Historical Homebrew, Part Three: I have no words...

Historical Homebrewing Part Two: Sickness Demons and Yeast

Today was supposed to be a work day for our kitchen remodel, but then the back gremlins showed up and now I stand at the new kitchen counter typing this because I cannot really sit. Probably twinged something when I moved the anvil off the kitchen counter so The Engineer could do some tiling next to the stove.

Yes really. Why, where do you keep your anvil?

Since I can't really undertake anything new, let's rejoin the Brewery of the Bearded Alewives, already in progress...

Part Two: Exorcising Our Sickness Demons

The Elizabethans were not as dirty as advertised. They bathed more often than frontier Americans (who I wager were also cleaner than reputed) and even brushed their teeth. Okay, they chewed on a sort of bushy stick, but it sort of amounted to the same thing. The Waterpik hadn't been invented yet. Unfortunately, any benefit of this brushing was somewhat undercut by their affection for raw sugar. I've read that black teeth were a status symbol and most records of her majesty recount her black teeth.

Which honestly must've hurt like holy heck.

They even had sewers... open ones for the most part, but they did have them, and we'll get more into the transit of muck from city to sea when we discuss the Worshipful Company of Plumbers (yea verily). If you want to get ahead of the class, Google "Gong Farmer" some time. Or you could just click that link.

Hint: Gong farmers don't maintain fields of east Asian percussion instruments.

All that being said, they had no idea how sickness happened, how it spread, or what caused it. As the author of my ale book said: "Alewives... would've taken your word for it if you told them that invisible sickness demons lived in the water and could only be killed by being boiled alive." Cleanliness may well have been next to Godliness, but the definition of cleanliness was as flexible and multi-defined in our time period as was the concept of Godliness.

I noted in a previous post that the idea of "They drank ale because water was unsafe" is a popular notion, put forward once more by Dr Cookson in the book I'm using. But it's a concept that is currently, finally, under fire. The easiest counter-argument is that the claim is flawed at its core for the exact reason she just mentioned: avoiding water and supplanting it with beer would imply more knowledge of disease vectors than the early modern person actually possessed.

Also, the duration and amount of boiling in ale-making is insufficient to actually kill some popular water-borne "sickness demons".

This article by medievalist Tim O'Neill will do a better job of presenting the counter-argument than What Was the Drink of Choice in Medieval Europe?  He makes a good case for water being the go-to for most Europeans... and yet, in his first sentence implies that the problem is with misinformation on the internet. I've been reading the factoid that ale was safer than water and preferred for that reason in history books, including textbooks, since I was a small child. This isn't a new idea or one of those bits of net-lore that get argued about in the fora of Straight Dope and Snopes.

Anyway, it's a great article and I'd love to talk to him about it sometime... maybe over a pint.

For whatever reason, it's indisputable that people drank enormous amounts of ale and beer. Several liters a day by many counts. We're impressed by these statistics because we think in terms of modern beers, but they got away with it because alcohol levels were so very low in early beers and carbohydrates were incredibly high by modern standards. The recipe I've been brewing has a pound and a half of oats in it, for heaven's sake.

Calorically, it's a meal in itself.

Academic arguments aside, whether it was because the local water supply was suspect or because it was the early modern equivalent of a protein shake, we can all agree that ale was the lynch pin of the early modern diet.  And whether or not the average medieval schmoe was as dirty as popular imagination would have them be (they weren't) the sanitation of the modern kitchen is vastly greater than the sanitation of the Alewife's kitchen.

Did I say "vastly"?  I meant "somewhat".  As far as you know, I decided to forego sterility for reasons of historical accuracy. Yeah... that's it.

Part III: My Yeast Can Beat Up Your Yeast

Mistake #3: Sanitation is such a Thing in modern brewing because we have a much better understanding not only of disease vectors, but also we have a much greater knowledge of what yeast is and how it works. Pathogens that cause food poisoning are one thing (and of greater concern in bottling than brewing) there are also pathogens that will just show up to eat your yeast. Also, wild yeast, which exists naturally on almost every surface, can get in the way of or inhibit the operation of cultured yeast, leading to problems, or at least unpredictability, with your brew.

Honestly, can you really sanitize a broom? Or even a wooden spoon (which is what we were using)? The God's honest truth is this: I forewent sterility in this project because sterility was an unreachable goal. Note that JoNell, quite accurately, said "sanitize" rather than "sterilize". That's because outside of a clean room in a science lab, it's all but impossible to really sterilize anything even in a modern kitchen. 

When Janet Winter commented on my Facebook wall that her husband's foray into homebrewing seemed to be more an exercise in washing dishes than it was in making beer, she put a lovely point on things. I won't define Godliness for you, but I can tell you that cleanliness looks like soap suds because I am, at the core of my being, a modern man. 

Besides, even if you do get something sterile, that stops the moment it makes contact with the air because the air itself is rife with things like wild yeast.

But we're making beer! Yeast is a Good Thing, though, right?

Yes and no.

Modern ale yeast, "Saccharomyces cerevisiae" is top-fermenting and operates best in warmer temperatures, as opposed to Lager yeast, "saccharomyces pastorianus" which is a "bottom fermenting" yeast which operates over longer periods at cooler temperatures. Top and bottom fermenting is a bit of a misnomer, frankly, and has to do with where the foam shows up as opposed to where the real action is. Both types of yeast are free-ranging, hunting down every scrap of sugar they can get their yeasty teeth into and chomping it down to turn into alcohol and carbon dioxide.



The foam that forms atop a top-fermenting beer is the stuff I was talking about in the baking post, called "barm" and though I was looking too early when JoNell posted that the next day, I knew I was in trouble when I messaged Patrick a few days later and he told me he still didn't see any barm forming at the top of my ale batch.

My yeast were failing me.

Still, I would have to wait a week for confirmation of my failure.

Special thanks once again to Patrick and JoNell Franz for not only generously offering their kitchen to host the brewing of this oatmeal-soup-which-we-will-agree-to-call-ale-in-order-to-humor-Scott, but also their generosity of spirit and wonderful good humor along the way. Would not have been the same without JoNell's play-by-play documentation.

Today's Unsolicited Endorsement: Patrick is a professional Robin Hood (yes, really) as well as the founder and president of Presenters of Living History. JoNell and Patrick bring hands-on history demonstrations into schools and organizations, giving kids a chance to make a tactile connection to history by participating in demonstrations and crafts from the renaissance through the American civil war. Aside from being two of my favorite people on the planet, they do Good Work showing kids that history is NOT BORING. You can find out more about their work at PatFranz.com.

Next: We drink!

- Scott

Historical Homebrewing Part One: Alewives like us...

Sometimes, I run out of resources and the chronicles are silent, so I end up doing things by the seat of my pants on this project. Beer-brewing was not supposed to be one of them.

After, all I had a book!

What could possibly go wrong?

I read the instructions in my book. Over and over again. I visited the local home brew store. I talked to the very knowledgeable guy who was there. When I told him what I was up to, he didn't bat an eye. Told me what to expect, gave me some advice, told me I didn't need to buy any extra gear, and sent me on my way with ingredients in hand. I read three books on the history of beer and brewing.

Then I re-read the instructions and read two books about modern home brewing and made notes on a bunch of things I didn't actually need to know, but wanted to know just in case I was wrong about what I'd need to know.

And then this happened.

Yes, it was going to be that sort of night.

My partner in crime Patrick has a partner in crime of his own, his wife JoNell. She was there to document the procedure for the edification and amusement of her friends on Facebook (and with her permission, you as well! Remember to thank her in comments.) 

It was supposed to be simple (according to the instructions, which I really did read) for Patrick and I to put together a basic, low-alcohol, late medieval ale. It would "be like liquid bread," the author assured us.

Deviations from Period Procedures: 

• Sanitation. (More on that later.)
• I make a very masculine alewife. In fact, both of us are a bit hairy about the jowls for a proper alewife.  In fact, if the ghost of particularly annoyed alewives of yore were haunting us and cursed the proceedings, I would not be at all surprised.
• Period alewives used a twig-broom known as a bessom or the branch of a broom plant (known hereabouts as 'Scotchbroom' to which I am fiercely allergic) to stir the mash. We used a wooden spoon.
• No huge copper tuns or kettles or oaken barrels were sullied in the manufacture of this small ale. My efforts were barely worth the plastic buckets and coolers that we did use.

Incidentally, when you're around theater people, mention the idea of dressing in drag very carefully or you'll end up in a dress before you can say "Milton Berle".

Welcome to the Brewery of the Bearded Alewives.

Part the First: Angus MacGyver, Patron Saint of Brewers

Mistake #1: As previously noted, I forgot to bring the kitchen scale with us and the Franzes didn't have one. As it turns out, you can weigh ingredients the way you weigh a cat: Weigh the person, weigh the person holding the cat/oats, subtract the difference. 

In all honesty, this probably had minimal impact on our results. The malt was pre-weighed by the home brew store, who also ground it for us.  We also tested our scale scheme with known-weight items like the bag of malt to be sure we could get into the correct ballpark for our weights and measures.

The oats were mostly present for flavor, so a slight deviation in weight probably didn't affect the brew much anyway.

Why yes, I did watch a lot of MacGyver as a young and impressionable child, why do you ask?  Look, if you want to read about brewing being done right and done well, there are places to find that sort of thing. Sadly, this is not going to be one of them.

The recipe was simple:

4.5 lbs of Malt

1.5 lbs of Oats

4 gallons of water

2 packets Ale yeast

2 five-gallon food-grade buckets

End of list.  How could someone as experienced at cooking pretty much every cuisine as I am screw up a recipe that simple?  

The careful observer will note that I even got to wear my own clothes! And a snazzy black Guinness apron.

And so the evening began. 

There was a bit of tumult early on as we encountered cracked and broken buckets. Patrick has tried home brewing before, but it was quite awhile ago and some of his equipment has moved all over the country to sit unused in various ports of call. Not all of it fared well.

Eventually, we discounted the idea of using the floor cleaner bucket and settled on a 5-gallon water cooler and the one food-grade bucket that had survived the moves. 

Mistake #2: This one might've been worse. The bucket substitution wouldn't have been such a big deal, but the broken one was the only bucket with graduations marked on the side for gallons. We used a pitcher that was almost a half-gallon to measure out our universal solvent.

The whole procedure takes several hours, long stretches of time are called out in the recipe as each step requires the mash (which is the term referring to the mixture that is allegedly going to magically become beer at some point) be left alone to saturate, meld, boil, sit undisturbed, settle, etcetera.  All with the aim of extracting the sugars locked in the barley, which will feed the yeast, which will make alcohol with them.

Not to blame my tools but if I had one criticism for Dr. Cookson (Author of Drinkable History) it would be to better list out the steps in the process. As it is, the recipe/procedure is shot through with jokey asides while you scour the instructions for some indication of how much water should be boiling and when it should be added can get a bit lost in the silliness.

Rather like trying to cook from one of my blog posts, come to think of it.

Through the clever use of an array of kitchen timers, we were able to keep on-track with our boiling and stirring and pouring routine...

Well... mostly.

Did I mention that my TV is only tenuously hooked to the rest of the world? It's been ages since I cut the cord, so any current television is a bit of a siren song. Honestly, between the television and the ghosts of alewives past, we probably never had a chance.

I ended up with a series of successive timers set to go off at specific intervals so that one would signal me to begin heating the water that I'd need to be boiling for the next step. I don't know how alewives did this, but for me, it was all about timers.

Sometimes, it was difficult to figure out what was going on and I think I re-read the entire book several times, trying to suss out the instructions from the asides.

Then, he asked me if I'd sanitized the spoon... crap.

Should've used a broom.

Coming tomorrow in Part Two: We tangle with the Sickness Demons

- Scott

A Yeast Affection: Say hello to my little friends...

This is Figaro.

He's not a special historical breed of cat or anything. He's pretty cool and I've had him a long time, but he's not really sure what to make of my strange hobbies. I suppose after 14 years he's seen me do stranger things than learning renaissance crafting, though if you pressed, I think he'd admit he's a bit giddy that there are now two knitters in the house.

Why am I bringing up my grumpy old cat on a story about yeast?

Because I've spent the last decade and a half trying to keep the furry little weirdo away from the stuff. Fig will move heaven and earth to get to anything yeasty. He's been known to try to drink the water we bloom the yeast in for bread dough. Beer, bread, pizza dough... he'll climb you like a tree to get at it.

You would think it was tuna the way he chases it.

Which is one of the many reasons that I was so happy when my friends Patrick and JoNell offered his kitchen and gear for my foray into beer making. They don't have a weirdo yeast-obsessed cat to contend with and brewing is all about sanitation.

Brewing beer at my place would require straining tuxedo cats out of the mash.

Since most of the ale that the Elizabethans drank was made at home, a little cat fur and a couple of miscreant children in the mix might make it more period, but I think people would object. So we're brewing a cat-less batch first time out.

Beer brewing was a fully-fledged industry by the time Elizabeth came to power, but according to Martyn Cornwell's "Beer: The Story of the Pint" (Headline Publishing, 2003) even as late as 1585, over half of the brewers in London were registered aliens.

Why?

Because hops, that's why.  Traditional English brewing happened without hops, and it happened in the home. The histories tell us that immigrants, mostly protestant refugees from the religious wars on the continent first brought hops brewing to England and it was they that drank most of the production of the breweries they set up once they got to London.

Not to be xenophobic, but we're going to take this opportunity to look into the homelives of the artisans, to step out of the workshops and saunter down the street a bit or up the stairs to enter the world of the Alewife.

The bakery and the brewery is going to overlap for us and these projects will take place simultaneously because the line between bread and brew was a fine one in the early modern world. Both were a calorically-dense cornerstone of the English diet and the ale we're attempting will be, in every sense, liquid bread.

Early modern humans consumed mind-boggling quantities of brew, with estimates ranging from two liters per person, per day, to four for a male and one for a child. Reasons given are still dominated by the "Water was unsafe" school, though that is teetering a bit.

Whatever the case, once you understand the rates of consumption, you begin to wonder if people were loaded day and night. The answer is a low-alcohol, calorie-dense, liquid bread.

In search of a beer you can drink all day without turning into a complete sot (an artisan has to earn a living, you know) led me to this book.

My first foray into this very simple method of brewing will be paved by a book by a fast-rising star of fermented history, Cassandra Cookson and her book "Drinkable History". The book is written in a light-hearted and far too short, but it enforces in the reader a desire to hear Professor Cookson give a lecture on pretty much anything.

Her English ale recipe is simplicity itself: Malted Barley, Oats, water, yeast.  She even outlines how to harvest your own yeast and malt your own barley, though we're going to let that project wait for another show.

My high school teachers taught me that fermentation was mankind's oldest trick, the first chemical reaction that humans learned to control.  Control, but not understand.  The brewers and bakers of the ancient world developed some very strange theories about what was going on in their brews and their bread, but it was mostly written off as supernatural until the 18th century and not really understood until the 19th century.

Yet they figured out that bread and beer were working from essentially the same process, and that the foam atop a vat of brewing beer could leaven bread as well as the funk that occurred naturally on the skins of apples.

Which is the latest example in my new presentation, tentatively titled, Our Ancestors Were More Observant than Us.  And so is my cat.

Later, we brew. In the meantime, like the artisans of old, I need to head off to work.

- Scott