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Hobbit Brew?

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Thanks for the update O'Flannagain. I'll probably be brewing mine next weekend after I finish my finals, assuming I keep enough of my mind intact to brew some beer afterwards :)
 
I have all of my ingredients except for my wizard robe and hat that I have ordered to wear while I brew.......lol, yeah right.

I should be brewing this weekend and not in a wizard costume...(since I always brew in the nude);)
 
cheezydemon said:
I have all of my ingredients except for my wizard robe and hat that I have ordered to wear while I brew.......lol, yeah right.

I should be brewing this weekend and not in a wizard costume...(since I always brew in the nude);)
that made me laugh, cheezy
 
I brewed a Radagast the Brown ale earlier this year that was delicious, I'll have to dig up the recipe.

Also, I've tried 5 of the gruit ales listed earlier in the thread from the Fraoch heather ale producers (they're sold in a 4 pack and occasionally by singles at my local beer store) and all of them were tasty, well made, interesting beers that don't miss the hops at all IMHO.

I've brewed with heather twice and both times it produced a satisfying beer. Given Tolkien's deft hand with detail and apparent love of history, as well as the herb lore woven in to his stories, I think he might have championed the gruit cause.
 
Okay, so due to some unpleasantness at school that resulted in no finals for a day, I found myself with an entire afternoon in which I could brew. I took advantage of the situation and got going on my Old Gaffer Brown Ale. I made a few changes to the recipe I posted earlier, so here it is.

3.3# Northwestern Gold LME
3.0# Munton's Plain Light DME
.25# Crystal Malt-40L
.25# Crystal Malt-120L
.25# Belgian Chocolate Malt
1.25 oz. East Kent Goldings-5.5%-60 minutes
1.0 oz finely chopped ginger root-15 minutes
3/4 tsp Irish Moss
Safalle 04 Dry Yeast

It's been in the primary since Monday evening and fermentation was going strong within the first 24 hours and slowed between last night and today. I'm really interested to see how this is going to turn out, and for those that are still following this I'll keep you posted. Thanks again for everyone who kept this thing going and for giving me feedback along the way!
 
Here's a little something I wrote up somewhere else about my recipe. I'll be brewing it tommorow!!

Over at another homebrew forum I frequent, some members and I have decided to make some brews based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. After extensive research, we have some pretty good ideas. The idea I will be making I call 1420 Old Gaffer Ale. In the books, there is mention of the barley crops in the year 1420 making the best malt the shire has had. They also mention how the Old Gaffer was a root farmer. So, I've decided to stick with a pretty simple recipe.

First, I will use Marris Otter as the base malt. Marris Otter is an English barley malt that is rich with flavor. Seeing how Tolkien based a lot of the hobbit culture around early 20th century England, I believe this malt would be just right. I don't think the hobbits had any advanced malting practices, so I will use just Marris Otter and some Wheat Malt (since Tolkien mentions the wheat crops of Middle Earth quite a bit) and no specialty malts. Instead, I will slightly toast some of the Marris Otter malt myself in an oven to provide a nice, nutty, toasty English brown type beer.

Secondly, I will be using Fuggles.. a noble English hop and ginger. Ginger is a root spice and I believe the Old Gaffer would have plenty in his gardens. Hops would probably only come in one or two strands in the Shire and Fuggles is arguably the most traditional of the English hops. Some might say East Kent Goldings though.

Lastly, I will use a British Ale yeast strain. I will take 24 ounces of the wort runnings and let them sit in a bowl for a week with a few crushed grains. This way the 24 ounces will sour. Since the sanitation techniques of hobbiton were probably minimal and they probably relied on spontaneous fermentation, I suspect they had wild yeasts adding a slight sour tang to their beers. Thus, they probably drank them quickly or mixed with new ale as they became too sour. I will take the 24 ounces and pasteurize it after it has been soured and mix it in with the original 5 gallons that has been fermenting for a week.

On a final note, I think the hobbits were quite merry and probably enjoyed a beer with a lightly high alcohol level. I will be shooting for an ABV of around 7-8%. Here is my current recipe:

Original Gravity: 1.077
Final Gravity: 1020
IBU: 26.7

6lb Marris Otter Malt
1.5lb Marris Otter Slightly Toasted
.5lb Marris Otter Toasted Dark
5.5lb Wheat Malt
2 ounce Fuggles 60 min boil
1 ounce Ginger Root 10 min boil
British Ale Yeast WLP005




... if this beer is good, I might try it again and add some strawberries :D :D
 
Interesting thread.

I've been reading The Hobbit to my daughter lately. She loves it!!

I haven't named my brewery yet, and re-reading this got me thinking about using the book and it's places as a theme. Bag End Brewery has nice ring to it, and there's all kinds of names/places you could use for different beers.
 
What kind of beer would hobbits drink? Well, I think you should select hops based on their name...

Fuggles, definitely. Hobbits would definitely consume something that had a name like "fuggles".

They would also definitely consume something called "Pride of Ringwood".

Then maybe add some Boadicea, if only because according to Northern Brewer, it is a "High-alpha dwarf variety".
 
Upon reading this thread for the first time yesterday, I immediately pulled out a book I have called "The Hobbit Companion". It's not related to "The Hobbit", but rather concerning all sorts of interesting linguistic trickery that Tolkien used to name, well, everything.

Nothing of particular value to this project, unfortunately, but here's an interesting coincidence:

It is not surprising, then, that one of the most famous figures in Hobbit history was a horticulturist. A thousand years after the founding of the shire the most famous of Hobbit farmers, Tobold Hornblower of Longbottom, succeeded in perfecting the cultivation and curing of that ancient plant known as sweet galenas.

The galena is a smoking herb...

Galena hops weren't introduced until the 1970's, however, and are an American hop. Interesting, though.

Since Hobbits are cloned from Anglo-Saxons, we get this:

Three tribes of Anglo-Saxons, three tribes of Hobbits. (Angles, Saxons, & Jutes--Fallohides, Stoors, & Harfoots). The Hobbits of the Shire descended from the Harfoots. They are comparable to the Saxons.

Find the beer that the Saxons made, and you should have your Hobbit beer.

I myself may participate in this, as well. I'll be bottling a porter tomorrow that I think has good potential as a base for something Tolkien-ish, so we'll see what happens.
 
I think mine is coming along pretty well. It's been sitting in the secondary a little longer than I intended due to the holidays and my getting terribly sick, but I'm better and I have some free time coming up to get it into bottles. I'm adding the oak chips tonight, and hoping to bottle on Sunday.:)
 
Alas! I had a set-back. I was sick, our newborn was sick and had to go into the hospital for four days, the holidays, I had to switch jobs(health insurance, 401K, paid days off, OH MY!)...I told Oflannigan, but I guess I should have told all of you. I must bow out of this one. Sorry.

Good luck to all.
 
IowaStateFan said:
Me too. Because of this thread I have decided to do another read of The Hobbit followed by the LOTR. I'll be keeping a close eye out for references to beer, ale, porter and any other beer styles. In the first chapter of The Hobbit, as has already been pointed out, some of the dwarves took ale, and others took porter. Since Bilbo supplied them, it would seem that both were brewed in Hobbiton so that porter is not exclusively a dwarvish style.

But Hobbiton was on the old Road toward the ancient Dwarf settlements in Ered Luin. Indeed, Thorin had made his dwelling there after wandering in the wilderness for years after Smaug drove the Dwarves out of the Mountain. Unfinished Tales notes that trade existed between Hobbits and Dwarves, so it is entirely plausible that Bilbo's supplies of beer and porter were brewed by Dwarves in the Blue Mountains.

Pip's song, quoted above, is a Jackson invention and therefore (IMNSHO) inadmissible as evidence. Though I enjoyed the films, they are far from canonical. :D

Jens - I love it! Sounds heavenly!

O'Flannigan - your 1420 sounds "proper"!

I wish I found this thread earlier; I could have wallowed in Geekdom for weeks! Let me establish my nerd cred.

Several posters have noted that the Hobbit culture is loosely based on Interbellum Britain. While on the face of it this makes sense, it is not exactly accurate.

The comparison to Interbellum Britain is perhaps relevant to the very end of the LoTR, after Sandyman's smoke-belching mill was pulled down. Before then, the only possible comparison is with pre-Great War Britain.

The Great War - and it was during and just after the Great War that the foundations for Middle-Earth were laid - severely injured the class system in England (it wasn't totally killed until post-WWII, but it was on life support). So many men of the middle and lower classes were affected by the Great War, and trench life so class-crossing, that after the Armistice it was impossible for British society to return to the status quo. The proletariat had tasted the bitter equality of war, and no longer had the inclination to remain under heel. It took a long time for class distinction to die - these things are generally generational - but when one couples the pre-WWI generation dying off with another World War 1939-1945. When one combines that with the economic recession experienced by Britain until the 1960s - due to War damage to another generation of men as well as the loss of the Empire - the centuries-old class system extant in England evaporated.

I think JRRT's depiction of the Rape of the Shire in Volume III is a depiction of the destruction of Hobbit society, and that is directly traceable to the polishing stages the Trilogy was experiencing at that time - mid C20, post-WWII.

Anyway what does that have to do with beer? Hobbit culture is, IMO, not-so-loosely based on English pastoral culture pre-1900. Small villages are the social base, not a large city far away which no local has ever even visited (Minas Tirith?). Every English village has a pub or two, and I needn't go into the tied-house schemes extant at that time.

Furthermore, I find that the descriptions of the Southfarthing just scream "Kent". For me, that makes creating a Hobbit Ale simple - a fairly simple grain bill and lots of fresh hops.

In fact, I've a recipe for what I call Southfarthing Special Ale that I haven't brewed in a while. Now that I can get Maris Otter extract, that's what I use.

6.6 lbs John Bull Maris Otter extract syrup
1 lb dry wheat extract
1 lb McCann's steel-cut oats (steeped)

2 oz Fuggles, EKG or Bramling Cross - 60
1 oz same - 20
1 oz same - flameout

Ringwood ale - Wyeast

I like Ringwood because of its overt fruitiness and estery profile. I prefer Bramling Cross because it's not as refined as Fuggles, much less EKG. The malts I chose because of the bucolic nature of farmhouse brewing.

Anyway, thanks for rekindling my interest in JRRT! I'm gonna go pull out my copy of The Silmarillion.

Bob
 
Hey all-I know its been nigh on two months since I first posted about Hobbit brew, but mine is finally ready. My recipe is on here, but if people would like me to repost and save them the trouble of digging for it, I would be more than happy to. I modeled it after a southern English brown ale, and I think it's pretty on the mark. It has a nice maltiness to it, some hop bitterness but very little to no hop aroma, and the ginger I used gave it a nice pastoral touch, just right for a hobbit. I've been keeping them in my pantry (about 65*), and I actually think they taste better at that temp than they do refrigerated-its much softer, and you can pick up all the little subtleties of the beer. All in all, I'm really happy with it, so thank you to everyone who helped and gave input leading up to brewing day!
 
I have a crazy idea for Ent-wash. Would it be possible to use maple sap for a "wort"? My grandfather has property with plenty of sugar and red maples and he has made syrup before.
It might be more of a maple cider or wine, Im not sure, but I have a couple weeks for research before the sap starts flowing if its possible.

Have I lost my mind?
 
I don't know that maple sap will do much for you. It's fairly bland, on its own. However, maple syrup can work well in a beer.

I've always thought Old Foghorn has a bit of maple syrup in there, but don't tell anyone you heard that from me. :)


TL
 
this thread inspired me to try and make a few LotR beers.

here is one i have in the secondary right now which i tried to make seem elven:

batch size: 1.5 gal

1/3 lb crushed oats steeped for 20 min at 150 F
1/4 lb orange blossom honey
1 1/2 lb light LME
1/5 oz Pride of Ringwood 45 min
1/8 oz Pride of Ringwood 5 min
1/8 oz Pride of Ringwood 1 min
8 tbsp lactose
Wyeast Whitbread 1099
Irish Moss

OG 1.061
FG 1.024
 
cheezydemon said:
Someone that doesn't have a "hottie" at home, didn't go to college...

Or they just went to an engineering school :(

j/k... I'm *trying* to convince this hot chick to date me ;)


---

I propose that the hobbits drink "Hobgoblin"

Clearly the name was coined in a world where goblin's exist :p
 
Time to bring this one back out...

After brewing all sorts of other things the past couple of months, I finally decided it was time to brew my take on a hobbit beer, a Ginger Oak Oatmeal Porter, and ordered the extras I need to make it.

However, it just occurred to me that for them to toast the malt, wood had to have been used as a heat source. Which should leave a smokiness to the beer.

So now, my recipe is going to change a bit, yet again, to include a bit of home-smoked malt.

"Smoked Ginger Oak Oatmeal Porter"--how many BJCP categories might that partially fit into? *groans*

Anyway, I look to brew this one in the next couple of weeks, and am curious to know how any of the rest of you have come along.
 
Ok, time to put my two-cents in on this. First off this is the first time I've seen this tread and I have to say, my hats off to you folks. You've done some serious research here, but...

Some one beat you to this along time ago. I live in Kalamazoo, Michigan and there is a particular brew pub here. Can you guess the name? It happens to be "Bilbo's" and yes it is based on the Tolken books. Check them out at www.bilbospizza.com
 
Having recently read both The Hobbit and LotR, my impression of their ale is that they wouldn't have used smoked malt, ginger or oats. (Porter is actually mentioned, as distinct from ale, in The Hobbit.) It would be a fairly basic malt-oriented ale, most likely a dark mild: they sing a song in praise of a very very brown ale, and the quality of barley was extremely important, with the year after the war being an exceptional vintage. So it couldn't be smoked, spicy or strongly hopped, as that would mask much of the barley malt flavour.

You could, of course, say that they would use wood to kiln the malt, necessarily leaving a smoked flavour, but these are fantasy books. Things exist for their effects on the imagination, not for how they would be produced in the imaginary world -- that's the domain of utopian science fiction. Porter, for instance, is a product of the industrial revolution, so they couldn't possibly have it. Yet they did. In a consistent Middle Earth, porter would be the drink of the orcs of Saruman, representing industrialisation, but then porter is good and orcs are evil, so that would leave a different inconsistency, and one more important to the genre.

The elves didn't have beer at all, IIRC.
 
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