Hilarious old homebrewing book!

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Torchiest

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My future FIL gave me an ancient homebrewing book a couple months ago, and I've glanced at it now and again for laughs. It's terribly outdated, and generally misinformed about a number of things. However, I didn't realize just how BAD it truly was until I started looking at some of the recipes. My favorite (i.e. the worst) one has got to be this:

Brown Ale #2
2 lbs roasted barley
2 lbs black patent
4 lbs white sugar
4 oz hops
2 tsp salt
1/2 oz citric acid
yeast
nutrient

I hope all the other EACs out there find this as ridiculous as I do. BTW, the book is *chuckle* Home Brewing Without Failures: How to Make Your Own Beer, Ale, Stout, and Cider by H. E. Bravery.
 
Don't laugh -- my father in law was telling me about beer his dad used to brew -- in a great big barrel (I picture 55 gallon drum) in the living room -- with stuff like corn kernels and raisins and chopped up potatoes in it -- and about the firemen that came over to put out a fire they had and everyone of them dipping into the barrel with a ladel, etc. -- back in the day, free beer was.... well.... FREE BEER
And there was no such thing as Craft Beer back then, either, remember.
 
When I started brewing in the early 80s it was all like that.

Recipes were closely guarded, ingredients hard to find and in individuals with in depth knowledge were like friggen Oracles.

I am amazed that in this day and age anyone brews bad beer, after all, it wants to make beer, you are just helping it.

Cheers,

knewshound
 
That's too funny - I just stumbled across an old recipe that is REALLY similar in a book I got from the library yesterday: "Home Brewed Beers and Stouts" by CJJ Berry (1963).

MILK STOUT
2 lb. Patent black malt
6 oz. Flaked barley
2 lb. Glucose (powdered)
4 gallons Water (soft)
Brewing yeast
2 oz. hops
1 tsp salt.

Yum.
 
Fingers said:
Four pounds of white sugar!!!!

I think I have to spit something out....

Perhaps something like this?

spit_take.gif
 
Dennys Fine Consumptibles said:
No wonder home brew beer still gets odd looks from people till they try it.

Now I think I understand why when I gave one of my recent AG porters to a ~50 year old guy at my church, he wasn't too sure about trying it after remembering how his dad made beer and it was marginally ok. Prior to hearing that, I'd figured, like an earlier poster said, that this stuff practically makes itself, you just have to heat it up and cool it down.
 
Technically speaking Beer, Ale were different drinks.
Hops/No Hops. Not sure about stout!
But I don't think this was the case at the time of writing the book.
 
orfy said:
Technically speaking Beer, Ale were different drinks.
Hops/No Hops. Not sure about stout!
But I don't think this was the case at the time of writing the book.

I guess things are starting to get a little clearer in my mind...

Beer (the old definition) = no hops = BMC...
 
regular sugar is 100% fermentable....

2lbs black patent, I swear to god if I went to my LHBS and bought those ingredients just like that, the HBS owner would smash me over the head with a hydrometer and use my body to make scrumpy...

:mug:
 
Oh, in case anyone was curious to try, that's actually a four gallon recipe, so for a regular sized batch, you'd have to adjust your figures to:

2.5 lbs roasted barley
2.5 lbs black patent
5 lbs white sugar
5 oz hops
etc...

:D
 
In their day, Berry and Bravery were well respected authors (like Palmer and Papazian nowadays).

They were among the first authors to write books on home brewing when taxation free home brewing was legalized in the UK in 1963.

Fortunately, I didn't start brewing until the early 70's when Brewing Better Beers and Advanced Home Brewing by Ken Shales were available.
Shales still relied heavily on sugar for many of his recipes, but admitted that all malt brews were much better.

I am not so sure that the "Patent Black Malt" mentioned in those books is the same as the Patent Black Malt that we get nowadays, but their books were responsible for getting a lot of people involved in home brewing, resulting in a rapid improvement, both in the quality of recipies, and ingredients.

-a.


P.S.
Here is a Shales recipe published in 1972, that shows how the recipes had improved in less than 10 years (before the Internet)

1 lb Black Malt *
12 oz Flaked Barley
5.5 lbs DMS **
4 oz Fuggles

Mash at 150 F for 45 minutes. Add hops, and boil for 30 minutes. Then sparge with 170 F water. (Yes, you boil the grains, and sparge afterwards :confused: ) Make up to 4.5 Imperial Gallons. O.G. 1.043

The recipies had improved, but the techniques hadn't.

* Black malt is malt that has been kilned to 210 degrees C
** DMS is Diastatic Malt Syrup, AKA DME (Diastatic Malt Extract)
 
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