beer time capsule

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after grandpa passed away we found his malt liquor recipe, his old stone crock, rusted bottle capper, and even a box of decades old caps (with cork inside the top to seal against the bottle). we followed his recipe and used all of his old supplies, which had probably been sitting in his garage for longer than i've been alive. yesterday we bottled 5 gallons, and it occurred to me that these are essentially like beer time capsules. the date: 1950, the place: south dakota. i cant wait to crack one open and taste what he was drinking with the brothers in his fraternity.:mug:
photo77.jpg
 
Very cool--I scored a box of those exact same caps a few years ago, they're just sitting on my shelf. Cheers to you for using them!
 
Neat. I'd love to find an old crock fermenter one of these days.
they're great. we've got two-six gallon crocks, one-three gallon crock, and one-fifteen gallon crock. we use the sixes and three as primary fermenters continually (boy do they get heavy). i'm going to try the 15 next month. its a little odd because it has a hole for an old wooden spigot. i've been uncomfortable deciding whether i could ever actually get the thing sanitized, but finally decided, hey, if people can sanitize wood barrels, why not this.
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we HAD a 12 gallon and 30 gallon that were the greatest things known to man, but this is what we found when we opened the moving boxes in april.
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Care to share the recipe?
dont laugh now...its pretty wonky
photo8.jpg

i have to admit though, i deviated in a few ways:
1) instead of two yeast cakes, i used a packet of safale us-05
2) instead of a quart of dark malt, i used 3.33 cups of dark DME
3) instead of .5 tsp priming sugar in each bottle, i primed the whole thing with 224g dark DME. i fear that i didnt end up with a full 5 gallons after leaving the trub behind so hopefully i didnt overcarbonate it too badly. each bottle is a tad underfilled, but i still made 50 bottles
:pipe:
 
That's awesome! I have some OLD OLD family dandelion and elderberry wine recipes from my great great great grandfather but that is about it. I don't think anyone has made the wine since he did back in the God knows when. I found the recipes in an old leather folder when cleaning out my great grandfathers barn after he passed. Going to give them a shot this summer.
 
after grandpa passed away we found his malt liquor recipe, his old stone crock, rusted bottle capper, and even a box of decades old caps (with cork inside the top to seal against the bottle). we followed his recipe and used all of his old supplies, which had probably been sitting in his garage for longer than i've been alive. yesterday we bottled 5 gallons, and it occurred to me that these are essentially like beer time capsules. the date: 1950, the place: south dakota. i cant wait to crack one open and taste what he was drinking with the brothers in his fraternity.:mug:
photo77.jpg

Wow, That looks a heck of a lot like my dad's stuff. I remember the caps well. I have his capper. It looks identical to yours.

I did not find his recipe though.
 
I lost my Dads capper sometime ago in a move I fear. Absolutely amazing though that you got the recipe and I am going to do it myself. Thanks for sharing
 
Can't imagine the amount of starches to sugars from the potato. Been thinking about this for a while..,........
 
I just been watching a programme on tv here in the uk called "wartime farm" and they was making potato beer. I learnt that the reason they used potatoes is because in the 2nd world war malt barley was scarce in Britain and winston Churchill did not want beer to be rationed so they used potatoes.

You all probably know this but I wanted to share my new knowledge :)

Cheers
 
I just been watching a programme on tv here in the uk called "wartime farm" and they was making potato beer. I learnt that the reason they used potatoes is because in the 2nd world war malt barley was scarce in Britain and winston Churchill did not want beer to be rationed so they used potatoes.

You all probably know this but I wanted to share my new knowledge :)

Cheers

I loved that show. Been watching it streamed online. I'm a big fan of all those series- Victorian Farm, Victorian Pharmacy, etc....
 
Cool, great way to honor your family.

Since its malt liquor and all, dont forget to pour one out for your homey :D
 
Revvy said:
I loved that show. Been watching it streamed online. I'm a big fan of all those series- Victorian Farm, Victorian Pharmacy, etc....

Yep they have all been good. I love history programmes too.
 
I just been watching a programme on tv here in the uk called "wartime farm" and they was making potato beer. I learnt that the reason they used potatoes is because in the 2nd world war malt barley was scarce in Britain and winston Churchill did not want beer to be rationed so they used potatoes.
I watched the programme and it didn't look to me as if that method would work. They just seemed to be boiling up the pototoes. Maybe I missed something.

Potatoes were used a little in WW II but in the form of potato flour. It wasn't greatly popular with brewers. After a bumper crop of oats in 1942 the government forced brewers to use 10% oats in their grists for a while. Mostly flaked oats, but sometimes malted oats. You even see weird grains like rye turning up in beers.

Britain was very lucky with the weather during the middle war years and had record harvests.

While beer itself wasn't rationed, the ingredients to brew it were. Breweries were allocated a certain amount of malt and hops based on how much they had brewed pre-war. It meant that there were often shortages of beer. Pubs were obliged to open for the permitted hours whether they had any beer to sell or not.

There were shortages of bottles, crates, crown corks and just about everything else a brewery needed. The shortage of bottles led to a big shift in packaging from bottled to draught. Breweries often wouldn't deliver new supplies of bottled beers without getting back an equivalent number of empties and crates first.
 
Cool story. I'm interested in how the beer turns out.

Very interesting recipe. It would be interesting to see an OG reading and a FG reading on this.
 
45_70sharps said:
Cool story. I'm interested in how the beer turns out.

Very interesting recipe. It would be interesting to see an OG reading and a FG reading on this.

+ 1, if it turns out ok, I'd like to to make a couple of gallon. I like the idea of some good old school style beer.
 
I knew I had read something about potato beer recently.
I did a little checking and BYO magazine had an article about it.
Theirs wasn't for a simple home brew like this.
The author was talking about a retired lucky lager master brewer who spoke at an event and talked about using potatoes in World War 2 when some of the
grains were rationed.
They used dried potatoes and use them the same as any other grain in the mash.

This simple garage brew it looks a lot more interesting to me.
 
Elucidate me if you can - is "dark malt" a historical term that has a readily identifiably meaning; i.e. was there some substance from back in the day called "dark malt" that came as a liquid?
 
Ferment 72 hours... 72 hours = 3 days. And to think we tell people to leave it in the primary for 7 times that.

I am rather intrigued as well. let us know how it turns out.

generally it would be best to transfer to a secondary and let settle for clarity, but staying true to the recipe, i waited for it to stop bubbling in the primary, in order to consider it "dead," and sent it straight into the bottles.
 
Cool story. I'm interested in how the beer turns out.

Very interesting recipe. It would be interesting to see an OG reading and a FG reading on this.

OG was 1.06something. i don't know why i didnt measure an FG before and after priming it. that would have been useful for calculating the ABV. oh well, next time.
 
Elucidate me if you can - is "dark malt" a historical term that has a readily identifiably meaning; i.e. was there some substance from back in the day called "dark malt" that came as a liquid?

i assumed, since it was measured in quarts, that he meant something like this, but i didnt have any LME, so i converted a comparable amount of this
 
OG was 1.06something. i don't know why i didnt measure an FG before and after priming it. that would have been useful for calculating the ABV. oh well, next time.

I may be doing something wrong, but If I know the OG before pitching yeast and the FG before I put in the bottling sugar, that is close enough for me. I'm not selling it. Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, nuclear warfare, and calculating ABV? The bottling sugar should add alcohol ever so slightly.

Dark Malt Extract? BYO had this to say - along with a whole lot more info....

Malt extract had already been produced in America as far back as 1896. In fact, Muntons in Britain started importing extract from the USA in 1919. (It did not take over Fison’s until 1934.) And, as a result of a sugar shortage in the First World War, the US government had pushed the use of malt extract as a sugar substitute in baking. What this meant was that, at the onset of Prohibition, a retail distribution network for malt extract was already in existence. So, many brewers jumped on this bandwagon, including such well-known names as Schlitz, Miller and Anheuser-Busch, with the latter introducing a hop-flavored extract in 1925. And, of course, Pabst — whose Blue Ribbon extract remained as a homebrewer’s standby long after Prohibition’s demise. Indeed, Blue Ribbon stayed around until recent times, when it became the Premier brand and eventually ceased to be made in the US.

Now it is starting to come back. I'm pretty sure that is what dad used. Blue Ribbon Extract.

Yeah, that's it.

This is what it looked like.

Blue Ribbon Malt Extract.jpg
 
I may be doing something wrong, but If I know the OG before pitching yeast and the FG before I put in the bottling sugar, that is close enough for me. I'm not selling it. Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, nuclear warfare, and calculating ABV? The bottling sugar should add alcohol ever so slightly.

Dark Malt Extract? BYO had this to say - along with a whole lot more info....



Now it is starting to come back. I'm pretty sure that is what dad used. Blue Ribbon Extract.

Yeah, that's it.

This is what it looked like.

We have a pretty in depth thread about that product (now made in Detroit under the name premier malt extract) that includes stuff I posted on the historical, and experiments by people using it today.
 
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