Apr 20, 2014

Western Australian Homebrew Recipe - 1834

A second colonial homebrew recipe. This time on the other side of the country but still using a fairly large percentage of sugar. Found in The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal, 11 January, 1834, less than 5 years after the colony on the Swan River was established.

DOMESTIC BREWING. 
The following is a very valuable recipe especially for farmers who have many house-servants, and for labourers who would have a cheap and nourishing beer. It may be done by boiling the water in a washing copper, or even a large tea kettle, and drawing out the virtue of the malt in any clean pans or tubs about the house. Either large or small quantities may be brewed, only observing the same proportions :-put one peck of barley or of oats into an oven just after baking, or a frying pan, just to steam off the moisture, and dry it well, but on no account to burn the grain; then grind or bruise it roughly. Boil 2 1/4 gallons of water, and when it has stood ten minutes (or so hot as to pain the finger sharply), put in the grain-mash it well, and let it stand three hours; then drain it off. Boil two gallons more water, which pour on the grains (rather hotter than before, but not boiling), and mash them well, let it stand two hours and drain it off: mash the grains again well with two gallons more water, and in one hour and a half draw it off. The three worts will be about five gallons. Then mix 7 lbs. of treacle in 5 gallons of water, and boil the whole ten gallons with 4 ounces of hops, for one hour and a half, taking care to stir it so long as the hops float on the top; let it cool, and when about milk warm take a good tea cupful of yeast, and stir it well together, beginning with about a gallon of wort at a time; let it ferment for l8 hours in a tub covered with a sack; put it into a nine gallon cask, and keep it well filled; bung it up in three days, and in 14 days it will be good sound fine beer, equal in strength to London Porter. If you cannot get treacle, take 5 lbs. of the cheapest and darkest sugar you can get.

This one is significantly different to the first recipe I found. It actually uses barley for a start (or oats). It also uses less hops but boils them for much longer, around 2.5g/L boiled for 90 minutes.

It also calls for an addition of yeast, the other one left that out so I'm assuming it was working on spontaneous fermentation. This one calls for a tea cup full of yeast, drastic underpitching in this day and age but probably good enough for then.

The way it goes about the mash is a little odd and I'm not actually sure that the barley or oats it describes were malted. The roasting in the oven could potentially destroy the enzymes and make conversion either slow or impossible. The mashing instructions also seem problematic. 10 minutes off the boil is way too hot for the probably non existent enzymes to function. I guess if the grain isn't malted but gets browned, it might just be contributing colour and flavour rather than a significant amount of fermentables. From what I can tell, we're talking about 4-5kg of grain in about 40 litres of beer.

Overall the instructions are for something more recognisably like beer than the last one but it's still not something I'd be in a rush to go out and brew. I guess what both these recipes are doing is showing what people were trying to do in response to the climate and with the limited ingredients at their disposal. Homebrew wasn't a luxury or a hobby like it is for us, it was about providing for yourself and your family or being thrifty in much the same way that growing veggies or having chooks would be.

All is not lost though! I've got a couple more colonial homebrew recipes up my sleeve and one of them actually seems like it'd be really good.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...