BeerBorg

I stumbled upon this looking for other things. It is an analysis 19th century German lagers for the amount of lactic acid that was in them.

http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2014 ... -1886.html

To give you perspective, anywhere between 0.2 to 0.5% is the normal target range for a blended Belgian sour, it depends on what the person blending the older more sour beers and the fresher less sour beers is trying to achieve.

0.2% doesn't taste sour like say a Berliner, but you do notice it as a tart character. Many of you would likely dump any lager you brewed that hit that level considering it a "bad batch not worth drinking". But if you lived then, you'd be drinking it. Or else not drinking.

Also consider that these are lagers, which were brewed and stored on the cool side, which suppresses the lacto and brett (some Brett can get you to 0.2% easily, as can some other wild and currently "domesticated" formerly wild sacc. strains).

It is possible that some of the bugs got into the mix more during bottling/transportation, so the things got more tart then, and not necessarily while brewed/stored/lagering in the cellars. Impossible to say, but it would seem likely to me that the warmer it got the more chance something would wake up and do stuff.

None of these beers was highly bittered and they attenuated less then we get today, so the extra residual sweetness could have countered that tartness, so maybe it wasn't as apparent as it would be in a modern 80% attenuated lager.

Does anyone care?

Anybody interested in history of brewing should find it interesting, and there are more of us here then just me who are.

The entire Barkley Perkins web site is a most excellent source of brewing history including recipes for 18th and 19th century British beers.

I like brewing history though I’m not a follower but one of the great things about this forum, like many, is that we can share things like this.
We all do things differently and the sharing of ideas and how we learn from others before, us I find fascinating.

Interesting stuff...thanks for posting it!

Wow,imagine living in Europe in the 16-1700's. I guess beer was sometimes fermented in open vats where all kinds of bugs and vermin had access to.Wild yeast spores everywhere.The water around larger cities was probably polluted from animal and human waste. Geez,you had to brew high alcohol beers just to be on the safe side,by killing the bacteria. I spent a year(Army)in Germany and can't recall ever having ice in a drink(I was a Whiskey guy back then) because the water was unfit for human consumption. Yes, I missed out on some of the best Beers in the world. What little beer I did drink was PX beer flown in from the States.(Pabst,Schlitz etc.) I guess I'll have to try and catch up and drink more GOOD beer now.Cheers.

dbrowning wrote:Does anyone care?

Nope I don't care at all if you care.

Interesting reading Mashani thanks for the link.

dbrowning wrote:Does anyone care?

Yep, me.

Without some diversity of discussion here it would get boring pretty quickly.


Edit to add: RDWHAHB [emoji481]

RandyG wrote:I guess beer was sometimes fermented in open vats where all kinds of bugs and vermin had access to.Wild yeast spores everywhere.

In the Flanders region of Belgium the actual local wild things kind of formed a symbiotic relationship as such with the local brewers. Hot wort was literally put up into shallow open containers on rooftops to cool overnight, which let all sorts of wild things get into the mix, and all become part of what would end up as a blended Belgian sour one day.

As far as I know some people still do this. But Flanders is special, the local bugs make good beer. Someone tried this in my town. They didn't make good beer.

I've seen open fermenters in cobweb filled barns. And beer comes out of them too.

Geez Mash,all this talk of open fermenter,bugs etc., made me remember an unpleasant experience that happened long ago. I used to drink cheap.The cheaper the better. I drank Old Reading 16oz. returnables.Cost $3.83 a case. Well one Saturday I was working in the yard,hotter than the gates of hell. SWMBO brings me and ice cold one out. I proceed to chug it until something big glugged on down into my stomach. I was somewhat tipsy,so I continued to finish the bottle and have some more. The next day I remembered the glug and freaked out. Since then I drink all of my beverages in a glass or from plastic cups. No more hidden suprises for me....lol

RandyG wrote:Geez,you had to brew high alcohol beers just to be on the safe side,by killing the bacteria.

Just so you know, if you hit even only 2% ABV then pretty much nothing that is a human pathogen can survive the brewing process. Between the alcohol and the PH levels, the only things that can still at that point "infect" your beer don't harm people, just make the beer taste sour or funky.

That's why beer was magic and why large Elizabethan households (and I'm sure other people all over the place) brewed huge amounts of beer and drank all day long. They didn't brew their daily beer strong, they brewed it low ABV and drank it like water. Stronger beer was for special occasions. In the Elizabethan household, anyone from the family to the servants all drank the same basic table beer that was turned around weekly or even faster before it got sour or funky. IE it was consume immediately as it came out of the fermenter, there was no waiting. Waiting would just likely lead to sour/funky less pleasant to drink beer, because as an ale that was not stored cold, bugs would work faster. That said, the beer still wouldn't harm anyone when soured, it was stills safer then the water. Because "Gardyloo" and such.

During the Holy Roman Empire and similar times, (say 10th to 12th century), the abbey monks were allowed at points to consume something stupid like 7 liters of beer a day. This was all in the 2% range, they made a 2%ish beer they served not just themselves but pretty much anyone who stopped by the abbey because it was safe to drink, where the water was not.

The monks "special occasion" beer was more like 3-4%, and the strong stuff, IE 5-6% was reserved for the Abbot and his guests.

Some of that beer, IE the 2%ish stuff was 60% malted oats because they had more of that and it was cheaper. The %age of oats went down as the ABV went up, IE the Abbot beer had less oats and more Barley.

It was good to be a friend of the Abbot.

We know all this because the monks actually were literate and wrote stuff down, IE there are surviving manuscripts that show abbey plans with 3 separate breweries all connected to the bakery (because... yeast...) and general frameworks of the types of herbs and grains they used to brew in them. And in the case of the Elizabethan householders, because they put stuff like this in their journals and cookbooks, and books on how to be proper wife/matron and such.

If we had a "Like" button I would click it for the post above.

Barclay Perkins is a great resource for "ancient" recipes. I still have a bottle of a BP recipe that Leigh and I think the professor brewed in one of the Borg collaborations. (I know Leigh, should have opened it more than a year ago, but still want to give it a taste. It went in the fridge immediately when you told me)

Man, a week is a quick turn around for green beers.So ,they drank 2% beers at a week into fermentation. How long does it take from pitching to the formation of say a 2% abv.? We go for 3 weeks to get full fermentation in most cases. In essence they were consuming "grain water ",for lack of a better term. Aint it always the same? Stop in the monastery for some refreshment and receive 2% O'Douls,while the Monks are enjoying a Miller Lite,and the higher ups are having a Pliney. I wonder if that's why Lou Costello was always yelling "HEY ABBOTT". lol
Interesting info. Cheers

It takes very little time to hit 2% once active fermentation starts as long as there is enough sugar to get there and you're fermenting at "real ale" temps with a proper yeast. Consider that many of the dry strains Lallemand sells will ferment out a 1.05ish wort in 3-4 days to ~5% ABV if you pitch right and ferment in the proper "real ale" temperature range (instead of low ester suppressing ranges that Americans tend to these days), and we are talking a 1.02-1.03ish wort here, and in Elizabethan times it seems often people pitched from another beer at high krausen, IE they would scoop a bucket full of krausen from the top of a fermenting batch and pitch it into a fresh batch. So they basically were using one batch that was fermenting as a "starter" for the next.

They drank it with just the residual carbonation from fermentation and they didn't care if it was cloudy, it was really a matter of it being "food/sustenance" at that point in time.