Small Beer

I'm new to brewing, but have been a reader of historical novels like Horatio Hornblower and the like for years. Now that I am learning about the different types of beers, I am reminded of the small beer that gets mentioned a lot in many of the books of the age of sail. Is this a style worth making and is there a recipe for it? Thanks for your thoughts.

Tom

A classic small beer is made from a later gyle of a bigger beer; that is you make a very strong all-grain batch of beer, like barleywine, and then re-sparge the leftover mash to collect what little sugar is left. This results in a pretty low gravity wort which you can ferment out to a nice easy drinking session beer. This technique, called partigyle, is a very traditional way of brewing, and it allows you to make the most beer of the ingredients you have. Also, it gave innkeepers a way to make beer they could serve to their patrons in large quantities, cheaply, without causing a riot every night.

The easiest to find example of this would be Anchor's Small Beer which is made from the late runnings of their Old Foghorn barleywine. Most traditional British breweries use this to make multiple different beers as well.

In my opinion, it would be fairly difficult to recreate a small beer in a single batch, but the best way to do it I think would be to find a recipe of a strong beer you like, and then scale it way way down, shooting for a max OG of around 1.035.

The reason beer is mentionned a lot in those books is that water goes bad very rapidly, while beer keeps for a longer time. Hops, alcohol, acidity and the brewing process (which includes long boiling periods), mean that beer, even small beer, was much more shelf stable than water: thus sailors, which could be months without having a freshwater source, would need to rely on beer for their hydratation. The same was true for most of Europe in high population density areas or near intensive farming before the advent of water filtration and centralized sewer systems. When everybody is dumping their refuse (literaly) in rivers and waterways and sanitation is abysmal, beer is the natural choice because it is safe to drink. And when you need to drink it in high quantities (sailors) or from the craddle (infants were often weened and went straight to the bottle!), low alcohol levels were very much needed.

Thanks. Among my history magazines, there are often articles on food preparation for certain periods. Even Napoleonic period wargaming magazines have articles on this stuff. So it might be interesting to put something together some day with all the right touches. Now I just need to get some weevles for my ship's buiscuits to make it authentic.

Thomas, I've read a massive amounts of Age of Sail Books, same as you the Hornblower type series. I forgot whether it was mentioned a lot in Hornblower or the Bolitho series but I've contemplated making Maderia wine. That'd be interesting as well. And the weevles are not neccesary for the hard tack, I've tried.

Would you mind mentioning the Napoleonic wargaming magazine? Haha, I didn't know there were any other games of the type besides Napoleon Total War.

Thanks.

I think the one magazine is out of print these days, Eagles and Empires or something like that. The game shop in Chicago by a similar name published the magazine, several sets of rules and had a great webstore presence. Each issue had an article on period food and drink, dress, weapons, tactics and a scenario or two as well as a cartoon. I'll have to go home and scrounge through my old issues and see what I can find. I remember they had an article on making Spotted Dog and some of the other things named in some of the books.