1860s Australian pale ale recipe outline

I’d been sitting on yesterday's post about wheat malt and the beginnings of a distinctive Australian beer for a few weeks. I was hoping to find information about hopping rates to go with the information about malt and sugar so that I could produce a recipe outline. So of course the day after I gave up and posted it I stumbled across exactly what I had been searching for. I don't know how I managed to miss it but only two weeks later the same author wrote about the use of colonial hops. So much for my searching skills.

Anyway, now I've got enough information to sketch out a 1860s Australian pale ale. There's lots more to the article and I'll try to get back to it soon but the snippet below contains the gold for my purposes today:

The Star (Ballarat),  31 December, 1863

4 pounds per hogshead is described as the ‘low average’ hopping rate, that's about 7.5g/L or 170g in a 23L batch. We’re not given any details on how or when these hops were added but from the 8-10 homebrew recipes I've found from the time, the hops were often added as one giant first wort hop addition and that's exactly how I would do it here. Whenever I've used the FWH technique I've found that it has given a softer bitterness which would probably be a good thing when making such a large addition of hops. We're talking about roughly 90 IBUs by my calculations. That might sound excessive but if you've seen some of the recipes on Shut Up About Barclay Perkins, you'll know that it's not unusual. There's not enough information to be dogmatic about it though so add the hops as you see fit.

So based on that and the information I posted yesterday, if you want to brew a reasonably authentic mid-19th century Australian pale ale:


Fermentables
A starting gravity in the range of 1.045-1.055 made up of:

• Australian barley and/or wheat malt in any combination up to 100% wheat
• Sugar worth up to 25% of the gravity points

Hops
7.5g/L of hops, both colonial and UK hops were used so go with East Kent Goldings. Unfortunately I think Tasmanian Goldings are a thing of the past so until I can grow my own, the UK ones will have to do.

As discussed above, it's probably worth making it a first wort hop addition but the lack of specific information means you should use your own judgment. You might also want to adjust for the age and lack of cold storage of 19th century hops but I'm not sure how to go about that.


Yeast
It seems that Australian brewers were using yeast from imported beers and ales so the best way to go would be to use something descended from a Burton, London or Edinburgh brewery or use the Coopers strain. You can probably get away with any UK strain though.

My shortlist would probably be cultured up Coopers dregs, WLP009 or WY1028.


So there you have it, I just need to find the time and energy to get brewing. I'd love to hear from anyone else who gives it a try.

Colonial-style Australian pale ale

I've been getting hints at what some of the colonial ales and beers looked like through homebrew recipes and comparisons made in newspapers but most of the time they were either nasty bran & molasses affairs or otherwise very similar to the Burton and pale ales being imported into the country. Our national inferiority complex was in full effect even then and meant that very often our colonial ales and beers were attempts to mimic British beers.

But I found an article which shows something else emerging in Victoria & South Australia in the mid-19th century, something uniquely Australian. It's agenda is to argue for prioritising the use of the abundant colonial wheat in brewing instead of spending money on imported British malt. In the process gives heaps of interesting details about the practice of breweries in the area. I think we're getting an early glimpse of the Australian pale ale, an ale more appropriate to our climate and available ingredients than most of the imported stuff.

The Star (Ballarat), 15 December, 1863

The first gem is an outline of the standard grist used by brewers in the region: the equivalent of 4 bushels of malt per hogshead made up of 3 bushels of malt and sugar equivalent to 1 bushel of malt. 3 bushels of malt/hogshead is, if Wikipedia can be trusted, around 190g/litre. In a 23L batch of homebrew that's 4.35 kilograms of malt. Exactly how much sugar they were able to extract from that malt is not clear up my hunch is that it would be more comparable to homebrew systems than the high efficiency of today's commercial breweries. Assuming 70% efficiency, we're talking about an original gravity of around 1.048 of which 1.036 is from the malt and 1.012 is from sugar.

Use of sugar deserves attention. As I mentioned above, the article suggests that around 25% of the fermentables came from sugar. There were plenty of reasons for colonial brewers to use sugar and I’ll probably have a post up about that soon. Even more than the presence of wheat, the use of sugar was a distinctive of early colonial brewing while the the use of sugar was illegal in Britain until 1847 and only seems to have become popular through the 1870-80s. The use of sugar in these Australian pale ales led to a lighter bodied, more refreshing ale than the majority of the imported ales that were available.

The Star (Ballarat), 15 December, 1863

It's worth noting that they were often using a large amount of wheat. I already posted about Tasmanian homebrewers using wheat in times of plenty but above we've got a report of a brewery in Bendigo relying on wheat malt and only turning to barley once there was no more wheat available. There's also mention of a brewery in Adelaide using wheat when there was a shortage of barley and several others in the Beechworth district and Melbourne were also using it. It doesn't seem like everyone was using it but it sounds as if it was common enough and hints at the beginnings of a unique style of beer – the Australian pale ale.

There's some more gold to be mined from the article as well as more about wheat malt and sugar in colonial brewing that needs to be pursued. Each post leads to way more questions. Well, for me at least.