A version of this article appeared in Brew Your Own magazine in January 2003. See that edited version here: http://byo.com/stories/issue/item/479-colonial-ale
Have you ever dreamed
about digging in the ground and suddenly have your shovel strike a
rare ancient treasure? A chest of gold coins, perhaps? Or maybe, even
better, a tightly-sealed, well-preserved bottle of beer from the
Colonial period? Occasionally archaeologists do recover old bottles
of wine or brandy, but beer? I doubt such a find would tell us much
about what beer really tasted like two or three hundred years ago.
I am an archaeologist
and anthropologist with a primary research interest in the 17th-
and 18th-century plantation cultures of the British New
World colonies, and with a particular interest in the foodways of
these colonial cultures. As a homebrewer and winemaker, I am also,
naturally, interested in the nature and role of these beverages in
historical societies. Among my various research projects has been the
15-year archaeological study of Curles Plantation, at Curles Neck on
the James River in eastern Henrico County, Virginia. The first
colonists may have settled Curles as early as 1614, but they were
certainly there by 1630. Curles was the home of Nathaniel Bacon,
whose revolt against Virginia’s colonial government in 1676
presaged the American Revolution by a century. From 1699 to about
1840, Curles Plantation was owned by four generations of the Randolph
family.
Between 1986 and 1988 I
excavated remains of a 54’ x 22’ brick plantation kitchen at the
Curles site. This building had been constructed (originally as a
house) about 1700. The building was razed and its bricks salvaged by
Union soldiers during the Peninsula campaign of the Civil War in
1863. The kitchen excavation provided a wealth of architectural
details about the building as well as archaeological evidence related
to food preparation and service over a century and a half. My earlier
excavation of the remains of the 18th-century Randolph
mansion house had uncovered a huge colonial basement that had
included a warming kitchen and wine-and-beer cellar.
Material-culture
evidence of the sort recovered by archaeological digging can be
extremely useful in understanding early lifeways, but when we combine
these findings with the analysis of historical documents, we have a
true treasure-trove of insights into the cultures of the past. And so
I was quite excited to find, lurking in the Virginia Historical
Society’s manuscript collections, a copy of a an old plantation
kitchen cookery manuscript from Curles. Women used to write down
recipes passed on by relatives and neighbors and collect these in
“receipt” manuscripts. These cookery books were one of the tools
of the day for socializing young gentlewomen. There are only a
handful of plantation cookbooks extant from early Virginia. The one
in question is titled “Jane Randolph her Book,” and it appears to
have been begun about 1715 by the mistress of Curles Plantation, and
then was passed on to her daughter and, eventually, her
granddaughter—all named Jane. The last entries are from the 1790s,
so the book covers three generations and most of the 18th
century.
As a homebrewer, I
could not help but note recipes for “Good Ale,” Small Beer” and
“Metheglein” (sic). I also could not help but want to
attempt to duplicate these recipes. Here let me talk specifically
about the recipe for “Good Ale,” provided to the second of the
Jane Randolphs by “Mrs. Cary,” who was her older sister, her
aunt, or her sister’s mother-in-law living just across the James
River at the Cary’s Ampthill Plantation.*
The “beerology” of Colonial Virginia
Before we get to the
recipe and the beer it makes, lets examine for a moment what we know
about beer in Colonial Virginia. The terms “beer” and “ale”
are commonly found in Virginia records from the earliest colonial
period. Beer was brewed in Jamestown from the beginning of the
Virginia enterprise. We can assume that the British settlers brought
with them the traditions of brewing and drinking that they had known
in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Early settlers also included
Germans and French, and they, no doubt, brought their own traditions.
Of course, enslaved African women, who had their own brewing
traditions, would have done most of the brewing at Curles, especially
after 1700. Foodways on the plantation, however, were controlled
primarily by the senior woman of the household, and we can assume her
understandings of beer were descended, through cultural tradition and
recipe manuscripts, from the earlier “alewives” of Britain.
Cookery manuscripts typically contained very traditional recipes.
When we compare them with printed and published English works of
earlier years, we often find that identical or very similar
recipes—often with the same words and phrases—were repeated over
hundreds of years. For instance, the “Good Ale” recipe in Jane
Randolph’s book is clearly related to one published in The
English Huswife by G. Markham in 1615.
Modifications from
tradition came, we can expect, mainly from differences in access to
materials, and so it is important to understand what was available to
Mrs. Randolph and Mrs. Cary in 18th-century Virginia. We
have a notion that early plantations were self-sustaining entities,
but nothing could be further from reality. The colonies existed to
provide commodities for consumption in the British marketplace (or
export from Britain to other European countries), and to serve as
markets for goods produced in Britain. The Navigation Acts of the mid
1600s strictly limited the colonies’ ability to trade with other
nations, and corollary statutes made it illegal for colonists to
produce most goods for themselves. In short, plantations were tied to
the world-system economy, especially the trade based in London and
Bristol.
So, we might well
wonder, was the beer produced in Colonial Virginia made from locally
available produce? Numerous records indicate that a small amount of
barley was produced on plantations in the 1600s and 1700s, but was
this for consumption as a cereal grain or as beer? Early in the
history of the colony, barley was probably malted and brewed in
Virginia for local consumption. At least one archaeological site—the
Walter Aston Site in Charles City County--contained remains of what I
believe was a malting kiln. This was probably in use in the decades
of the 1640s and 50s.
By the 18th
century, the much shorter, much cheaper, North Atlantic passage
between Britain and America had been developed. It was now much
easier for the colonies to be kept dependent on British
commodities—and so they were. Virginia’s plantation wharves and
stores were outlets for the commodities of the burgeoning Industrial
Revolution of 18th-century England. In the 1700s the vast
majority of malt was imported from England rather than produced in
Virginia. Hops were grown on Virginia plantations at least as early
as the 1680s—probably earlier. They continued to be a minor product
throughout the 1700s, but the majority of hops were also imported
from England.
What was ale like in 18th-century Virginia?
We need to keep in mind
that commercial beers today owe quite a bit to the industrial and
scientific revolutions. In the mid-1700s the brewers of Burton began
to make “pale ale” for the first time, and this clear, relatively
light-colored beverage spread in popularity thanks to technological
breakthroughs in malting, mass-production of glass bottles, and in
shipping and marketing of the product via newly constructed canals,
etc. But these pale beers were extremely expensive. The vast majority
of English, Scots and Irish drank ales called “mild,” “brown”
or “porter.” All of these were somewhat dark, though not as dark
as modern black beers made with roast malts. The very dark malts we
know so well were developed primarily in the 19th century,
and the crystal and caramel malts came later still. This means that
18th-century British beers were generally lighter in color
and in body than the darkest, heaviest beers of the later Industrial
Age, but they were darker than the “pale ales” that were to
become so popular in Burton, London, and Glasgow.
Hops had been used in
German beers since mediaeval times, but hopped ale was a new-fangled
notion in England at the time Virginia was settled. By the 18th
century, however, hops were universally included in British
ales—often at a pretty high rate. Hops, however, were expensive,
and they did not ship well. Hoppy beers originated in hop-growing
districts of England, just as they did near the hop fields of
Germany, Bohemia, and, more recently, Washington and Oregon.
Traditional beers from areas without their own hop crops
tended to be malty rather than hoppy. The best example I can think of
is to compare English ales and Scottish ales—the latter emphasizing
malt and using very low hopping rates. It was even more risky and
more expensive to ship hops to Virginia than to Scotland, and so we
might expect a malt emphasis in indigenous beer.
It wasn’t until well
into the 19th century that Pasteur isolated and identified
beer yeast, but today nearly all commercial brews are made from
carefully cultured selected yeast strains. Even our homebrews have
benefited enormously from the recent development of single-strain
liquid yeast cultures. While I didn’t happen to excavate a nice
sample of yeast at Curles that I could culture for this re-creation,
I feel that use of a generic, long-established, dry ale yeast was
likely to produce a better approximation to the historical beer than
would a modern liquid single-culture strain. Yeast was routinely
“made” in the plantation kitchen by harvesting “barm” from
ale fermentation, mixing it with flour and hops into cakes, and
drying it by the hearth. While the Randolph women and their enslaved
cooks/brewers did not understand the biology of yeast as we do, they
clearly knew how to select what they called “good” yeasts, and to
make potent starters. They also differentiated between “ale yeast”
and “bread yeast.” For fermenting my version of this historic
brew, I used two packets of Danstar’s Manchester yeast, a variety
favored by many brewers for traditional ales.
While these women were
without a modern understanding of “germ theory,” they did know
that good ale required cleanliness. We should assume they were good
at their task of brewing, even though they didn’t have modern
sanitizers, stainless steel containers, etc. Boiling-hot water is a
potent sanitizer, and we must assume it was used liberally in
colonial brewing. Just the same, the use of open wooden fermenters,
and storage of ale in barrels probably led to more complex flavor
profiles than we tend to get using closed fermentation in glass and
steel. Likewise, the advent of refrigeration and air conditioning
mean that stored beer can age more gracefully than it did in the
cellar of a central Virginia farmhouse.
So now we come to the
crux of the matter. What did colonial beer taste like? Did it
resemble any beers we now know? Well let’s see if we can figure
that out by analyzing, and then brewing, “Good Ale,” as recorded
by Jane Randolph of Curles Plantation sometime in the mof-1700s. Here
is a transcription of the handwritten “receipt” as it appears in
the Curles manuscript:
Good Ale
Take
3 Bushels malt 1/2 high & 1/2 Pail
dry'd
let your water boil then & put into your
Mashing
tubb, When the Steem is gone
off,
so as you may see your face; then put
your
malt, & after mashing it well then
cover
it with a blanket, Let it stand 2
hours,
then draw it off Slow, then boil it
three
or four hours, till the hops curdles
when
boiled Enough, cool a little, & work
that
with your yest, & so put the rest
of
your wort in as it cools, which must
be
let in small Tubs, let it work till
your
yest begins to curdle then turn it up
&
stop your Barrel when it has done
working;
Note to Every Bushels malt
a
Quarter of pound of hops
Let me transcribe this
into contemporary English, with comments.
Take 3 bushels dried malt, ½ high and ½ pale,
and put it into your mashing tub (or tun).
British malt of the
period was all “floor” malted, with direct heat from wood or coal
fires, which led to uneven modification and kilning levels in any
batch of malt. Presumably the malt was then divided into relatively
pale- and relatively high-colored fractions. How pale was pale and
how high was high? For the high malt we can rule out anything like
chocolate and black malts. Many 18th-century British
brewing books and recipes refer to the practice of blending pale and
brown malts. To Mrs. Randolph and Mrs. Cary, the “high” was
undoubtedly what London brewers meant by “brown.” The high malt
could not have been as dark as some modern “brown” malt,
however, because this is well roasted and, consequently, has little
or no diastatic action due to the high roasting temperatures. Some
modern brown malts are as high as 70-100 degrees Lovibond. However,
one English maltings produces a brown malt that they claim is meant
to approach the darker malt of the 17th and 18th
centuries (SRM near 60). This is Crisps, and it so happens that
Crisps’ Brown malt is stocked by my local homebrew dealer, The
Weekend Brewer in Chester, Virginia.
I chose Maris Otter for
my pale malt; it seems to be the malt of choice by those of England’s
commercial brewers who produce more traditional beers. While Maris
Otter is thought of today as”traditional” English pale malt, even
it is made by methods (and with a barley strain) that didn’t
exist before the modern era. It is, nonetheless, I think, as close as
I can get to traditional malt made by a cottage-industry
craftman-maltster of the period.
The recipe calls
specifically for “dry” malt. Today’s standard bushel weight for
dry malt ranges from 32 to 38 pounds. I found one source claiming
that 34 is a good target, and that’s the number I used. So a barrel
of Mrs. Cary’s Good Ale required 3 bushels, or 102 pounds, of malt.
Mrs. Cary’s recipe is to make a barrel of beer. So what, exactly,
is a barrel? That question sent me on a quest! I consulted numerous
historical sources, the writings of some other brewers of historical
beers and living-history interpreters who work at historical sites in
Virginia. In the mid-18th century, there were wine
barrels, beer barrels and ale barrels, and these were based on
capacities defined in terms of “beer gallons,” versus “wine
gallons.” This dichotomy reflected the marketplace in which English
citizens enjoyed domestic products (called by the Anglo-Saxon term
“ale”) as well as imports from the Netherlands (using the
Germanic word “beer”), and these nations measured their brews
with different sorts of gallons. In fact, these distinct gallons were
the antecedents to our current distinction between U.S. and British
Imperial volume measurements.
That said, almost
everyone I spoke with agreed that, while the urban taverns of the day
would have used statute ale barrels, the most likely containers to be
found on plantations were wine barrels that had once held sherry,
port, or Madeira. These held the equivalent of 31 ½ English (roughly
similar to Imperial) gallons, or about 36 U.S. gallons. Therefore, if
I wanted to make a five-gallon batch, I needed a little over 14
pounds of malt, divided equally between pale and brown.
Wood- or coal-fired
kilns tended to lend a slight smokiness to the malt. London brewers
of the day disagreed with the desirability of smokiness in their
malts, but I assume some amount of it was inevitable. I, therefore,
added a touch (2 ounces) of smoked malt, choosing to use wood-smoked
rauchbier malt rather than peat-smoked malt.
Bring your water to a boil and put it into the mash tun. When it has cooled such that the steam has cleared and you can see your reflection in the water, add your malt to the tun. Mix it up well and let it mash for two hours.
The water I chose for
this brew was Richmond, Virginia city tap water, after passing it
through a consumer household filter to remove metals, chlorine, and
chloramines. This water is not substantially different from the
shallow well water used at Curles and Ampthill plantations. As can be
seen from a later statement in the recipe, only part of the water is
used in the mash; presumably enough to make a proper mash
thickness—whatever that was! I would have preferred to have used a
moderately thin mash to de-emphasize dextrin, as is typical of
British common ales; however, my mash tun is a 5-gallon cooler, and
with the quantity of grain called for, a thin mash was not possible.
I could get about 3 gallons of mash water in my tun, a bit under 0.9
quarts per pound of grains.
Jane Randolph and her
cooks had no thermometers, so they waited until the water stopped
steaming enough to see their faces in it as an indication that they
should now add the malt. In re-creating this mash, I followed these
instructions. I waited until the steam had died down substantially on
my boiling pot and then I took a temperature reading. It was about
165 degrees F, about 5 degrees cooler than my normal strike
temperature. Jane’s tun was a wooden tub covered with a woolen
blanked. I used a cooler. After mixing liquor and grains my
thermometer told me we would begin the mash at 148 degrees. Not a bad
temperature for maximizing extraction and attenuation, but I boosted
it to about 152.
At the end of the mash, draw your wort slowly from
the tun into the boiler.
The cooler’s spigot
provided the means to accomplish this feat. My boiler is an
8.5-gallon enameled canning pot, rather than a really romantic
humongous, ancient, copper or black iron kettle. My fire comes from a
propane crab-boil burner that is probably as good at producing BTUs
as was a roaring colonial kitchen hearth or large outdoor open fire
pit, as was often used for tasks such as laundry and brewing.
Boil the wort three or four hours until your hops “curdle.” Then take some of it aside and cool it to make your yeast starter. Add the rest of the “wort” (liquor) needed to make up your final quantity of ale.
Presumably, the
coagulation and settling of the hot break is what “curdling”
meant. Setting aside wort for a starter is straightforward, but the
instruction to “put the rest of your wort in as it cools” is
ambiguous at best. Were the grains sparged? I think not. Instead I
believe that they were “re-mashed.” Several sources suggest that
additional hot liquor (brewing water) was added to the grains and
allowed to “mash”—actually, to steep—for a while in order to
extract more sugars. That is the approach I took in recreating the
brew. This procedure tends to extract a bit more tannins from the
grain husks than does sparging, but, as far as I have been able to
learn, sparging, as we know it, was simply not practiced—at least
not by small-scale brewers.
I decided to ignore the
recipe in one minor way by adding all the water at the beginning of
the boil, rather than adding “the rest of the wort” at the end of
the boil. While boiling 36 gallons of wort in an open kettle would be
a serious headache, boiling 7 or so gallons in my cooker was a cinch.
Adding the water afterward may have helped to affect a “cold
break,” but the chance of introducing unwanted microbes
unnecessarily bothered me a bit. Throughout the boil I had to
replenish the water several times.
Hops? Did she say hops?
Well, notice that, at the end of the recipe, she prescribes a quarter
pound of hops per bushel. My recipe required 2 ounces of hops, and I
chose East Kent Goldings at 6% alpha acid. Goldings were already a
favorite hop for British ales in the mid-18th century, and
they were undoubtedly among the most popular imports from England in
the colonies. The recipe makes no mention of staged additions of the
hops, and so I simply added them at the beginning of the boil. There
is no doubt that a 3-4 hour boil will extract the maximum bitterness
from hops, while leaving behind only minimal hop flavors and, most
likely, no detectable hop aromas.
Place your wort into one or more small tubs or
other open fermentation vessels.
Why small tubs? The
18th century kitchen was not equipped with pumps or
siphons or hoses. The women brewers of the day were no doubt
physically strong individuals, but they couldn’t expect to empty 36
gallons of beer into a barrel when the time came. So a series of
small wooden tubs was used for the ferment. I decided against my
usual closed blow-out system using a carboy and decided instead to
ferment in a plastic bucket fermenter. I did cover it with its lid
and inserted a lock, so I may have sacrificed some opportunities to
introduce a nice component of “house flavors” to the final brew.
When the primary fermentation is over and the
yeast falls back into the brew, pick up your tubs and turn them over
to pour the beer into your barrel. When it’s full, hammer in a
tight bung.
As is still typical of
some cask-conditioned ales, the carbonation comes from the last
couple days of fermentation in the barrel. In taverns and breweries,
we also know that kegs were sometimes conditioned by adding some new
ale at high kraeusen; however, the average family would not always
have a ready source of kraeusen beer. Some historical documents
suggest that they could increase the priming condition of the ale by
adding some molasses. Keep in mind, there was no dried malt extract,
and sugar was extremely expensive. It would not have been feasible to
prime with sugar, while molasses was readily available and
inexpensive. My approach was to use the traditional method of waiting
until yeast cap fell back into the beer, then racking to a stainless
Cornelius keg without any priming sugar. The completion of
fermentation provided all the necessary spritz for the beer. I
wouldn’t attempt this method if I intended to bottle the beer!
So what’s the recipe in plain English
Grain bill: Seven pounds Maris Otter pale, seven pounds Crisps
Maltings Brown, 2 ounces Bamberg-style smoked malt.
Infusion mash with approximately 3 gallons water at 150-152 degrees F
for two hours.
No mash out
Drain sweet wort to boiler and replenish mash tun with another 3
gallons of water at 152 degrees. Allow to rest 15-20 minutes, then
drain. Add water to boiler to make approximately 7 gallons of sweet
liquor.
At boil add two ounces East Kent Goldings hops. Boil 3-4 hours,
replenishing water as needed to result in five gallons, or less, of
bitter wort. If less, add cold water to make five gallons.
Rehydrate and pitch two packets Danstar Manchester dry yeast. Ferment
in 7-gallon food-grade bucket at 70--75 degrees F. until yeast head
falls (S.G. approximately 1.025-30), then rack to stainless steel
keg. Condition in cool (55-65 degrees F.) temperatures for 2-3 weeks
before tapping keg.
Original gravity: 1.066. Final gravity: 1.014
Note: If you don’t want to mash for two hours, feel free to
shorten the time to 90 minutes. This may reduce the phenolics and
astringency a bit in the final brew, although I found those flavors a
nice balance to the sweet malt. If you don’t want to boil for four
hours, then try mimicking the flavors of caramelized wort by adding
about ½ cup of molasses at the beginning of the boil. Many modern
British breweries use molasses (or treacle or dark refiner’s syrup)
to provide the slightly sweet caramel notes formed by burning wort in
a copper kettle heated over an open flame. It’s a good
approximation.
Evaluation
I presented Mrs.
Cary’s Good Ale with a talk about its creation to the James
River Homebrewers this past April. The beer was a real success. Here
is how I described it in my tasting notes:
This beer is fairly
clear, deep brown in color, with good condition and head retention.
The aroma and flavor are clearly malt-accented, with strong
dark-coffee-like tones from the brown malt, and subtle smoky notes.
Hops are present solely as a balance to the malt, but they contribute
little to flavor or aroma. If this were sweeter, it would most
resemble a strong Scottish ale. Instead, it has the dry finish and
mouthfeel of an English ale, probably due to the attenuation
properties of the yeast, and the lack of a mash-out. This is a
fascinating, and somewhat foreign brew. I’ll certainly have to make
it again. It is probably best classified as “old ale,” though
some Scottish wee heavies come close in style.
Mrs. Cary’s Good
Ale is a smoky-dark, coffee-and-toffee-flavored brew and, in its
18th-century incarnation, it was probably embroidered with the “house
flavors” of the wild yeasts and bacteria endemic to the Curles
Plantation cellar, as well as the distinctive blending of lactic
acid, acetic acid, tannic acid and complex esters and oxidation
products one expects from open ferments in wooden tubs and storage in
barrels. The very foreignness of my approximation to Mrs. Cary’s
Good Ale serves well enough to remind me of the distance between
history and present experience and expectation, but when I realize
that I cannot imagine if the hops available to 18th-century
Virginians were fresh, floral, spicy, cheesy or just bitter, then I
am forced to admit the impossibility of knowing the past in those
nuances which make all the difference.
*
I hope to have the opportunity to bring you Jane Randolph’s
recipes for Small Beer and Metheglyn (spiced mead) in the near
future.
9
