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.

Drying my home grown hops

Picking a few kilos of hops is awesome but it does mean that there's a bit of work to be done in a short time. Hops either need to be used very soon after picking or dried out for use at a later time. Short of having an oast or a makeshift fan and fly screen contraption, a food dehydrator set to low temperature is a good way to dry the crop. The only real drawback I found was that it doesn't have a large capacity so it took me 6 batches to get through the full harvest.

Loading up the dehydrator. It's probably a
bit overfull. 

I loaded up the dehydrator and set it to 35C and it took 6.5 hours to dry the first batch. The trays needed to be swapped after a few hours as the bottom layer dried quicker than the top. For later batches I turned the temperature up to 41C, filled the trays a little less and managed to get the time down to about 4 hours. I'd have preferred to keep it at 35C but I've read that commercial hop drying is carried out warmer than that and I had to return the dehydrator.

Weighing out the dried hops for bagging

As they dried the room was filled with the aroma of sweet perfume, pine and grass. It was incredible. My wife said the smell brought back childhood memories of Christmas with real pine trees.

It felt like I was bagging drugs

Light, heat and oxygen are the enemies of hops. So after drying I weighed them out into 60g lots and put them in vacuum sealed bags and then into the freezer. In theory I'll be able to use them months and months down the track and they'll be close to as good as they are today.

Ready for the freezer

All up I finished up with 640g of dried hops from 2.736kg of wet hops - way more than I'll be able to use this year given my plans.

Sticky lupulin goodness! It smells just
like the hops on the vine.

I'm thinking of doing a small boil and ferment in an erlenmeyer flask to get an idea of the level of bitterness they'll contribute. I can't measure the bitterness in a scientific way but even a taste should give me enough of an idea to plan future brews with it.

2014 Hop Harvest

I planted my Hallertau and Saaz rhizomes 2 1/2 years ago and since then they've been pretty well neglected. They're growing in my mate Jason's backyard, running along a reinforcing steel tunnel that used to be a hothouse frame. And even though I've neglected them, they've treated me very well. In their first year they didn't do much, last year we were pleasantly surprised to get 440g wet hops from them and today we harvested 2.98kg of wet hops from the Hallertau vine.

The Saaz has always lagged behind the Hallertau and its much smaller crop looks like it needs at least another month to mature.

The Hallertau flowers smell beautifully floral, perfume-like really. The plan is to use some wet hops in a Saison I've got planned for Saturday. The rest are being dried in a dehydrator and I'll vacuum seal them and keep them in the freezer until I'm ready to use them. I'm expecting to have 500-600g of dried hops.

Plump hop flowers ready for the picking!

Some of the flowers were pretty huge!

Jason getting a good whiff

Hopppsssssssssssss