George Washington's beer
- Thread starter petie
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1 gallon molasses to 10 gallons of beer and a 3 hour boil with no grains? That's definitely interesting. I'd love to read about someone trying it.
It's bran hops though. No grain...
zeg
Well-Known Member
Sounds like a decent recipe if you are in a bind. Works out to be in the 'ordinary bitter' territory alcohol-wise, so looks plausible. Maybe I'll try a 1-gallon batch some time.
It could be that there is a missed period between Bran and Hops. When you crush your grain, it looks similar to bran, with the husks all open, right? Then flavor with "Hops to your taste". A sifter varies in size, but think a screen-bottomed wooden framed device used to separate grain from flour...there are a few antique grain sifters on ebay that look like they could hold over 20 lbs of grain at once without a problem.
zeg
Well-Known Member
Perhaps... I thought that at first, but then calculated the OG based just on the molasses. It's spot on for a "small beer," and since there's no mashing step, it seems unlikely that the beer would get better from boiling a bunch of grain for 3 hours. Plus, hops seems like something that would be "to taste," whereas grain would normally be a fairly set quantity.
Though, thinking about it again, I guess maybe it's being used as a specialty grain, and perhaps extracted tannins would improve a beer that's otherwise a sickly sweet molasses mead.
Or maybe the molasses is to add flavor and some extra strength to the wort that for whatever reason was boiled with the bran still in it...I have zero knowledge of 18th century British brewing practices to draw any real conclusions.
I have also heard it argued that there is an original version of the recipe with a comma that makes it clear that the bran and hops are different items. Anyway, I brewed a somewhat modified extract version of this for the Northern California Homebrewers Festival. I was going to originally do a PM, but realized that, extract or grain wasn't going to be the issue with this recipe, it was going to be the MASSIVE amount of molasses. I decided to go the easy route and do extract and some old whole bittering hops I had in the freezer to give it that "authentic" taste. I kegged it about a month ago. The bitterness added by the molasses is substantial and the flavor of the molasses still comes through. I'm hoping it will mellow before the festival. It's not undrinkable, but it's also not great.
Out of curiosity, what sort of molasses did you use? If it was blackstrap molasses, by far the most widely available molasses around here and the most bitter, I think that stuff may be of relatively recent popularity. I know that it's still used in animal feed. George Washington, being a wealthy landowner concerned for his health, would probably be unlikely to eat the same things fed to his animals and slaves. He'd probably go for light or maybe medium molasses in a pinch.
Just a thought.
bierhaus15
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I know small beer brewed around the time revolution, that is beer for the troops, was often just molasses and spruce tips. It doesn't taste very nice, even at 3% abv.
Oh God NO, I specifically avoided blackstrap. I was trying to get light molasses, which I use sparingly in my old ale recipe. However, the store was out. So, I went with regular molasses, but it was still a LOT of molasses.
