Akenfield harvest beer.

[sheeprug]

Hi All,
In the book, Akenfield, by Ronald Blythe, the farmer, ‘John Grout’ gives the following recipe for making beer at harvest time.
“You took five or six pails of water in a copper. Then you took one ail of boiling water and one pail of cold water and added them together in a tub big enough to hold 18 gallons. You added a bushel of malt to the water in the tub. Then you added boiling water from the copper until there was 18 gallons in all in the tub. Cover up and keep warm and leave standing for at least 7 hours though the longer the better. When it has stood, fill the copper 3 parts full from the tub, boil for an hour and add a half pound of hops. Then empty into a second tub. Repeat with the rest. All the beer should now be in one tub and covered with a sack and allowed to cool. But before this, take a little of the warm beer in a basin, add two ounces of yeast and let it stand for the night. Add this to the main tub in the morning and cask the beer. You can drink it after a week. And it won’t be anything like you can taste in the Crown, either”.
Now this sounds a little like a description by somebody who didn’t fully understand the process, but I’m wondering what such a beer might have been like. 18 gallons, a bushel of malt (about 15Kg) and half a pound of hops sounds like reasonable numbers to give a beer in the region of 4% ABV, though presumably their conversion efficiency would have been somewhat lower than we get today.
Any thoughts?