Makng beer in the 1800's

[Beer-lord]

This is kind of cool.

[berryman]

Yes very cool. About 115-125 miles from me. Have been in that area of this state quite a few times.

[1919]

Cool! Townsends is a great channel. I watch stuff like this in case I ever fall into a time warp.

[berryman]

BL, after looking that village up, I see that place is quite close to me, last summer we must of went right by it on our way to Rochester NY, east of Buffalo NY. After watching that vid. a couple times, makes me wonder about sanitation like we do it now. Looks like not much then.....

[mashani]

BL, after looking that village up, I see that place is quite close to me, last summer we must of went right by it on our way to Rochester NY, east of Buffalo NY. After watching that vid. a couple times, makes me wonder about sanitation like we do it now. Looks like not much then.....

I always tell people that modern beer making concepts are *very* modern but nobody believes it LOL.

[bpgreen]

BL, after looking that village up, I see that place is quite close to me, last summer we must of went right by it on our way to Rochester NY, east of Buffalo NY. After watching that vid. a couple times, makes me wonder about sanitation like we do it now. Looks like not much then.....

I always tell people that modern beer making concepts are *very* modern but nobody believes it LOL.

You don't really have to go too far back before people didn't know that yeast were involved. The first version of the Reinheitsgebot didn't include yeast as one of the ingredients.

[berryman]

You don't really have to go too far back before people didn't know that yeast were involved. The first version of the Reinheitsgebot didn't include yeast as one of the ingredients.

I did see they pitched a pitcher of yeast in for what ever kind it was.. I also liked the sugar reference on maple sugar which is big around this area.

[mashani]

You don't really have to go too far back before people didn't know that yeast were involved. The first version of the Reinheitsgebot didn't include yeast as one of the ingredients.

I did see they pitched a pitcher of yeast in for what ever kind it was.. I also liked the sugar reference on maple sugar which is big around this area.

Nobody actually knew what yeast was until the mid 1800s, let alone bacteria. Before then they knew that the stuff that they skimmed from the krausen and/or the stuff left behind would make more beer and it had names that we translate now to yeast but they really didn't know what it was, basically they just thought that it was something God gave us that made beer so yeah!

I believe the first truly isolated lager yeast strain didn't get created until 1880 or there about. Until then it was always some sort of mixed culture based on whatever liked their wort conditions and would survive whatever preservation techniques they used if they preserved it (drying into a cake, or on a yeast ring, or "smears" or whatever).

[berryman]

Ok Mash I have a question for you. They didn't have Hydos. back then did they? The guy mention taking a reading. I don't think they even had a good thermometer back then. When I was a little kid making Maple syrup we would use a raw egg to when it would float for gravity. I still use that deal sometimes for making a brine for smoking. Of course now use a refractometer on making maple syrup.

[The_Professor]

For perspective, when one peruses something like Peter Damerow's Sumerian Beer which covers in 3 sections 3200-3000BC, 600 years later mid 3rd millennium BC, and the end of the 3rd millennium BC (3rd millennium = 3000-2001 BC) with "the Hymn To Ninkasi" being from c. 1800 BC, the beer being made in the 1800s is exactly like the beer we make today.

[mashani]

Ok Mash I have a question for you. They didn't have Hydos. back then did they? The guy mention taking a reading. I don't think they even had a good thermometer back then. When I was a little kid making Maple syrup we would use a raw egg to when it would float for gravity. I still use that deal sometimes for making a brine for smoking. Of course now use a refractometer on making maple syrup.

For temperature, many just literally stuck their finger in it to see if it was cool enough to pitch the yeast, even in Elizabethan times. They COULD have used a thermometer though, they did exist. Just more crude and not something you could just go to the local store and get off the shelf.

Hydrometers are a weird little beast. They were invented in crude form in like the 1300s, but then forgotten like a lot of Arabic things (batteries, math, etc.), and then re-discovered in the renaissance. But they weren't used for brewing really until the early 1800s when they finally figured out you could use it to measure alcohol in solution. I believe it was actually mandatory for commercial brewers to use a hydrometer in England starting in the early 1800s.

So again they COULD have used one. That place would have to look at the old records and see if they took measurements. That would also tell us if they took actual temperature readings with a thermometer as they probably would have recorded that if they kept records.

This didn't usually cause issues so much anyways with cask conditioned ales, they would just put it in the cask right after the krausen fell/yeast dropped into the beer, and literally start serving it with the residual carbonation. If it wasn't done all the way, worst case it would be doing is keeping itself carbonated over time. Worst case the bung would pop out.

Some of those Elizabethan household brewers had literally a 3 day turnaround times from brewing to serving... a week would be the most.

The Professor is right though that the medieval and 1800s brewing is still much closer to what we do today then those ancient brews made with bread. I won't use the term "exactly" like he did because in the modern sense many steps were skipped, sanitation was not like today, the ideas of how to avoid HSA, DMS, [insert any other modern what you should do to make good beer thing] was non-existent in anyone's brains, yeast was not a purified culture... 11th century medieval brewers didn't use hops or the like... ya know. Things did still evolve is what I'm saying.

But even so, there were (and still are) Nordic/Eastern European brewers who baked their mash into loaves of "barley bread" and then bust them up and "sparge" them to make wort, *even today*. That is in many ways a lot like the Sumerian brewing (sort of a middle ground, best of both worlds kind of thing), except that they ferment with preserved mixed yeast cultures on yeast rings instead of just relying on spontaneous fermentation, and of course today use hops, but back a ways would have been using herbs. The baked mash gives them the complexity of specialty grain additions but with just using base malt.

[HerbMeowing]

... makes me wonder about sanitation like we do it now. Looks like not much then.....

Thought the same thing.

Guess pellicles had yet to be invented ...

[1919]

Ha! I've spent months in the fermenter.