PhilOssiferzStone
Active Member
Yes, this is an odd one. Bear with me, gents:
One of my hobbies is recreating (and cooking, and eating) historic recipes, and my interest in the field has grown to encompass beer. I have many Renaissance-era beer and ale recipes to follow, but I am receiving signals from the source material that conflict a bit with what modern beer authorities are telling me.
On the one hand, pale/pilsner malt is supposed to be impossible before 1680, when the first water-cooled coke-fueled kiln was fielded. Malt before then was supposed to be darker, more caramelized, and oftimes reeking of wood smoke. On the other hand, I have William Harrison's word for it (circa 1577) that smoky beer stinks, so that you should get your malt from a guy who knows his job. He has this to say for the finished product:
'When it hath gone, or been turned, so long upon the floor, they carry it to a kiln covered with hair cloth, where they give it gentle heats (after they have spread it there very thin abroad) till it be dry, and in the meanwhile they turn it often, that it may be uniformly dried. For the more it be dried (yet must it be done with soft fire) the sweeter and better the malt is, and the longer it will continue...'
'The best malt is tried by the hardness and colour; for, if it look fresh with a yellow hue, and thereto will write like a piece of chalk, after you have bitten a kernel in sunder in the midst, then you may assure yourself that it is dried down.'
Yellow hue. Kilned with gentle heats (plural, so our old time maltsters are taking great care to prevent the temp from rising too high or too rapidly). Writes like chalk after you bite it in half. What kind or variety of our multitude of modern grains is Master Harrison describing? Care to hazard a guess...?
One of my hobbies is recreating (and cooking, and eating) historic recipes, and my interest in the field has grown to encompass beer. I have many Renaissance-era beer and ale recipes to follow, but I am receiving signals from the source material that conflict a bit with what modern beer authorities are telling me.
On the one hand, pale/pilsner malt is supposed to be impossible before 1680, when the first water-cooled coke-fueled kiln was fielded. Malt before then was supposed to be darker, more caramelized, and oftimes reeking of wood smoke. On the other hand, I have William Harrison's word for it (circa 1577) that smoky beer stinks, so that you should get your malt from a guy who knows his job. He has this to say for the finished product:
'When it hath gone, or been turned, so long upon the floor, they carry it to a kiln covered with hair cloth, where they give it gentle heats (after they have spread it there very thin abroad) till it be dry, and in the meanwhile they turn it often, that it may be uniformly dried. For the more it be dried (yet must it be done with soft fire) the sweeter and better the malt is, and the longer it will continue...'
'The best malt is tried by the hardness and colour; for, if it look fresh with a yellow hue, and thereto will write like a piece of chalk, after you have bitten a kernel in sunder in the midst, then you may assure yourself that it is dried down.'
Yellow hue. Kilned with gentle heats (plural, so our old time maltsters are taking great care to prevent the temp from rising too high or too rapidly). Writes like chalk after you bite it in half. What kind or variety of our multitude of modern grains is Master Harrison describing? Care to hazard a guess...?
