George Washingtons Beer Recipe.

[dad2all5]

I found on line George Washingtons beer recipe, have done the math and come up with a five gallon recipe. His original was for 33 gallons.

4lb.-2oz. Six row barley malt
6lb. Molasses (unsulfered)
2oz. Hops
Dry ale yeast

Place milled 6 row barley in brew pot, add 6.5 gallons water. Slow heat to 175 degrees over low heat, then raise to 225 degrees. Add hops and boil for 3 hours. Strain out the mash and add the molasses. Rapid cool in ice bath or with wort cooler to a temperature below 80 degrees. Place wort in 2 LBC'S add yeast and finish like a Brew Demon recipe.

Well guys anf gals please let me know what you think about the entire recipe and ingredients, this is going to be my first non-extract recipe.

[FrozenInTime]

I could be off some but... does not one want the adjunct to be no higher than 1/3% of the grist? That looks more like the adjunct is darn near 2/3s of the grist. I'm thinking if u want to make vinegar, go buy a jug of vinegar. BUT, and this is for those that don't like my opinions, it is IMHO.


Show us the whole recipe you found online if u would be so kind.

[dad2all5]

Well here is the recipe I found on line if any of you can figure it out let me know. This is a light beer recipe so keep this in mind its the first ever light beer in history or the history of our nation.

Take a large siffer of bran hops to your taste, boil these 3 hours than strain out 30 gallons and put into a cooler put in 3 gallons molasses while the beer is scalding hot or rather draw the molasses into the cooler and strain the beer on it while boiling hot, let this stand until it is little more than blood warm then put in a quart of yeast. If the weather is very cool cover it with a blanket, let it work in the cooler for 24 hours then put it into the cask leave the bung open til it is almost done working bottle it thst day week it was brewed.

[FrozenInTime]

A while back this recipe was brought up on the old forum. I'm not sure if anyone figured out what siffer of bran hops is. What is a siffer? Bran hops? IMHO, that recipe is missing alot. Keep in mind whatever you come up with, you don't want the adjunct to be more than 1/3 the total grist bill or you will get vinegar. Molasses is an adjunct. If you want to use 6 lbs of molasses, I would do atleast 12-13 lbs of 2 row. Have you tried to do a google or bing search on siffer, or bran hops? I'm willing to bet bran hops is not really hops, but some sort of grain/hops mix? Just guessing here.

[FrozenInTime]

I'm trying to read this at the moment, give it a read and see what they come up with.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f14/george- ... ew-243695/

[dad2all5]

Thanks for the link but cant follow long posted topics my A.D.D. gets in the way. Older posts with all the other added communication just frustrate me. But sincere thanks.

[dad2all5]

I will figure this recipe out, it will take more digging into historic language and measures if for nothing else than just for the historic value of it and having a kick ass 4th of July brew. Its still just a very light beer the original recipe was used be cause of the water quality, and making this was a way to preserve water for months on end.

[FrozenInTime]

What it boils down to is they figured out what everything was. The bran was what they called common 6 row back then. They also figured it came out to 65 pounds of it boiled but the tanins had to be really bad so they added cluster hops to mellow it out. A poster called JLW made up and did a batch and it sounds like it rocked! It follows:

5 Gallon batch

10.50 lb American Two Row Pale
0.75 lb Black patent
0.60 lb Roasted barley
0.50 lb Chocolate
0.25 lb American Crystal 60L
5 tsp of molasses
Hops:
1.00 oz Chinook [12.0%] (60 min)
0.75 oz Willamette [5.5%] (20 min)
Yeast:
Dry Yeast

He suggested mashing the grains at 154.

He used WLP029 however, you could also use WLP001 or US05.

That is what I got from reading the posts, it was somewhat informing and interesting.

[dad2all5]

Where to buy all the ingredients? Midwest?

[FrozenInTime]

Them, or any online supplier. If you have an LHBS near by, they will probably have it all too. If u do decide to try that recipe, let us know how it comes out, I'm curious about it too now.

[mashani]

5 Gallon batch

10.50 lb American Two Row Pale
0.75 lb Black patent
0.60 lb Roasted barley
0.50 lb Chocolate
0.25 lb American Crystal 60L
5 tsp of molasses
Hops:
1.00 oz Chinook [12.0%] (60 min)
0.75 oz Willamette [5.5%] (20 min)
Yeast:
Dry Yeast

He suggested mashing the grains at 154.

He used WLP029 however, you could also use WLP001 or US05.

That is what I got from reading the posts, it was somewhat informing and interesting.

That recipe will make beer you can drink in modern times, but Georges real stuff had vastly larger amounts of Molasses, it was more adjunct then barley. More like a molasses Braggot then beer really. He didn't have fancy chocolate malt or crystal malt, just 6 row mostly. If he had any hops at all they were wild ones, which were likely cluster or something related to cluster as that's what grew wild around here.

I'm sure it was totally nasty to our modern beer tastes.

[dad2all5]

So keeping it to the original standard is the question. Ok lets keep it as clost to original as possible, so please refer to the 1st post and add from there. Lets keep the ingredients and look at the brewing process. Hoe would be the best way to build George's Beer??

Boil or steep, when to add what and how much at what temp.??

Lets gather keeping the recipe as George's Hairloom Beer Recipe, and not build a better beer, just a better way to brew with steeping bags,ect.

So for the advanced all grain brewers this is where I need your imput.

[mashani]

How authentic do you really want to get? Your process is ok, but still too modern.

The likely didn't really measure the temperature. It was trial and error, IE for a mash folks who brewed would more likely heat the water until it made their finger hurt to a certain amount when they stuck it in it. A certain level of pain = good mash temps, more was too hot, no pain was too cold. Or they would mix x amount of boiling water with y amount of cool river/lake water and experiment until they found a mixture that made beer.

Most brewers back then did double or triple infusion mashes or a sort, but not like what we'd call that, more like a sparge, IE they heated water as above, added it to the grain, let it sit, poured the wort off into a some container.. added more water to the grain, let it sit a bit, poured it off into the container.. and then did this again maybe.

It is difficult to say if this beer was based off the second infusion of a mash like this (modern sensabilities would interpret small beer as such) or was just a simple infusion mash. Because of the lack of real temperature control and understanding of enzymes, the second and additional infusions were mostly just like a sparge, sugar runnings from whatever managed to get converted in the first infusion. If this was the case, then that's a good reason why all that molasses wound be needed.

They certainly would not have cooled it in an ice bath. Cooling was done either by tossing the wort from the boil pot to the fermentation vessel through the air using a bucket or such to scoop it up and/or pouring it in some other way and then walking away for a day or more... or by pouring or otherwise moving it into a shallow vessel with a large amount of surface area, IE evaporative cooling. (Some Belgian brewers of wild beers still do this).

Washingtons recipe sounds more like that he just let it sit until cool.

It's likely his beer was infected by various bugs and would get sour if consumed with age. It is highly unlikely they let this beer age. It was probably consumed within a week or two of it's making. Most households who brewed back then just consumed the stuff for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and then just made more.

To be clear, almost *all* beer was infected back then. You either consumed it young as in within weeks - or you consumed really strong beers after years of aging. There was not much in between that was drinkable.

"Hops to taste" would take into consideration how long it would be before it was gone. The more it ages, the more sour it gets, so less hops are needed for "balance". So a modern "hops to taste" beer would be very bad in this sense.

[Manowarfan1]

Not sure how authentic this is but Yards Brewing out of Philly has a series of the older style brews and recipes.
If link works here is a page with some detail on their various Beers of the Revolution or whatever they are called:
http://www.yardsbrewing.com/ales/ales-o ... ern-spruce
I have had the GW Porter and the Thomas Jefferson brew and enjoyed both. Molasses very prevalent in the GW beer as I imagine it was back then, although probably cleaned up and polished a bit for modern palates.

Cheers
jeff

[dad2all5]

Manowarfan1 thanks for the link, I"ll check it out. The idea came to me for a cool 4th of July beer. So I would like to honor both George & the good ol USA with something cool this year.