” generally described as strong, sweet, and rarer/more valuable than other drinks.

I’ll spare the entirety of the argument (one of the most cogent discussions I’ve found is this paper, by Christine Fell); in short, most sources we have in Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon describe four types of alcoholic drink: win (wine), mjod (mead), ealu (ale), and beor/bjorr.  What is beor? Most modern translations take the easy way out, and gloss it to beer, but that doesn’t seem right.

These writings are, almost without exception, from before the ale/beer distinction came about. (These are texts from before 1200AD; the English didn’t start differentiating until the 1400’s or so.) Pretty much everything at the time would have been what we’d classify as “ale.”

Also, a good case can be made that beor wasn’t grain-based, which again rules out beer.  So, it’s not wine, it’s not mead, it’s not ale, and it’s not beer… What could it be?  A plausible hypothesis is cider–or, at least, something cider-like. Apparently, in Normandy the word “bere” is used for cider. Depending on the provenance of the word, there’s a certain something there.

Beor’s Not Quite Cider

But even going with cider, some hurdles appear. Anglo-Saxon, at least, has a term for cider (aepplewin). And beor appears to have been sweetened (read Fell’s tract, above, for the reasoning). Perhaps a backsweetened cider? Again, plausible…

I certainly don’t claim to have the answers–I’ve only been devoting a little spare time to the topic for the last several days, really. I’m fine with it being a “strong, backsweetened fermented juice drink,” as far as that gets us. A thought did strike me that they could have “jacked” (freeze-distilled) a fruit drink, then sweetened it with honey to make it more palatable. I’m tempted to say we’d have some description somewhere of the process, though, and we don’t.

So where does that leave us?  As with so many things involved in period brewing, with more questions than answers. What are your thoughts on beor, readers? Let’s discuss them in the comments1

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Brew Day, June 2018 – Hopleaf Mead

This month saw the brewing of a hopleaf mead. This is rather a strange-seeming batch, and a bit of an experiment, just to see if some 15th-century Venetians knew what they were talking about. (I opted not to make anything overly complex because it’s been in the low 90’s and humid. Also, we’ve been getting pavilions ready for Pennsic outside, which is hot, sweaty, and tiring. Firing up a burner was definitely counter-indicated.)

The hopleaf mead experiment stems from a passage in a Russian book on brewing. In it, a professor writing the foreword cites Ambrosio Contarini, part of the Venetian Embassy to the Shah of Iran from 1472-1475. On the trip back from Iran, Contarini and company stopped for about six months in Moscow. Part of the story of his travels reads thus:

They have no wine of any kind, but drink a beverage made of honey and the leaves of the hop, which is certainly not a bad drink, especially when aged.

The “leaves of the hop” (hopleaf) really caught my attention. It reads that way in both Russian (“с листьями хмеля“) and, once I found it, the original Italian (“con le foglie del bruscandolo“).  My first thought was, certainly they don’t mean hop leaves? Contarini has to be confused about what part of hops gets used. I mean, the cones are green, and somewhat leaflike.

Intrigued, I dug a little further. “Bruscandolo” is Venetian dialect for hops (Google says that “normal” Italian would be “luppolo”; and a medieval Italian-English Herbal Dictionary even went with “lupuli“). Nowadays, it apparently means the hop shoots or tips, which can be treated like asparagus shoots or fern shoots, and cooked up in a variety of ways. (I’ll have to try Risotto di Bruscandolo, or Bruschetta Bruscandolo, next spring.) But I found another reference, again to a Venetian in period:

The principal imports of England are spices, sugars, and all sorts of fruit from Spain and France, wine, oil, and what they call hops (obloni), the flower of the hop plant, and the “bruscandoli,” needed for the brewing of beer…

This is from an English translation of some diplomatic letters from Giacomo Soranzo, the Venetian Ambassador to France. Now we’ve got several hop references and names; just to confuse matters, Soranzo describes “hops” and “bruscandolo.” Fortunately, he specifies “hops” as “the flower of the hop plant.”

Given all of these varying terms and such, until and unless I find anything different, I’m going with the notion that “hops” (or “obloni“, and maybe “lupuli” as well) are references to the hop flowers/cones, and “bruscandolo” is a reference to the plant as a whole. As such, it makes some sense to assume that Contarini meant the actual leaves. What one would get from them, I have no idea; all of the bittering oils are found in the cones. Hopleaf might (might) give you some tannins. There’s bound to be some natural yeast there, as well. But experimenting is in order.

I brewed this up as a 1-gallon batch of sweet mead, Cascade Hops, used in Hopleaf Meadand put three full-sized, mature hop leaves into primary, lacking any indication as to how much to use. I rinsed the leaves, just to ensure there weren’t any spiders, insects, aphids, or the like. The particular leaves I used were from one of my Cascade mounds, for the reason of ease of availability–I’d have had to go across the field to get Magnums or Willamettes, and did I mention it’s been hot?

Having acquired the leaves, it was time to assemble the rest of the recipe. I’ve got about 20 pounds of Clover honey left over from a previous meadmaking spree. Three pounds or so into a gallon batch makes for a decently sweet mead. I’d thought about using K1V-1116, but didn’t have any on hand, so I opted to go with EC-1118 instead. They’ve got similar alcohol tolerances, and both ferment out cleanly. Also, after pondering things, K1V is a “killer” strain–it kills off other yeasts in solution with it. If the hopleaf is to add anything of a yeasty nature to the brew, going with EC-1118 will allow that to come out. The rest of the batch is pretty standard, with GoFerm and Fermaid O staggered nutrient additions.

Hopleaf Mead
Hopleaf Mead, prior to adding the final leaf. It also got diluted by almost half.

Hopleaf Mead (this is recipe #166 in my Little Black Book)

3.1 pounds of Clover Honey
1 packet Lalvin EC-1118 yeast
4.53 grams Fermaid-O (split into four additions, at 24, 48, and 72 hours, and on day 7)
2.5 grams GoFerm nutrient
3 mature Cascade hop leaves, rinsed

OG: 1.126

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Brew Day, May 2018: Two brews, one experiment

Beer and a little watermelon while brewing

The brewday for this month went of well, with the weather finally deciding to cooperate after a solid week of rain. Downtown flooded, but as we’re on a hill, with a slope away from the house in all directions, we didn’t get any of that. There was a little water seepage in the cellar, but the full extent was a little bit of mud.

Two batches were brewed: a Pils for my friend Dominick, based on a Stella Artois clone, and an experiment for myself, which I’ll get to in a moment. The pils I believe is going to be nice, if not exactly “to style.” I don’t have a setup right now to truly lager, but I can ferment fairly cool in the cellar. It was a simple grain bill, with 9.5 pounds of Pilsner malt. The hops were Saaz, added at the beginning, and with 5 minutes to go in the boil (1.5 ounces and .5 ounces, respectively). Dominick picked out WLP830, German Lager yeast. Volumes came out decently, and the gravity ended at about 1.046; I think it’ll be about 4.5% ABV, and the color should be straw gold. The hope is to have it ready for Pennsic.

The other batch was, as I mentioned, a bit of an experiment. The recipe was a riff off of my “scaled” Braunschweig Stadtmumme recipe: Munich and Vienna malts, with a healthy dose of German hops. I went for the higher-Alpha Herkules, rather than Tettnang, partly because I wanted something with some bittering to balance the Munich, and partly because I wanted to try them out. Nottingham yeast, to keep things simple. (The full recipe will be below.)

The crux of the “experiment” part, though, was the mash. Rather than my typical infusion/batch-sparge style, I went with a direct-fired mash, starting everything (grains and water together) at room temperature. This, again, is based on my reading of the Mumme recipes. They didn’t infuse, nor did they decoct; rather, they heated the mash for an hour and a quarter. That timeframe confused me at first, because it almost sounded like they were “simply” mashing for 75 minutes. But the more I thought about it, the more I figured that a properly-shaped vessel, with a strong enough fire under it, would probably get the volumes given in the original recipe (2172 pounds of grain, with “enough” water) up to the right temperatures in about that amount of time.

I went with 16 pounds of grain overall, and water to bring the overall volume up to about 9.75 gallons (about 34 quarts, give or take). With a pretty low flame on my propane burner, it took me about an hour–near enough to the original time–to get to my target mash temperature of 152 degrees F.  I stirred constantly, to try to prevent any scorching, but still got a small amount (maybe 4 square inches of “scorch”).

My reasoning for starting from room temperature is that they didn’t specify any mash steps, and didn’t indicate adding the malt to hot water. The ramp up from ~70 degrees F progressively all the way to ~152 F took the mash through all of the intermediate steps–liquefaction, acid rest, protein rest, glucan, then saccharification. Rather than discrete steps, they “slid” up through the entire scale.

Once I had the mash at temp, I turned off the burner, and a friend and I transferred the mash to my “normal” mash tun (an Igloo cooler, with a false bottom). I let it sit another 20 minutes, partly to complete whatever conversion it was going to do, and partly to let the grain bed settle somewhat. Then I ran off the wort, using a large bowl to recirculate the first gallon or so.

My yield pre-boil was a little lower than I might have liked, netting about 6.5 gallons; while the kettle I fired the mash in could have held more, the cooler was about at its limit. (I either need to make the beer “smaller,” with less grain, or find a bigger mash tun.) Otherwise, everything went off without a hitch. The batch is currently happily fermenting in my cellar, and I’ll have to wait until next month to see how things have gone.

Fermented beer and leesOne other “achievement” for today was kegging last month’s batch. It turned out quite nicely, as a sort of “lawn-mower beer.” Pale golden, light in body, and astoundingly clear. In fact, here’s a picture of the last few inches of beer in the fermenter, with the sediment clearly visible through it. I think this will be a lovely Pennsic beer, nice and crisp and thirst-quenching.

This month’s recipe, with ingredient links to MoreBeer:

Closer to Stadtmumme

11 pounds of Munich Malt
5 pounds of Goldpils Vienna Malt
1.5 ounces of Herkules leaf hops (11.3% Alpha, first wort hops)
1 Whirlfloc tablet (15 minutes in the boil)
1.5 ounces of Herkules leaf hops (11.3% Alpha, 10 minutes in the boil)
1 packet Nottingham dry yeast

Direct-fire the mash from room temp up to ~152 degrees, over the course of an hour. Initial boil volume ~6.5 gallons. Boil 1 hour. Final volume, 5 gallons. Initial Gravity: 1.073.

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Three Beers from Brunswick

In trying to track down my “Holy Grail” of a pre-1600 Einbecker Bier, I stumbled across a mention of another of my favorite period beers: the Braunschweiger (Brunswick) Mumme. This reference was in “Hochtnutzbar und Bewährte Edle Bierbrau-Kunst”, by David Kellner, printed in Leipzig in 1690. While this is a bit post-period for my purposes, I’m confident enough to say that it’s “close enough” for horse-trading. Unlike Einbeck, Brunswick maintained a continuous brewing tradition, which inclines me to think that it was less likely to change significantly. (The brewing of Einbecker Bier moved to Munich after the 30 Years’ War, and there it evolved into today’s Bock.)

Kellner praises Mumme for its “exquisite strength, lovely taste, and thick, brown, beautiful color.” He also describes how it is carried far and wide over land and sea, for which the Braunschweiger brewers have created “Schiff-Mumme,” or Ship-Mumme. For their own usage within the town, they have a version called “Stadt-Mumme,” or City-Mumme; lastly, they make “Erndtbier,” or Harvest Beer, to sell to the peasants at harvest-time.

The description of what goes in to the various Brunswick Mummes is as follows:

Take two Braunschweiger wispels of quite well-washed and dried barley-malt, together with sufficient water for , and cook it for five quarters of an hour, scoop it into a vat and let it stand a little, then again it goes into the pan (but only the broth, without the malt), and once again for three hours with 15 himpen of good Country-Hops therein cook well. After this they cool in a vat, and allow them to be fermented adequately before they place it in barrels and bring it into the cellar, which afterwards, when it has sufficiently fermented and separated from the yeast, it will be tapped in the cellar and sent away. From this they receive commonly four half-barrels of Mumme.

The common City-Mumme, to be drunk quickly, take the same amount barley-malt, only 4 himpen of hops, and proceed as with the previous one. But if it is supposed to lie long, take 10 maß of hops to it, and put the brew in seven barrels.

For their Harvest-Beer they take two wispels of barley malt, 12 maß of hops, cook them with enough water for nine barrels of beer, in the same way as before, and clear it up, then they seal up the barrels, and sell it to the peasants at harvest-time.

First, let’s do an analysis of the brewing technique. It’s obviously different than the Berliner Beer process I’ve documented, particularly in that it assumes pre-malted grain. Judging from the above, I would guess that the “five quarters of an hour” portion is the mash, and it takes that long to bring everything up to temp, running it up from room temperature. It would obviously go through each stage of the various rests–liquiefaction, acid, protein, et cetera. I would have to run experiments (or dig up information on specific mass and heat absorption) to see if they’d get up to a good mashing temp in that amount of time.

Once they’ve got their “cooked mash,” they let it sit for a while, probably finishing whatever conversion is going to happen, before returning the liquid to the kettle. They then perform a three hour boil. I shudder to imagine how much fuel that must have taken. After the boil, they cool the wort, then perform what appears to be an open fermentation, before casking the beer.

One point of interest to me is that they’re using the same grain bill for these beers, “adjusting” them by varying the hopping rate and the output volume. It’s not especially significant, other than to note that modern homebrewers go the opposite route: we aim for a consistent output volume (typically 5 gallons), and adjust the grain bill and hops to meet that.

Another point to make here is that this helps dispel the notion of “brewing being mostly done in the home, for personal use.” They would need two vessels large enough to hold over a ton of sodden grain, plus the additional mash liquid. I’ve heard of ways cities got around this (which I will put in a different post), but this is obviously not “homebrewing” in any real sense of the word.

That being said, the next thing to do is to get the measurements into something usable to us. For definitions of the different measures, and for lack of something better at the moment, I’m using the Vollstaendiges Handbuch der Muenzen, Maße und Gewichte aller Länder der Erde, by Johann F. Krüger, which dates from 1803 (Google Books edition). Here’s what we’ve got:

  • 1 Braunschweiger Wispel is 329.1 gallons
  • 1 Himpen is 1/40 of a Wispel, or 8.23 gallons
  • 1 Fass, or barrel, of Mumme is 95.95 gallons (for the curious, 1 Fass of Bier is 103.62 gallons; I’m not sure why the difference)

Those are, where available, the Brunswick measurements (as for the Wispel). Failing that, I’m using the Saxony versions, unless I can reason my way into something different. The Duchy of Brunswick/Braunschweig was part of the Kingdom of Saxony, when it wasn’t independent–but that’s more history than I want to go into here. (Maybe I’ll go over it a bit in its own post, some day.)

From my own empirical observations, I get about 3.3 pounds of barley malt per gallon. The hops are problematic, as we don’t know for sure how they were packed. Are they using hop bales? “Trod” hop pockets/sacks (as used in Victorian England)? Loose hops? I’m going to assume some form of tightly packed (bales or pockets), and use that as an upper bound. Two sources (Stewart and Priest’s Handbook of Brewing, and Hornsey’s Brewing) give me bale and pocket volumes and weights of .83 to 1.25 pounds per gallon and 1.02 pounds per gallon, respectively. So, roughly 1 pound per gallon should work as a rough maximum.

Then there’s the water. “Enough” water can be difficult to estimate, but with a brewing calculator, we’ve got the information to figure it all out. I don’t have an analysis of medieval Brunswick water available to me, but it was likely well-water, and probably of moderate hardness. This would tend to promote somewhat darker beers than otherwise.

Anyway, if we plug in the numbers, the raw recipes look something like this:

Schiff-Mumme
2172.06 pounds of barley malt
123.45 pounds of hops
Final volume 191.9 gallons

Stadt-Mumme
2172.06 pounds of malt
32.92 pounds of hops, plus 2.64 pounds for dry-hopping
Final volume 671.65 gallons

Erndte-Bier
2172.06 pounds of malt
3 pounds of hops
Final volume 863.55 gallons

Those are some big beers!  My calculations tell me that the Schiff-Mumme would need something north of 285 gallons pre-boil, and significantly more than that for the mash (considering the grain will absorb some). It also gives me an OG of 1.288, assuming 70% efficiency–which is likely optimistic. IBUs would depend largely on the hops being used; assuming something with about 3% AA, you’re looking at about 79-80 IBUs.  If they were using stronger hops, it would quickly bump up towards the (theoretical) 100 IBU maximum, but given that OG, you’d need some hefty bittering to balance it! The color, even if you assume something on the order of a modern Pale Ale malt, comes out roughly 20 SRM, which looks like a nice brown, darker than a Newcastle, say, but not as dark as a Dunkel.

The Stadt-Mumme needs about a thousand gallons of wort pre-boil. I’m seeing an OG of 1.078, with 40-ish IBUs. The color is significantly lighter, coming in at about 5 SRM, using Pale Ale malt.  And the Erndte-Bier needs 1285 gallons of wort pre-boil, clocks in at about 1.050, 8-9 IBUs, and about 4 SRM, or the same color as the Pale Ale malt.

But, as I mentioned, no homebrewer these days has the equipment to mash a ton of grain at a time. (If you do–please contact me; I’d like to talk.)  So, to make it work, we have to scale things down. Here’s what I come up with, to make 5 gallon batches of each:

Schiff-Mumme
56.47 pounds of grain
3.2 pounds of hops
Mash with 36 quarts of water

Stadt-Mumme
16.07 pounds of grain
3.9 ounces of hops, plus .3 ounces for dry-hop
Mash with 37 quarts of water

Erndte-Bier
12.6 pounds of grain
.25 ounces of hops
Mash with 38 quarts of water

I’m not sure the average homebrewer would be able to brew up a Brunswick Schiff-Mumme on typical equipment. Not all-grain, certainly; although the adventurous could probably come up with a usable extract recipe. The Stadt-Mumme looks like a hoppy Oktoberfest, in just about everything except color. Playing with the grain bill, to move it away from just the base malt, would make for a really tasty beer. And the Erndte-Bier, well–it looks okay, if a bit strong, for quenching the thirst and providing some extra calories on a long workday outside.

In all of this, I’ve avoided mentioning what yeast is used. I haven’t seen any useful analyses that would point in one direction or another, and certainly no actual cultures from the time. I’d go with something German, or at least Continental, if possible; if it had a good alcohol tolerance, so much the better. The Schiff-Mumme, after all, is strong enough that even a Champagne yeast would have a hard time drying it out. An Alt yeast might work for the other two, but really, you should experiment and decide what you like best. I can imagine a California Ale/Chico/1056 batch of Stadt-Mumme being tasty, with the right hops.

I hope this has inspired you to brew a batch of Brunswick Beer! If you try any of these recipes, please let me know, either via email or in the comments!

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Working Up To Bockbier

I will, one day, brew the full version of my proposed Einbecker Bier (the “original” Bockbier). That day, however, was not today.

Today’s Brew Day, on Saturday as opposed to the normal Sunday due to outside scheduling conflicts, was playing around a bit with the bones of the basic recipe (which can be found in another post–as soon as I get it written and published). I kept the 2/3 barley, 1/3 wheat grist, but scaled it back from a 1.078 SG to a planned mid-1.050’s–and then hit 1.068 anyway. This should bring the ABV down from about 7.5% to a more quaffable not quite 6%. I also stepped away from the Munich malt in favor of Vienna, which should give a breadier maltiness. (In my opinion, Munich can almost get overwhelming when used in large percentages–almost a chewy meatiness, if you will. It’s not bad, but generally needs to be either less than 100% of the malt bill, or hit with a large dose of hops). It also dialed the color back from garnet-amber to somewhere in the gold range, where the original Bockbier was (described in period as “golden”–and more detail will be in the afore-mentioned post).

Low-tech Brew Rig, starting out on Almost Bockbier Brew Day
My trusty, somewhat rusty, Brew Rig, ready to start heating strike water.

I’ve also fooled around with the hop schedule: where the original was all bittering hops all the time, I’m doing FWH and some late hops. This should add a bit of hop complexity, even though it’s still a single-hop beer. It’s all Tettnang whole-leaf hops, because I’ve got a bunch of them waiting to be used. (As of this writing, they’re harder to get hold of as whole-leaf; here’s a link to some Tett pellets.)

Lastly, I went with White Labs San Francisco Lager yeast. This choice was made to cover a number of issues. First and second, the temps in my cellar have been fluctuating around the low 50’s; too warm for most lagers, but too cold for most ales-and I want this to be more lager-like, which pretty much means Kolsch yeast or San Fran. Third, given the weather has finally turned, everyone is brewing this weekend, and the yeast selection at my LHBS was pretty well decimated. None of my first, second, or third yeast choices were available, so here we are.

As things are wont to do, technical snags abounded. My first propane tank ran out while I was heating the sparge water; when I unscrewed the regulator, its O-ring broke. After quickly scrambling and scrounging out all of the other suitable propane hoses I’ve got, I determined that none of them had functional O-rings. A trip to the hardware store later, and my channel-lock pliers had wandered off–making connecting my second propane tank complex.

But, all things considered, it was a good day. The weather was nice, beer was brewed, and no one was killed in the making of today.

The recipe, for the curious. This is #164, in my Little Black Book.

Almost Bockbier
9 pounds Vienna Malt
3 pounds Wheat Malt
2 ounces Tettnang leaf hops (3.7% AA, FWH)
1 tablet Whirlfloc (15 min. in boil)
1 ounce Tettnang leaf hops (3.7% AA, 10 minutes in boil)
1 packet WLP-810 San Francisco Lager Yeast

Mash at 156 degrees F.  Sparge to 8 gallons pre-boil.  Boil for one hour. OG: 1.068, 5.5 gallons into the fermenter. Ferment at “cellar temps” (currently upper 50’s F).
(Brewed 14 April 2018)

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Fourteen Steps for Brewing Medieval Beer

While sorting through stacks of dusty, old German books, looking for beer recipes that might date to pre-1600, or hints as to where they may be, I stumbled across an interesting series of books: the Oeconomia, oder Hausbuch. They were put into publication beginning in 1563 by Johannes Coler, a German Protestant priest who lived from 1566-1639. He lived in various parts of what is now Germany, including Frankfurt and Parchim, but spent a significant part of his early life in Berlin. Coler’s father, the Provost of Berlin, was the Lutheran theologian Jakob Coler; Jakob authored the books, but was in poor health by 1600, and his son had them printed on Jakob’s behalf.

The topic of the books was a popular one at the time: Household Maintenance. This ran the gauntlet from keeping and maintaining the gardens, hunting, cooking, finances, etc. But the most important chapter, for my purposes, was Chapter 20 of the Second Book. This chapter was entitled: On Brewing. Here’s what it looks like:

One page of the German beer brewing text

To be sure, it’s only one brewing method (“how we do things here in Berlin”), but it’s better than most of the other stuff I’ve seen, which includes more than a little bit of guesswork.  And what’s better, it’s all recognizable! This is all stuff that has equivalents in modern brewing (mostly).  Let’s break it down, with my translation (slightly tweaked for readability, and modern language):

  1. Pour the barley into a butt, and leave it to soak there for three days and nights (in winter, four is as well).
  2. Pour the barley onto a platform, raised into a heap, until it begins to germinate or shoot.
  3. Stir it frequently, separating the grains from each other, until there is a small sprout at its tip.
  4. When enough of it has sprouted, separate the grains from each other, and dry it in the stove-room, in the sun, or in a drying-oven.
  5. Grind the malt coarsely, so that the meal is well-hulled.
  6. In a pot, bring water to “seething;” put the milled malt into the butt, and pour the hot water over it, and stir it together.
  7. Scoop the mash from the butt into the kettle, and stir it well so that it does not burn. If the malt is burned, the beer will taste burnt, as well.
  8. Put wood laths alongside each other in the butt, and pack around them tightly with straw to strain the malt out from the liquid. (The butt needs to have a tap in front.)
  9. Pour the cooked malt into the butt, on the straw, and open the tap, collecting the liquid in another butt. If there is a lot of malt, heat another kettle of water, and pour it onto the grain. (If you want good beer, you pour less water; if you want a lot of beer, but lower quality, you pour a lot of water.)
    The second page of the German beer brewing text
  10. Once you have collected the runoff, pour a little into the kettle, so that it is about one-third full. Add hops–if the beer is going to store for a long time, you need a little more hops; if it is going to be drunk quickly, you need less. Stir the hops in, and bring the liquid to a boil. (The boil duration is as long as you think necessary, which is learned by experience and taste).
  11. When the boil has gone long enough, you add the rest of the liquid to fill the kettle, and bring the whole volume to a boil (without stirring).
  12. After the boil, place a large basket over a butt, and scoop the beer into the butt, straining the hops out in the basket. (If you are making a small beer, re-use these hops in it, straining them out after the boil again.)
  13. Let the beer cool to lukewarm, then add an adequate amount of yeast: more yeast if there is more beer, but less yeast for a smaller volume.
  14. Let the beer ferment for one to three days (or eight days for a Lager Beer), then remove the yeast from the top, and pour the beer into a cask. If it will be drunk soon, let it sit for eight days to clear and carbonate. If it is a Lager Beer, let it sit for longer. Afterwards, tap the cask and drink.

The third page of the German beer brewing text.

That seems like a lot to process, I know, but it’s really not so bad once you unpack what Johann says. At its heart, there are three parts to this.

First, steps one through five take you from raw grain to ground malt. There are a pair of surprises here. The most obvious one is that classically, we’ve thought that brewers purchased “finished” malt from maltsters. According to this, that wasn’t the case, at least in some areas–and if there was a part of the world I’d have bet there were professional maltsters in period, it would have been Germany.

But the really interesting thing to me is the drying of the malt. The most common “thought-experiment” description of medieval beer says it would have tasted smoky, from being dried over wood. Here we have a choice of three methods to dry the malt: “in the stove-room, in the sun, or in a drying-oven.” The drying-oven sounds to me like what we’d call a kiln. While I have issues with the notion that all kilns inherently smoked the malt, I’ll grant that it’s possible.

Drying malt “in the sun,” however, sounds like you’re creating what I’ve seen referred to as “wind-malt.” (I’ll call it “sun-malt,” from here out.) Basically, air-dried. And “in the stove-room” sounds to me like the equivalent of “dry it in a warm, dry place.” While I can come up with a way for the “stove-room” to smoke the malt, however slightly, I can’t really picture sun-malt having any smoke at all. And either of these two would give you an extremely pale malt–easily as pale as the palest of modern ale malts. I’d say at most, you’re probably looking at between 2.5 and 3.5 degrees Lovibond.

Second, from six to about thirteen, you’re taking your malt and brewing beer. Again, there are a few interesting points. First, the “seething” water used in the mash. The German word used is “sieden,” which nowadays can translate as “to boil.” I submit to you, however, that the Berliners knew what they were doing, and knew that if the mash steeped too hot, you wouldn’t get good wort. (Modern science tells us that the malt conversion enzymes denature above about 160 degrees Fahrenheit.) Running the numbers through my brewing calculators, in order to cool a volume of boiling water to mash temperature, you’ve got to have so much grain that your mash wouldn’t work.

If, however, you bring your strike-water to a bit below boiling–seething, or (as the English have so poetically put it) “smiling”–your mash temperature will tend to even out in the 152 to 156 degree range, given a number of other variables. This is perfect mashing temperatures. (William Harrison, in his 1577 Description of England, calls several times for seething water.)

Scooping the mash back into the kettle and presumably heating it (all the while stirring it, to prevent it from scorching) looks to me like either decocting, or heating the mash up to “mash-out” temperatures (stopping the enzymatic activity)–probably the former. If the malt is of uneven quality, this would probably help to bump up the mash efficiency a little bit. I’ll have to do a bit of experimentation here, and update this with my results.

Straining the wort out from the malt is fairly straightforward. Pouring more water onto the grain to increase the volume of beer is sensible, as well. I find it interesting that they’re actually adjusting the quality of beer by adding more or less water–the end volume doesn’t seem as important, here, so much as the quality of the end result.

Then they fill the kettle a third of the way with wort, and boil it with the hops. The odd bit here is that they’re doing a partial-boil initially, then later adding the rest of the hops. I’m not certain the purpose of this–again, some experimentation will be forthcoming. (Another interesting point is re-using the same hops to make a small beer…)

Third, step fourteen, is fermenting, racking, clarifying, and (eventually) drinking the beer. The beer goes through what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call primary fermentation: up to three days, or “eight days for a Lager Beer.” Bear in mind, “lagers” in the modern sense were unheard of, at this time. This is attested to by the notion of “removing the yeast from the top”–skimming off the krauesen, or foam. If this were an English ale, we would call this “top-cropping” the yeast.

Having removed the yeast, the beer is now poured into its serving-cask, where it will sit for eight days, or–again, the interesting bit–longer, if it is a Lager Beer.  Either way, by most modern standards, this is really quite quickly done. Most modern ales are around a month old or more, when you’re able to buy them; lagers (in the modern sense) take at least twice as long.

But they’re calling for the beer to be “clear and carbonated.” So, apparently it works… Yet again, further experimentation will need to take place.

There you have it! How to brew beer, in the style of Berlin, circa 1596. Great! But what’s the recipe? Well, for that, you’ll have to wait for my next post. What do you think? Please comment below…

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Some observations on barley

The biggest problem with growing barley, I’m finding, is observing the progress. On the one hand, brewing is a hobby for the patient–it’s all “hurry up and wait,” after all. On the other hand, watching barley grow is rather like–well, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s like watching grass grow.  (Makes sense, really, since that’s exactly what it is…) At least with the hops you can see progress on a daily basis.

So, everything has germinated. The Maris Otter and Halcyon are nearing the tops of their “cages”. The Hana and Bere are a ways behind that. I’m disappointed with the germination rate I got from the Hana in the field–of the 30-40 seeds, I’ve got maybe ten sprouts. (All of the Hana in the planter came up–it’s likely a soil issue, rather than a seed issue.)  The Bere is happy both in the field and the planter, with its second set of leaves up and the third set looking not far behind.

In the meantime, with less than two weeks to go before their introduction, I’m feverishly going over, revising, and correcting my class notes for the Medieval German Beer classes.  There are three, tentatively titled: “Period German Brewing Practices,” “Medicinal German Beers,” and “A Period German Pub Crawl.”  Thus far, the corrections are primarily fixing typos, and making sure my facts line up.  Of the three, I’m happiest with the Pub Crawl; it’s entirely possible that in the future I’ll fold the Period Practices bit into that one for a “mega-class”.  I’m hoping to have some medicinal herb people in the Medicinal Beers class, and to make it more of a discussion group.

Part of the fun for the Pub Crawl was looking at the various local beer names–“brands,” if you will.  A friend of mine was commenting on the wide variety of beer names available at the local liquor superstore, and the humor value in many of them… Well, our ancestors were no different in that regard: Butterfly, Toad, Choir Finch, Mosquito Mustard, and Raving Man are among the less vulgar names.  Some of them describe the feeling, or aftereffect, of the beer: Body-blow, Rip-Head, Blow-the-Man-Down.  The Lubeck offering of “Israel” was so named because of its strength: “People strive with it as Jacob wrestled with the Angel.”  (“Israel” is from the Hebrew for “wrestles with God”.)

Surprisingly, only a few of the beers were familiar to me, in terms of historical offerings: Gose, Israel, Broihane, Alt Klaus, Joben, and Mumme. Of those, I have only ever tasted commercial Gose.  (Mumme has become non-alcoholic, while Broihane morphed into a Pilsner, apparently.  I have practically no information whatsoever on Alt Klaus or Joben.)  Bock was not mentioned as such, although it was present if you know where to look–it derived from the name of its town of origin, Einbeck.  Indeed, it was searching for information on period “Einbeckisch Bier” that led me to the sources for my classes.

I’ll try to update again, either as “teaching-day” approaches, or soon after… And, I promise, pictures of barley (and hops!) will be forthcoming before long.