Thanks for digging it up, those look interesting, Jason.
Don't you think it would be awesome to hang out with our resident historian for a few days.?
I hear his library is wicked cool...but I bet his brewery is as well....
As always Bob, you rule!!!
[blush]
Okay, lookee. Most of my library consists of PDFs and stacks of stuff in 3-ring binders a librarian friend gets for me when he's bored at the university library for which he works. Obscure PhD dissertation stuff, like "The Economics of Commercial Brewing in Lubeck in 1385". Honest, it's terrible; there'll be something like 45 pages of skull-crushing boredom for that one line of interesting info. Certainly it's not something I show to visitors, for fear the pile of loose paper will suddenly become sentient and devour my guest.
As for my brewery, it consists of a decades-old Artic Boy cooler (5-gal mash tun), a 3 gallon pot and a 5 gallon pot. Nothing impressive
AT ALL. You want impressive, I'll take you to Chris Bowen's place (mrbowenz on HBT) and lie.
If I 'rule', it's inadvertent, I assure you.
I know sparging was a later "invention" but what did the introduction of hops have to do with it?
Nothing, unfortunately. That article is suspect. In the first place, it's dated; the state of the research art has advanced quite a long way in the past 13 years. In the second, the article is full of excessive oversimplification and downright wrong stuff and horrible leaps of logic.
It's decent as a starting point for your own research. By that I mean taking each point and saying, "What a pile of crap. What
really happened?" In a very few instances you'll confirm what Mr Hardy says. In the rest, you'll start to get the real story.
This is purely speculation on my part, but there's no practical reason to boil the runnings if you aren't extracting bitterness from hops and, related to that, reducing the volume of the wort to hit an intended gravity.
In other words, if you aren't boiling the runnings and just moving to the fermentation vessel then rinsing all available sugars from the mash doesn't prove necessary.
Boiling the gyle certainly wasn't a universal practice. It was known, however, that even unhopped ale benefitted from boiling the wort. In fact, Oxford University passed an edict in the latter half of the 15th century requiring ale-brewers who sold to the University to boil their worts and skim the foam.
Presumably this had something to do with wort clarity. Yes, I said 'clarity'. All too often we dismiss clarity as an issue with historical beer, writing it off due to the advent of glass being a mid-19th-century event. However, there is sufficient documentary evidence to support that beverage clarity was of some importance to drinkers. The Oxford reference isn't the only one; in his "Dietarie of Healthe" published in 1542, Andrew Boorde had this to say:
"Ale is made of malte and water; and they the which do put any other thynge to ale than is rehersed, except yest, barm, or goddesgood doth sophysicat there ale. Ale for an Englysshe man is a naturall drinke. Ale muste have these properties, it muste be fresshe and cleare, it must not be ropy, nor smoky, nor it must have no wefte nor tayle. Ale shulde not be dronke under .V. dayes olde. Barly malte maketh better ale than Oten malte or any other corne doth...."
Note several things about this. First, the utter lack of bittering herbs. Second, the words I have emphasized in bold text. All of them are related to beverage clarity. Note also the word "smoky".
Interesting, isn't it?
Bob
