Nice article on Thomas Jefferson (and wife) as brewers - late 18th/early 19th century

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I know i read that a bushel of barley was 48 pounds...for 10 gallons of water. That sounds like youre maximizing your solubility of water with that amount of malt. On a lighter note, I heard T.J. put a pound of hops in every pint and he used to sit around the house with G.W. and Martha and talk about the old times when their grandads "really" new how to make beer.
 
'Malted' barley is 34lbs, but I'm guessing TJ was using imperial measurements, so it may have been more. We'd have to ask an agricultural historian. If he's saying 8-10 gallons per bushel, let's say the average being 9 gallons...which is approx 4 lbs per gallon...in beer calculus that's a 10.8% beer. If a bushel 200+ years ago was somewhere between 34-48 lbs, then he'd be making a barley wine, which wouldn't be too far fetched considering he had a vineyard and wine cellar too. http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Vineyard
 
"...at Monticello three-quarters of a pound of hops were added for every bushel of malt..."

Respectable! I'd have a few with him.

(Side note: If you've never been, try to get there--Monticello is amazing.)
 
How crappy would that be though to only brew as seasons permitted? We are pretty fortunate.
 
The degree of modification in the malt would have been considerably less than modern malts - so the potential yield would have to be overcome by sheer volume of malt.

As for hops, they would have likely been low-AA% indigenous varieties; historic recipes make no mention of IBUs, they talk about weight. Further to this, we're talking bittering charges only.

The saccharometer (hydrometer) was invented in 1784, so some measure of repeatability could be accomplished. The brewing text mentioned in the article (Michael Combrune's Theory and Practice of Brewing) was published in 1804; you can view the text in its entirety here.
 
Puttting it all together, I think he was making barley wine. It sounds clear to me that they were going for higher alcohol amounts (regardless of less efficient yield). Higher alcohol + lots of hops + cool beer cellar = perfect conditions for long term aging. Just an educated guess.
 
explains why they have a few hop plants growing in the gardens at Monticello. I'm always tempted to take a bag out there in August and sneak some cones and make a TJ beer.
 
People made big beers back then and a common vessel for beer was the gill, only 5 ounces. The AA% of their hops were probably in the 5-6% range, like Bramling. We'd definitely call it a barleywine.
 
For anyone that's interested, I strongly recommend trying Yards brewery's Thomas Jefferson Tavern Ale. They say that it is based on his recipe, and its a part of their outstanding Ales of the Revolution series. Fantastic beer from an incredibly underrated brewery.
 
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