1792 porter recipe discovery.

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grant-robison

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In searching my school library for books on brewing (that's University of Tulsa), It turns out that we have on microfiche "Every man his own brewer: a small treatise, explaining the art and mystery of brewing porter, ale, and table-beer." written by one Samuel Child from London.
Within I found a recipe for a 6 gallon batch of porter. It goes thus:
1 peck of Malt
1/4lb of Liquorice Root
1/8oz of Spanish Liquorice
1/4lb of Essentia Bina
1/4lb of Colour
1/2lb of Treacle
1/4lb of Hops
capsicum, heading, ginger, linseed &c. &c.
Water for 6 gallons porter.

Also contained was instructions for making Essentia Bina, and colour:
Essentia Bina is made from sugar boiled until thick and syrupy and black and extremely bitter. (theres actually a little bit on this site about it https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f11/historical-brewing-equipment-72760/index2.html)
colour is pretty much just caramel, boiled sugar till caramel brown and a little bitter.
Need to do research about "spanish liquorice" probably gonna do a noble hop EKG or Fuggles etc. The peck of malt works out to about 9lbs.

I'm extremely excited to brew this and so are my brewing buddies. Any one have experience with these ingredients?
 
wow! Awesome find! Good Luck with your brew! Sorry I don't know much about those ingredients, but I am interested to know how everything goes.
 
i think it would be so cool to hand someone a beer and say "this is a 220 year old recipe"
 
I'd suggest reducing the licorice root the first time around.

I brew Charlie Papazian's tumultuous porter (Joy of Homebrewing) every once in a while. I did it this summer with 6 gm licorice stick (associated with Spanish "juice" by author Randy Mosher) and 0.6 oz licorice root. Other spices/herbs included 3 oz ginger, 38 gm juniper berries, and 2 oz fresh spruce tips. It was a very busy beer and next time around I'd cut back a little on everything.

1/4 lb (4 oz) licorice root sounds like a lot. 1-2 oz should be plenty but the sweetness of the licorice root could offset the bitterness of the essentia bina

The linseed part sounds grim. I wonder if this is one of those adulterated porters that led to laws banning such stuff from beer (I've also wondered if this kind of recipe inspired Papazian's musings on the tumultuous porter recipe)

Porter in early 19th century England soon became nothing but brown and pale malt and hops according to research in Ron Pattinson's blog, Shut Up About Barclay Perkins.

Your mileage may vary. Sounds like a great project. Happy brewing!
 
Yeah it really is from 1792, the book is still printed (amazon has an edition).
1/4 lb (4 oz) licorice root sounds like a lot. 1-2 oz should be plenty but the sweetness of the licorice root could offset the bitterness of the essentia bina
The whole recipe seems intense: e.g. 1/4lb hops. And i've read that in those days an "aroma" addition was almost unheard of, including these hops as a FWH was the mainstay. And they had much longer wort boils on the order of 2 hours or so. which considering a low AA hop like Fuggles (or any other noble) would still be like 100IBU.
But additionally their hop cultivars probably werent as powerful as modern ones, and maybe they werent as fresh. So if you model this with beersmith with fuggles @ 2%AA; and a boil time of 120 minutes you get 42IBU. at least that's my speculation
 
i'm not going to addd any of those optional herbs/spices like linseed or ginger or whatevs. Although a little ginger doesnt seem terrible.
 
The hopping process I've seen is 50% at start of boil and 50% with 30 minutes to go.

I've got an 1850 porter from Whitbread brewing logs going that was OG 1060 and approx 60 ibus by that method. I model hop ounces at 4% alpha. I also figure that there isn't much need to boil for more than 75-90 minutes although likely there's some extra kettle caramel going on with longer boils. They did serious mashing and boiling and parti-gyling which I just don't have time for presently (some day perhaps)

Various licorices, ginger, juniper and spruce are fun to play with which is why I keep brewing tumultuous porter.

I plan to brew a few Whitbread porters and stouts from 1914 next year. Mostly pale, brown and black malts with hopping running from 30-60 ibus using the method listed above.

Cheers!
 
One further thought on hop intensity.

I model hops at 4% alpha acids/ounce but for the initial boil hops I do use higher alpha hops to reduce hop content of the brew (1 oz Warrior = 4 oz kent goldings for example)
 
1/4 lb (4 oz) licorice root sounds like a lot. 1-2 oz should be plenty but the sweetness of the licorice root could offset the bitterness of the essentia bina

The linseed part sounds grim. I wonder if this is one of those adulterated porters that led to laws banning such stuff from beer (I've also wondered if this kind of recipe inspired Papazian's musings on the tumultuous porter recipe)

I'm finally brewing this tomorrow!!! I found the recipe and printed it off again, and noticed that it's not 1/4lb (4oz) of Licorice root, it's 1/4oz. So... heres how it's gonna go down:

I'm brewing 3gallons (half of the recipe). I'm mashing
5.5lbs Maris Otter
Making "Colour" in the boil kettle with dark brown sugar
and running wort into it.
adding .5oz EKG, .5 Fuggles (Leaf) as a FWH
@60:
1/8oz Licorice Root
1.5oz Grated Ginger
1/4oz "Capsicum" (Cayenne Pepper)
2oz or more essentia bina

@30:
.5oz EKG & Fuggles
Wyeast 1028 London Ale

Thinking about Oak in the secondary?
And thinking about toasted oats, and wheat malt, and thinking that if the color isnt right, i have some roasted barley and patent around.
 
We've been down this sort of road on a couple of different occasions here on HBT. Here are some links which you may find interesting:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/porter-what-goes-yesterday-today-73308/
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/historical-porter-some-recipes-199576/

Some important things to note:

Porter in the late C18 was a "stock" ale, meaning it was left to mature for quite a while in the wood. That imparts a distinctive flavor profile; ask anyone who's brewed with Brettanomyces. The spices and other additions not hops, malt, and sugar are, in my opinion as a brewing historian, meant to mimic the flavor of "stock" porter in a beer which can be consumed without expensive aging. There is another school of thought, that they are to adjust brewing liquor. At any rate, many of the spices and chemicals are dangerous, because some are poisonous. Best to avoid them.

"Essentia bina" is essentially molasses. You can make your own, as you've found here on HBT, but it's a PITA for something which to my palate anyway differs so subtly from regular ol' molasses. When I do this I use molasses and call it a day. ;) Treacle, however, is a distinctive thing with a distinctive flavor. I'd not substitute anything else for it.

Keep in mind 4 ounces of hops, or 1/4 pound, is not that much for six gallons, especially operating under the assumption that 1790s hops were low alpha and didn't keep well. It's safe to conclude that by the time hops made it from hop yard to kettle, the AA % was quite low. Don't be afraid to use the stated hops schedule; just use low (sub 5%) AA hops.

You can make "colour" by running wort into the kettle and boiling it down. This is a common historical method.

The color won't be "right", at least as you expect modern Porter to resemble. See the above-referenced threads. Don't futz with it; keep it as true as possible to the original recipe and take a trip back in time. :D

Good luck, and welcome to the historical brewing obsession!

Bob
 
Two things. First, given that this is a porter recipe from the late 18th C, the malt they used would have been a diastatic brown malt. That is, a lightly roasted malt (kilned over straw/fern/wood) that would be used for 100% (or so) of the grist and would produce a sufficiently black colored beer. Given that this recipe is for a home-brew type of beer, maybe they wouldn't have used brown malt, but the commercial brewers certainly did.

Here is a look at making a period, diastatic brown malt.

http://perfectpint.blogspot.com/2012/05/making-diastatic-brown-malt-again.html

Also, from my experiences tasting and making essentia bina, the flavor is quite a bit different than molasses. Mainly in that it has a bitter-chocolate-burnt flavor from setting the sugar aflame.

Good luck with the brew.
 

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