Thoughts on G. Washington's famous beer recipe.

I've been looking at the famous recipe for small beer written down by George Washington and kept at the New York Public Library. It goes like so:

"To Make Small Beer

Take a large Siffer [Sifter] full of Bran Hops to your Taste. -- Boil these 3 hours then strain out 30 Gall[ons] into a cooler put in 3 Gall[ons] Molasses while the Beer is Scalding hot or rather draw the Melasses into the cooler & St[r]ain the Beer on it while boiling Hot. let this stand till it is little more than Blood warm then put in a quart of Yeat if the Weather is very Cold cover it over with a Blank[et] & let it Work in the Cooler 24 hours then put it into the Cask -- leave the bung open till it is almost don[e] Working -- Bottle it that day Week it was Brewed."

Pretty much everybody agrees that bran and hops are different ingredients -- there's a line break between the two (image here. But no one seems to know exactly how to brew the beer. An NPR article I found said that making it according to the recipe would yield a beer with an 11% ABV, which is preposterous, three gallons of molasses in 30 gallons of liquid.

Is it the thought that the undisclosed and assumed (by Washington) ingredient in this beer is the second runnings of another beer, perhaps a porter? The term "small beer" was apparently used for both second-runnings beer and for hops-free beer at the time. Is it possible that Washington was merely writing down what to *add* to a small beer to make it more palatable?

Alternatively, how else might this recipe translate into a beer someone (a future president, perhaps) might actually want to consume?

 

I wouldn't brew it directly, others have said it's not so great. But I made a porter in "tribute" to the recipe. The porter is conditioning in the bottles now but the last tasting seemed promising.

I used a lots of chocolate and caramel malts (120L) to back up the burnt sugar taste of the molasses (which i used 10oz in a 5gal batch).

 

That is a ridiculous amount of molasses. A tiny bit goes a loooong way. I used 1/4 pound in a 5-gallon RIS and it is by far the most prominent flavor. Everyone comments on the molasses flavor (although they do not always identify it as such) and says it tastes fantastic, but that is after it's already been conditioning for nearly a year. It was MUCH stronger after only a couple months.

The only thing I can imagine is if maybe the molasses was diluted from what we typically use today.

 

That's kind of why I asked -- it takes a year for anyone to like molasses beer and then sometimes people don't like it anyway. And it doesn't make sense for Washington to have use for a recipe like that; he had access to first-runnings porter most of the time. That's what made me wonder if the recipe isn't to be taken on its own but rather than as an addition to a regular small beer to make it more palatable.