Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

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Re: Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

Post by Eric » Mon Jun 14, 2021 10:13 pm

It might not, but think this qualifies for the predetermined bit of the 19th century as it refers to earlier times and beer. This is not my find nor anything new and may have been seen by many before, but worth consideration of how likely each statement might be accurate fact. Published in 1870 in "The English Mechanic and World of Science", a weekly periodical.
The attachment IPA.jpg is no longer available
A problem with the above piece is a contemporary newspaper article had the Crusader bound FROM Bombay to the Mersey. The ship was blown ashore on January 7th, 1839, "The Day of The Big Wind" when several hundred vessels foundered. It broke up without being salvaged in February. There would only be a beer cargo if outward bound from Liverpool, which would be brought from Burton-on-Trent by barge on the Trent-Mersey Canal. The Liverpool newspaper may have been mistaken, but regardless, I think that in 1830 few in London drank pale beer. Other parts of the country may have had pale ale, which when brewed properly does clear, but this proves finings were used then to clear beer.
IPA.jpg
An interesting piece, especially that AK was keeping beer. Was that because they contained hops?
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Re: Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

Post by Northern Brewer » Tue Jun 15, 2021 2:05 am

Eric wrote:
Mon Jun 14, 2021 10:13 pm
An interesting piece, especially that AK was keeping beer. Was that because they contained hops?
I take it you're referring to the same piece that Gary Gilman discusses here :
https://www.beeretseq.com/the-meaning-o ... gy-part-i/

The whole AK thing gets complicated, but IIRC Ron Pattinson, who has just written a book on it, tends to dismiss the "Keeping Ale" thing as folk etymology - it was definitely intended for quick turnover.

The idea of pale beer was nothing new - the history of "white" beers made from air-dried malt goes back at least to the 15th century koyts and broyhan of the early 16th century. But air drying isn't particularly efficient and needs lots of space.

William Harrison wrote in 1577
"The best malt is tried by the hardness and colour; for, if it look fresh with a yellow hue, and thereto will write like a piece of chalk, after you have bitten a kernel in sunder in the midst, then you may assure yourself that it is dried down. In some places it is dried at leisure with wood alone or straw alone, in others with wood and straw together; but, of all, the straw dried is the most excellent. For the wood-dried malt when it is brewed, beside that the drink is higher of colour, it doth hurt and annoy the head of him that is not used thereto, because of the smoke."

William Camden notes that Derby was a major centre of the grain trade and brewing by the late 1500s. According to John Houghton maltsters in Derby were using straw before they started using coke, which they were certainly using by the 1640s and probably a bit before - this looks like someone coking sea coal for brewing in 1637. According to RA Mott by "1693, when there were 694 family houses, there were 76 malt houses and 120 ale houses, so that malt-making and brewing must have been the dominant occupations. A list of those occupied in the wool, leather, wood, metal and stone trades and the normal supply occupations left room for some 200 maltsters and brewers. Much malt was carried to the ferry on the river Trent, five miles away, whence it could go by water to London; 300 pack-horse loads (each of 6 bushels which each contained 40lb) or 32 tons were taken weekly into Lancashire and Cheshire."

By the early 1600s Derby ale seems to have become quite famous (see eg Martin Cornell) - although it needed canals etc to improve the transport routes for Derby/Burton pale beer to really take off. The first definite mention of Burton ale on sale in London is in the Spectator of 20 May 1712, which coincided with the opening of the Trent Navigation.

Alan McLeod has written lots on this stuff - eg http://abetterbeerblog427.com/2017/10/2 ... le-part-1/ - which I've liberally borrowed from for the above.

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Re: Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

Post by PeeBee » Tue Jun 15, 2021 9:09 am

Eric, as a bit of an interlude:
Eric wrote:
Mon Jun 14, 2021 10:13 pm
... Published in 1870 in "The English Mechanic and World of Science", a weekly periodical.

IPA.jpg

A problem with the above piece ...
Which comes out:
Capture.JPG
... is a bug in the forum software! It's been fixed apparently, but the our forum's software hasn't been updated yet? The work-around is never preview a post with more than one attachment (or delay too long posting it) or you'll find when posted all but the first attachment is lost, and the first appears as the last image in the post. Drove me insane figuring that out (how can the insane be driven insane? Scratch that!). Repairing the post will drive you insane!

Hopefully "Northern Brewer" figured out the missing bit?
Northern Brewer wrote:
Tue Jun 15, 2021 2:05 am
Eric wrote:
Mon Jun 14, 2021 10:13 pm
An interesting piece, especially that AK was keeping beer. Was that because they contained hops?
I take it you're referring to the same piece that Gary Gilman discusses here :
https://www.beeretseq.com/the-meaning-o ... gy-part-i/
...
And I've got my eye on that new "AK!" book, I'll no doubt buy it shortly. AK is very later 20th Century "running" (-like) "real" (i.e. not keg) bitter.
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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Re: Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

Post by Eric » Tue Jun 15, 2021 10:55 am

Oh, it was there in the preview. Sorry PeeBee, that's happened to me before and I should have checked after posting.
Bitter2.jpg
It could be possible the attachments are in the reverse order to my intentions.

Yes NB, it probably was from that source. Not in any way to dispute Ron P's findings, or those by any other, I do feel there would be as much diversity of opinion on brewing in the 19th century as there is today, including how long a beer should last before it could be called "keeping". I think that piece might predate Ron's earliest recipe for AK, but this thread could be an ideal place to gather data for comparison.

I understand Pale Malt was first produced with coke in Derbyshire, but coke was produced in vast quantities at many Northern pit heads during most the 19th century for iron and steel production, so was readily available in those parts for other purposes, including drying and kilning malt. Of course, the existence of pale malt did mean that pale ale would be the beer of choice, but with the correct techniques and resources, it was a greater probability than in regions with no local coal and coke.
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Re: Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

Post by PeeBee » Tue Jun 15, 2021 1:15 pm

Northern Brewer wrote:
Tue Jun 15, 2021 2:05 am
... By the early 1600s Derby ale seems to have become quite famous (see eg Martin Cornell) - although it needed canals etc to improve the transport routes for Derby/Burton pale beer to really take off. ...
It's great where some of these posts take you.

I read that bit and thought "but Derby had its canal", though it appears to have had to wait until the end of the 19th Century to get it. And it wouldn't have to wait long before the railway replaced it.

I was intrigued by this because as a kid I used to play by the old canal [EDIT: the "Derby" canal that is] at Borrowash. The lock was a terrifying place (for a ten year old) 'cos it still had deep water in it. We would catch frogs in the canal and "execute" them on the adjacent railway track. Horrible kid. Live railway tracks should have been terrifying to ten year olds, but they weren't (and didn't restrict access like today). And as a youth I remember them filling the canal all in. Now I see they've been digging it all out again! And they've rebuilt the "terrifying" lock.



That Derby (the town of my birth) used to be famous for its ales is all news to me. And the references of Burton Ales and "Darbie Ale" in early 1600s (17th Century) is very useful. Note these would have been hopped ales, not beers; though would we notice these days? Not a case of do we know what an "ale" tasted like, more a case of do we know what a beer once tasted like.
Last edited by PeeBee on Wed Jun 16, 2021 3:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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Re: Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

Post by Northern Brewer » Tue Jun 15, 2021 3:05 pm

Eric wrote:
Tue Jun 15, 2021 10:55 am
Yes NB, it probably was from that source. Not in any way to dispute Ron P's findings, or those by any other, I do feel there would be as much diversity of opinion on brewing in the 19th century as there is today, including how long a beer should last before it could be called "keeping". I think that piece might predate Ron's earliest recipe for AK, but this thread could be an ideal place to gather data for comparison.
From the horse's mouth :
"here's my theory on the meaning of AK. The "A" is a strength indication, which is one step below X. The gradations being, in ascending order, T, A, X, XX, XXX, XXXX. The "K" stands for "Keeping" and indicates that the beer is a Pale Ale rather than a Mild Ale. Despite the fact that the whole point of AK was that it was a Light or Running Bitter."

So although the name said "Keeping", that was more of a style thing rather than indicating that it was actually kept for a long time. See this from Ron, which quotes evidence to a parliamentary committee in 1899 that AK was kept 2 to 4 weeks before delivery, compared to 4-10 days for Mild and 4-12 months for Stock Ale.

I've got it in my head from somewhere that the earliest known recipe for an AK is 1837, but it was only later in the 19th century that they really took off. So some time before your 1870 article.
Eric wrote:
Tue Jun 15, 2021 10:55 am
I understand Pale Malt was first produced with coke in Derbyshire,
My post above is literally saying the opposite - that pale malt was widespread long before that - but it was difficult to make in quantity by air drying and/or by straw drying so it was always a premium thing. Coke merely democratised it a bit.
Eric wrote:
Tue Jun 15, 2021 10:55 am
but coke was produced in vast quantities at many Northern pit heads during most the 19th century for iron and steel production, so was readily available in those parts for other purposes, including drying and kilning malt. Of course, the existence of pale malt did mean that pale ale would be the beer of choice, but with the correct techniques and resources, it was a greater probability than in regions with no local coal and coke.
Well if you're talking 19th century then coal/coke was widely distributed by then, and certainly accessible to maltings which tend to be built with good rail or water access anyway, because they need to move bulk grain & malt in/out. And Derby's role as a grain/malt trading hub means that it had been distributing pale malt to brewers in surrounding counties like Cheshire - Sandbach was one of the first towns to gain a reputation for its beer, which seems to have developed at a time when Derby was "exporting" malt.

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Re: Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

Post by Eric » Wed Jun 16, 2021 2:55 pm

An excellent piece NB. Not wishing to dispute any piece, all will be from records of malting, brewing and the associated retail trade, which makes me wonder how representative those are of ale and beer production in Britain before the second half of the 19th century? Until then most of Britain's population worked on the land, not living in in urban communities with good communications.

Brewing at Burton boomed when the Trent and Mersey were joined, but could the beer improve because of the canal digging? Burton wasn't mentioned by Daniel Defoe when in Staffordshire in his "A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain" in the first years of the eighteenth century, but of neighbouring Derbyshire wrote, "---; not forgetting the ale, which every where exceeded, if possible, what was pass'd, as if the farther north, the better the liquor, and that nearer we approached Yorkshire, as the place for the best, so the ale advanc'd the nearer to its perfection." Defoe wrote of the dangers to travelers and of the state of communications. He examined the foundations of Roman roads to find them in better condition than ones a hundredth their age. Turnpikes were relatively few and carried tolls that would apply to goods like beer, canals were not suited to all terrains and although there were railways in the nineteenth century, it was later when they might assist beer production. Further, with some notable exceptions, beer was mostly a local product then, as it was when I began drinking, and is still the case for small breweries.

I feel that we may well be missing a lot of valuable data that might be out there, just as we would if we were to concentrate on national breweries today. At some time in the future people might examine these times to conclude we all drank Carling and they shouldn't look any further to learn if there might be anything else.
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Re: Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

Post by PeeBee » Thu Jun 17, 2021 2:41 am

Northern Brewer wrote:
Tue Jun 15, 2021 3:05 pm
Eric wrote:
Tue Jun 15, 2021 10:55 am
Yes NB, it probably was from that source. Not in any way to dispute Ron P's findings, or those by any other, I do feel there would be as much diversity of opinion on brewing in the 19th century as there is today, including how long a beer should last before it could be called "keeping". I think that piece might predate Ron's earliest recipe for AK, but this thread could be an ideal place to gather data for comparison.
From the horse's mouth :
"here's my theory on the meaning of AK. The "A" is a strength indication, which is one step below X. The gradations being, in ascending order, T, A, X, XX, XXX, XXXX. The "K" stands for "Keeping" and indicates that the beer is a Pale Ale rather than a Mild Ale. Despite the fact that the whole point of AK was that it was a Light or Running Bitter."

So although the name said "Keeping", that was more of a style thing rather than indicating that it was actually kept for a long time. See this from Ron, which quotes evidence to a parliamentary committee in 1899 that AK was kept 2 to 4 weeks before delivery, compared to 4-10 days for Mild and 4-12 months for Stock Ale.

...
Hang on, hang on! I've just noticed Ron may be contradicting his own work here?

I've just got to accepting his "Imperial Mild Ale" tongue-in-cheek "joke" and he's torpedoed it! Okay XXXX could be an unaged "Ale" ("mild"), but the inclusion of hops meant they could also be aged. The most famous example being "Burton Ale" which in the 19th Century had designations like "XXXXK" and even "KKKK". So Burton Ale is a "beer" (a pale ale [sic]) now? And what of "Darbie Ale" (Derby Ale), that has been discussed in this thread, who's existence pre-dates "X" and "K" designations (17th Century from posts in this thread); also a beer? Basically no "aged" ales, hopped or not? All "Ale" is "mild"?

Listening to Ron's deductions on these letter designations was all beginning to add up for me. Except it isn't now. I think a trip for me to his blog site to cause trouble is in order?
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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Re: Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

Post by PeeBee » Thu Jun 17, 2021 2:16 pm

PeeBee wrote:
Thu Jun 17, 2021 2:41 am
Hang on, hang on! I've just noticed Ron may be contradicting his own work here? ...
And I might be forgetting what Eric's been trying to teach me! ...

I'm viewing things from just Ron's point of view, who is very much focused on 19/20th Century and brewery records from the larger breweries (smaller provincial breweries often didn't comply with the big'uns anyway, which is where Edd's work comes in useful). The 19th Century letter designations probably did put the likes of "Burton Ale" into the "keeping pale ale" class (sic; beer not ale, e.g. "XXXXK" and "KKKK") and all "Ales" possibly were "mild" (unaged) well within that time frame?

Back in the Georgian eras (and earlier, like 17th Century "Stuarts") beer (ale) history must adopt a more "holistic"* approach. "Burton Ales" were "Ales" and were kept, but that in no way distorts Ron's views that "K" means "keeping", as in kept longer than "ales" which were all ready destined to become "Mild Ale" by WW1. Different eras, different views. It's easy to forget that I'm talking about eras covering over a hundred years each and a lot can change in those spans of time.

I do need to change my tact here; 'cos I've got Ron's new "AK!" book on the way!



* "Holistics" has built quite a bad reputation for only being fit for "cranks". Helped by a star crank (me!) cracking on about it (one of my earlier "holistic" ventures concluded I brewed my first "Porter" because the hospital had replaced my hip with "car parts" ... err, we wont go there). "Holistics" (viewing a thing as part of a much bigger whole) doesn't have to be taken to such extreme lengths, and is a very useful philosophical approach. Especially for cranks like me!
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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Re: Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

Post by PeeBee » Sat Jun 19, 2021 11:02 am

Northern Brewer wrote:
Tue Jun 15, 2021 2:05 am
...
William Harrison wrote in 1577
"The best malt is tried by the hardness and colour; for, if it look fresh with a yellow hue, and thereto will write like a piece of chalk, after you have bitten a kernel in sunder in the midst, then you may assure yourself that it is dried down. In some places it is dried at leisure with wood alone or straw alone, in others with wood and straw together; but, of all, the straw dried is the most excellent. For the wood-dried malt when it is brewed, beside that the drink is higher of colour, it doth hurt and annoy the head of him that is not used thereto, because of the smoke."

William Camden notes that Derby was a major centre of the grain trade and brewing by the late 1500s. According to John Houghton maltsters in Derby were using straw before they started using coke, which they were certainly using by the 1640s and probably a bit before - this looks like someone coking sea coal for brewing in 1637. According to RA Mott by "1693, when there were 694 family houses, there were 76 malt houses and 120 ale houses, so that malt-making and brewing must have been the dominant occupations. A list of those occupied in the wool, leather, wood, metal and stone trades and the normal supply occupations left room for some 200 maltsters and brewers. Much malt was carried to the ferry on the river Trent, five miles away, whence it could go by water to London; 300 pack-horse loads (each of 6 bushels which each contained 40lb) or 32 tons were taken weekly into Lancashire and Cheshire."

By the early 1600s Derby ale seems to have become quite famous (see eg Martin Cornell) - although it needed canals etc to improve the transport routes for Derby/Burton pale beer to really take off. The first definite mention of Burton ale on sale in London is in the Spectator of 20 May 1712, which coincided with the opening of the Trent Navigation.

Alan McLeod has written lots on this stuff - eg http://abetterbeerblog427.com/2017/10/2 ... le-part-1/ - which I've liberally borrowed from for the above.
This is all cracking stuff, many thanks!

Although I may use it to reach conclusions you may not wish to be associated with :wacko: . But between You and Eric you'll have at least attempted to keep me on track!
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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Re: Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

Post by Eric » Thu Jun 24, 2021 4:36 pm

PeeBee wrote:
Sat Jun 19, 2021 11:02 am
Northern Brewer wrote:
Tue Jun 15, 2021 2:05 am
...
William Harrison wrote in 1577
"The best malt is tried by the hardness and colour; for, if it look fresh with a yellow hue, and thereto will write like a piece of chalk, after you have bitten a kernel in sunder in the midst, then you may assure yourself that it is dried down. In some places it is dried at leisure with wood alone or straw alone, in others with wood and straw together; but, of all, the straw dried is the most excellent. For the wood-dried malt when it is brewed, beside that the drink is higher of colour, it doth hurt and annoy the head of him that is not used thereto, because of the smoke."

William Camden notes that Derby was a major centre of the grain trade and brewing by the late 1500s. According to John Houghton maltsters in Derby were using straw before they started using coke, which they were certainly using by the 1640s and probably a bit before - this looks like someone coking sea coal for brewing in 1637. According to RA Mott by "1693, when there were 694 family houses, there were 76 malt houses and 120 ale houses, so that malt-making and brewing must have been the dominant occupations. A list of those occupied in the wool, leather, wood, metal and stone trades and the normal supply occupations left room for some 200 maltsters and brewers. Much malt was carried to the ferry on the river Trent, five miles away, whence it could go by water to London; 300 pack-horse loads (each of 6 bushels which each contained 40lb) or 32 tons were taken weekly into Lancashire and Cheshire."

By the early 1600s Derby ale seems to have become quite famous (see eg Martin Cornell) - although it needed canals etc to improve the transport routes for Derby/Burton pale beer to really take off. The first definite mention of Burton ale on sale in London is in the Spectator of 20 May 1712, which coincided with the opening of the Trent Navigation.

Alan McLeod has written lots on this stuff - eg http://abetterbeerblog427.com/2017/10/2 ... le-part-1/ - which I've liberally borrowed from for the above.
This is all cracking stuff, many thanks!

Although I may use it to reach conclusions you may not wish to be associated with :wacko: . But between You and Eric you'll have at least attempted to keep me on track!
All thanks to your threads PeeBee, this one now has more than 1000 views.

Meanwhile, something to listen to, should you wish.
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Re: Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

Post by PeeBee » Wed Jun 30, 2021 5:07 pm

Eric wrote:
Thu Jun 24, 2021 4:36 pm
...
Meanwhile, something to listen to, should you wish.
I'll get me trunks on and see what I can find in the puddle at Bala :whistle:

I've been having a breather from posting 'cos I was running out of beer! Some quickie non-historic (craft-beer even?) and, because it's time I put all this waffle into practice, a "Georgian" era beer emulation out of Durden Park Beer Circle's "Old British Beers" booklet. #1, Amber Small Beer (1823), Cobb & Co.. I've made it before using modern amber malt (it contains a lot of amber, about 33%) and it turned out very astringent. It was this, along with the well known "London Porter (1850), Whitbread" which I was also unimpressed with last Xmas, that helped motivate me into looking into these historical beers. (So this is a "practical" post, not a historical one!).

Starting with the historical malt emulations (I've been refining the spreadsheet in the last few days - the current Excel spreadsheet is attached to this post):
Historic Malts Va.JPG
Historic Malts Va.JPG (94.85 KiB) Viewed 2037 times
The spreadsheet still relates to those "bin sizes" in the graphs shown earlier in the thread. I need to get those graphs in Excel too (graphs are in Visio) but figuring that out will take a while, and first step is proving the effort will be worth it. Changes include allowing to make on-the-fly alterations without going back to the graph: Like modifying the smokiness by adding Smoked Malt at the expense of base malt (more on that later), upping the colour of (modern) Amber Malt to fit in the scheme better (colour of Amber Malt is very variable, I want 75EBC but use 60EBC Crisp Amber) and increase the "caramel malt" content of the emulated malts (more useful for brown malt emulations). Nothing too important but I liked having the option.

For this recipe "smokiness" has been kept very minimal at about 3% smoked malt (total; it could have been 0%, but I'd like to see if I can even taste 3%). "Caramel" flavours have also been held back for this Amber recipe.

The spreadsheet will do the maths. It's Recipe 2 in the following:
Historic Malts Vb.JPG
Historic Malts Vb.JPG (109.71 KiB) Viewed 2037 times
It looks like:
20210628_083012_WEB.jpg
20210628_083012_WEB.jpg (80.74 KiB) Viewed 2037 times
The reason? In my recipe the grain bill is:
  • Pale Malt (emulation) 79%
  • Amber Malt (emulation) 31%
Two entries, that looks reasonable. In reality it's:
  • Smoked 2.6%
  • Pale Malt 47.6%
  • Mild/ Vienna 10.2%
  • Lt. Munich 21.2%
  • Dk. Munich 10.6%
  • Amber 3.3%
  • Crystal 100 1.5%
  • Brown 1.8%
  • Crystal 150 0.5%
  • Crystal 240 0.7%
Good grief! :out

You need a very good reason to want to post a recipe like that!


I don't imagine these grain lists will result in horrible beer. I've done something like them before. I can't claim the result will be like the original, but it will be a lot closer than using "modern" malts. No doubt attempting to make your own malts from scratch may produce better results, but that's a major time-consuming undertaking. And if you do it for brown malt like some have tried, what about amber malt and pale malt?

Final bit of persuasion: Recipe 1 and Recipe 3 in that table above is for a forthcoming Whitbread 1849 Porter (alternative to the DPBC's famous 1850 London Porter) and #122 in their booklet for William Black's 1835 Brown Stout (recipe for Xmas!) which includes the note "will need a brewing enzyme for complete mashing": Not for this recipe you wont! No criticism of DPBC's recipes; when they wrote that booklet they never had anything like the range of malts available to us.


What a mammoth post! But I do it because I need the convincing to try these formulations too. Attached is the Excel spreadsheet should you wish to hack it a bit: https://drive.google.com/open?id=13shvP ... 0ePWcyw4b- (it's on my Google drive).
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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Re: Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

Post by PeeBee » Wed Jun 30, 2021 6:33 pm

Back to history!

I was getting despondent about malt in 17th Century (Stuart era). Brown malt didn't seem to exist? What did they use?

Well they did have "brown malt", but they didn't call it that. It was just malt. And very variable, each town or hamlet having at least one person who could make it. And smoky malt would have been normal, and not widely approved of. Some maltsters developed the way of making clean tasting malt, and the area they worked in became famous for it's malt, beer and ales. Like Derby and its extensive use of straw for kilning malt, and later its seemingly impossibly early uptake of coke for kilning. When transport improved (canals, turnpikes or "toll roads", and much later the railways) Burton-on-Trent took over from Derby for brewing their famous ale, but they still used Derby malt. No doubt you would need to be rich to drink this good stuff.

So my formulations for "brown malt" would still stand. But it would just be "malt" and would be smoky (my emulations can't capture the "nasty" smokiness, because no-one these days sells "disgustingly smoky malt"!). But making the emulations pleasantly smoky seems reasonable (we don't really want to make bad beer!). If wanting to emulate the "Darbie" Ales or Burton Ales (etc.) ease off on the colour and the smoke (coke will introduce some smoky elements, but the nearest we can get is oak and beech smoked malt which in small quantity will have to do). Perhaps the "Pale Amber" emulations would be nearest? Interestingly, one of my favourite whiskies, "Craigellachie", is famous for being coke or coal kilned rather than the more common peat kilned.

So no "Stitch", that would come later (Industrial Revolution), but plenty like it. Although hop growing occurred widely across the nation, I'd guess they were still expensive, so "mild" (unaged), dark, (cloudy?), low hopped "ales" would be normal, "beers" would have much smaller availability, possibly restricted to those areas that could best grow hops?
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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PeeBee
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Re: Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

Post by PeeBee » Wed Jun 30, 2021 7:03 pm

Light relief! Going back to that "Small Amber Beer" I've been making, here's the progress according to the TiltPi that's looking over it:
SmallAmberBeer.JPG
SmallAmberBeer.JPG (39.39 KiB) Viewed 2032 times
Very sedate, but I am holding the temperature down.

I like my Tilt, so: Tomorrow a new all-singing all-dancing "Tilt Pro" turns up. If you think I'm a tad off-me-head mucking about with crazy complicated historical malt emulations, splashing out on a totally frivolous "Tilt Pro" should convince you?

I'm convinced! :D
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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PeeBee
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Posts: 1571
Joined: Thu Jan 21, 2016 2:50 pm
Location: North Wales

Re: Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)

Post by PeeBee » Sun Jul 04, 2021 9:14 am

The spreadsheet for calculating "historical malt" emulations has had a small sprucing up (same link to download it - Google like to display spreadsheets in their own online program if setup that way, but there is the option to download the file to open locally). The spreadsheet has only been loaded with "Crisp Maltings" grains.

The spreadsheet now automatically calculates the "informational" Diastatic Power (DP) and colour (EBC) for the emulation; the information for this is in columns K to N which are hidden and can be unhidden once the spreadsheets protection is disabled. Only relevant cells (those expecting entries for a new emulation) can be selected with protection enabled. There is no password to disable protection.
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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