I want to make a really old style beer.

I was doing some thinking about what I wanted to brew next. I came up with the idea of brewing a beer that was consumed around the time of the revolution/colonial period. What type of ales would they drink in 1776?? I was thinking some type of schilling?? maybe a 20 ?? or maybe some type of english ale... Please help I want to create my own recipe and would love some more information.

Sam adams did this a few years back with with 375 colonial ale...it had molasses and other things in it.

http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/beer

http://www.thebrewsite.com/2006/01/07/poor_richards.php

Randy Mosher's Radical Brewing has some recipes and discussion related to this.

You could also do a porter, stout, darker ale (I believe that really light colored ales came along after the 18th century)... Moderate Scottish ales, and probably English Bitters were pretty common...

If you're looking for specific historical recipes, keep in mind that most of the founding fathers were also brewers. I think with a bit of digging, and web crawling, you can find enough info to make brews either crafted by, or enjoyed by, some/most of them...

In my quick search, I did find a little interesting piece of information... Back then, people who didn't drink, were charged 10% more on their life insurance... :rockin: Now if we could only get that discount BACK!

Look up the history of the research into Poor Richard's Ale which was based on Ben Franklin's writings about beer in Poor Richard's ALmanac as well as his journals.

There were a lot of people from (the countries that eventually became) Germany in the colonies, especially Pennsylvania. They were probably drinking dunkelweizens, schwarzbiers, or marzens, which had been around since the 1500s.

This is all very interesting I'm going to check it out. If anyone finds anymore info please let me know.

I know braggots where kinda big back then too but I'm not sure about the colonial times. Also, cider was a big deal for the 13 colonies because of the abundance of apple trees they planted.

But my main concern is finding the main ingredients they used that were easily obtainable by them. So I read that hops were mostly grown wild so it was easy for them to find some hops and aparents kent golding hops was the most common back then.

http://www.gruitale.com/intro_en.htm

I just made a old German style ale called Kotbusser. I didn't know what type of yeast to use but I ended up using WLP036.

I remember having a website that was all historic beer stuff but I don't seem to have it bookmarked. Here it is it isn't recipes per say but information: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~pwp/tofi/liz_brewing.html

Here's another:

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/brewing.html