modern vs. medieval ale

[harpwriter]

Hello,

In researching for a book, I found a thread here about brewing medieval ale. I'm wondering if anyone could give me an idea of how modern ale would taste after a lifetime of drinking only the medieval style.

Thank you!

 

[rico567]

And who responding to this thread would have any idea what a lifetime of drinking mediæval ale would be like? Even if we're generous and extend the Middle Ages to the 15th century, a person would have to be over 500 years old. Some things translat, and some don't. The first thing you'd need to do, to approximate an answer, is find someone who uses gruit, and not hops. The trouble with gruit as a mediæval adjunct is that it was some kind of hell-broth of herbs & etc. that varied from place to place. Some ingredients could actually be poisonous.
There's no reason to believe that our tastes would ever be compatible with those of that age. With no refrigeration, they ate & drank many things that would be considered rotten / spoiled in our age. Some of their tastes are incomprehensible. We use ketchup and mustard. In the Middle Ages, they used something called garum. Look it up and decide -whether or not we can understand the mind of the Middle Ages- if we can share their tastes.

 

[cheezydemon3]

LMAO!....but....that was a little harsh.

All info was pretty spot on. Not much left to say.

 

[Jimmies]

Garum doesn't sound like anything medieval. Sounds more like the Greek.

 

[Edcculus]

One resource you might look to is Randy Mosher's "Tasting Beer". He goes a little into historic brewing.

One thing for sure, by our terms, it probably didn't taste good. It was probably low in alcohol, cloudy and pretty yeasty. More than likely, it was probably flat, unless they were lucky enough to have casks. It probably all was sour too. They didn't know yeast existed, much less about sanitation. Since there are reports of Porters being somewhat sour into the Industrial Revolution, you can bet Medieval brews were too.

 

[santosvega]

Gruit was largely drunk on the continent. "Ale", in its original meaning -- and it's gone through several, most recently being haphazardly applied to any top-fermented grain beverage -- was preferred in Britain, and was made without hops and usually without any herbs. So it would have likely been quite sweet by modern standards, and probably at least somewhat sour or horsey from wild yeast. "Beer", that being brewed with hops, didn't arrive in England probably until the 1400s, and only gradually took hold, with unhopped ale being enjoyed in rural areas at least into the 1600s. I would imagine that a medieval Englishman would have found modern beers to be unfamiliarly and unpleasantly bitter.
All of this of course only applies to Great Britain, and my knowledge of historical styles elsewhere is pretty lacking.

 

[Edcculus]

This just came to me when reading santosvega's post about sweetness. Attenuation rates were relatively low too. That, combined with not using hops would have made beer very sweet indeed.

 

[C2H5OH]

We might have to call on Captain Sully Sullenberger to land this one.

 

[Doog_Si_Reeb]

In addition to the sweetness, medieval brews likely had very low carbonation. If a person in the middle ages was given a modern macro lager, like Budweiser, I imagine they would find it very bitter and painfully carbonated.

 

[goose_on_fire]

Don't forget that before coke was used to roast malt in the 1600s, it would have been kilned over wood, straw, manure, coal, etc.-- to some degree, most every beer was a smoked beer.

Okay, so I made up the bit about manure, but why not?

 

[cheezydemon3]

Coke to roast malt?

 

[khiddy]

Don't forget that before coke was used to roast malt in the 1600s, it would have been kilned over wood, straw, manure, coal, etc.-- to some degree, most every beer was a smoked beer.

+1 on this. That's kinda what surprised me about the recipe for Poor Richard's Ale. I would've expected a bit of a smoked character to come out in a Colonial-style brew, since the early maltsters here in the Colonies didn't have access to the large malt plants that were common in England. I've been reading "Brewed in America" by Stanley Baron over the last month, and it has some very interesting information that led me to expect more smoked malt in "throwback" recipes.

Moral of the story: a murky, flat beverage tasting of herbs (not necessarily hops), smoked malt, and sourness.

 

[rico567]

+1 on this. That's kinda what surprised me about the recipe for Poor Richard's Ale. I would've expected a bit of a smoked character to come out in a Colonial-style brew, since the early maltsters here in the Colonies didn't have access to the large malt plants that were common in England. I've been reading "Brewed in America" by Stanley Baron over the last month, and it has some very interesting information that led me to expect more smoked malt in "throwback" recipes.

Moral of the story: a murky, flat beverage tasting of herbs (not necessarily hops), smoked malt, and sourness.

These are excellent insights. Since we've gone to speculating wholesale about this, I might as well chime in again, this time about consistency. Given what they were working with, mediæval beers must have been the most amazing crapshoot, and existed in almost unlimited variety. Any real ability to replicate the same beer from batch to batch would have been very difficult, if possible at all, and the next farmstead or village over would have been almost certain to have had a very different libation.

 

[Jimmies]

+1 on this. That's kinda what surprised me about the recipe for Poor Richard's Ale. I would've expected a bit of a smoked character to come out in a Colonial-style brew, since the early maltsters here in the Colonies didn't have access to the large malt plants that were common in England. I've been reading "Brewed in America" by Stanley Baron over the last month, and it has some very interesting information that led me to expect more smoked malt in "throwback" recipes.

Moral of the story: a murky, flat beverage tasting of herbs (not necessarily hops), smoked malt, and sourness.

Awesome post. I am learning so much here.

 

[azscoob]

I can imagine that the brewers of old reused barrels for each batch, perhaps the dregs in the bottom of the barrel lead to dominant yeast strains for that alehouse, so the beer for that town may have been consistant yet still unique for the location. I have read that early brewers had a family mash paddle that was passed down through generations, this paddle had the yeast from brewing on it, it inoculated the wort by its use, also a sort of dominant strain unique to that paddle.

 

[kaiser423]

I have read that early brewers had a family mash paddle that was passed down through generations, this paddle had the yeast from brewing on it, it inoculated the wort by its use, also a sort of dominant strain unique to that paddle.

I also read this in "Radical Brewing" by Randy Mosher. The Viking women used to very tightly guard their stirring paddles, kinda like a family secret because it contained the yeast. I think that he even throws out a couple of theoretical old-school recipes, and even put together a couple and tried them.

 

[harpwriter]

Thank you for all your help and speculation. The more I read about medieval brewing, it does seem it would always be an adventure trying a new batch!

 

[jdc2]

I don't think the idea that beer quality was all over the map is quite
right. I'm sure there were inconsistencies, but bars have been in
existence for a very long time, and nobody will be in business long
unless they can serve a reasonably consistent product, given that
the presence of competition. The art of making alcoholic beverages
was a trade like any other with its secrets and special knowledge handed
down the ages, including I would have to believe how to get beer to
ferment reliably. I also don't buy the idea that beer
must have been weak, because high alcohol drinks like wine and mead
had been made for many centuries prior to beer. Carbonation must
have been possible because casks have been around since about the
time of Christ. Chaucer has one of his characters say at one point
in the Canterbury tales "I'd rather have a barrell of ale than anything",
and that was about 1380, so barrells of ale would not have been a
new thing.
Jim

 

[Airborneguy]

+1 on the above.

 

[RichBenn]

I believe I read somewhere that some of the english ales were a bit dark and strong, in order to get some preservative quality. With no hops, no refrigeration, high alcohol helped.

No hops, though -- that's gotta be the dark ages!

Oh, and I also don't buy the thought that the beer was inconsistent. It was a trade, there was commerce, there was competition, like today, for the best beer or best price.

 

[Cheaton]

Garum doesn't sound like anything medieval. Sounds more like the Greek.

errr.......

Medieval is a period in history, the greek are race of people from a certain area of the world. Apples and oranges, anyone?

 

[Laughing_Gnome_Invisible]

Oh, and I also don't buy the thought that the beer was inconsistent. It was a trade, there was commerce, there was competition, like today, for the best beer or best price.

My thoughts too. It is not in man's nature to make life worse than it already is. If beer tasted like satan's urine, then there would be documentary evidence. Any historical references to wine, mead or beer sounds pretty darned favourable. Without a consistent method of brewing we would have heard about the foul stench of satan's urine in the Magna Carta or The Canterbury Tales.

 

[skadalajara]

I dunno. The "consistency" we are all acustomed to is a relatively modern phenomenon.
A Big Mac is a Big Mac the world around is due to a lot of science and trial and error.
Prior to the age of chains and franchises, a consistent product simply meant it was roughly the same from one iteration to the next.
I'd be willing to bet, if you were a peasant in a midieval alehouse, and your first flaggon was from one cask, and your next was from another, you'd be able to tell the difference.
But, since I'm slightly less than 500 years old, I can only speculate.

 

[Boerderij_Kabouter]

I think if you handed someone from the middle ages a modern beer you would be tried as a witch or a sorcerer. But that wouldn't matter, because you could just get back into your time machine and escape.

 

[Laughing_Gnome_Invisible]

I dunno. The "consistency" we are all acustomed to is a relatively modern phenomenon.
A Big Mac is a Big Mac the world around is due to a lot of science and trial and error.
Prior to the age of chains and franchises, a consistent product simply meant it was roughly the same from one iteration to the next.
I'd be willing to bet, if you were a peasant in a midieval alehouse, and your first flaggon was from one cask, and your next was from another, you'd be able to tell the difference.
But, since I'm slightly less than 500 years old, I can only speculate.

Heck, i didn't mean consistency to the point of the homogenization found in modern fast food restaurants! If beer in the middle ages were as consistently foul as McDonald's is in modern times then there would most definitely be historic documentation telling us to keep the hell away from beer!

 

[scone]

If you are curious about the culinary traditions of the dark ages I recommend Le Menagier de Paris which contains 400 something recipes from the "dark ages". I've been meaning to get it for a long time. From what I've gleaned from the middle french text (which can be found for free online), their cooking didn't differ that much from out own. Standard spices, breads, meats.

I would think that if you are talking about hopped beers, those were probably not too much different either. I have no data to back this up, but if our taste buds haven't changed so radically, could our preferences in beer have changed that much?

I would think that despite not knowing about the causes behind beer infections, souring, and the like, smart brewers would have still figured out ways to minimize the potential of spoiled beer based on trial and error. Don't forget that good middle age brewers probably spent a lifetime of apprentice-ship learning the trade. They didnt' wake up one day and decide, "hey I guess I'll try my hand at homebrewing". These are just conjectures, of course.

 

[jdc2]

I dunno. The "consistency" we are all acustomed to is a relatively modern phenomenon.

A more precise consistency is a relatively modern phenomenon. At least we
think so.

A Big Mac is a Big Mac the world around is due to a lot of science and trial and error.
Prior to the age of chains and franchises, a consistent product simply meant it was roughly the same from one iteration to the next.
I'd be willing to bet, if you were a peasant in a midieval alehouse, and your first flaggon was from one cask, and your next was from another, you'd be able to tell the difference.
But, since I'm slightly less than 500 years old, I can only speculate.

I would think an ale from one house or another could be different,
even vastly different, but why would an ale from the same brewhouse
but different cask be so different? Wouldn't they be using the same
ingredients, brewed by the same person, and pitched with yeast from
a previous batch made by the same person? I suppose that there
are minor differences in professionally brewed cask conditioned ales
even today, due to temperature differences during fermentation
and conditioning perhaps. I think the biggest difference might have
been the frequency of totally spoiled batches (ropes, etc.), and maybe
some tapsters might have tried to get away with selling it, but the
existence of Lambic proves that even soured beers have a market,
so the old brewers could probably get away with a brett infection for example, just smack a different label on the cask.
Jim

 

[Nyxator]

I agree that each alehouse would have to have a relatively consistent product. However, considering variations in available grain, and inconsistencies of barley crop yields, they probably varied their gravities quite a bit.

I agree that the beers would have to be smokey and infected. It sounds gross, but when you consider the alternative drinks, it was probably delicious by comparison. It was also much safer.

I don't think we can draw much of a conclusion on alcoholic strength, even though we have data in the form of recipes, it would be hard to know the level of attenuation.

 

[TastySalmon]

These are excellent insights. Since we've gone to speculating wholesale about this, I might as well chime in again, this time about consistency. Given what they were working with, mediæval beers must have been the most amazing crapshoot, and existed in almost unlimited variety. Any real ability to replicate the same beer from batch to batch would have been very difficult, if possible at all, and the next farmstead or village over would have been almost certain to have had a very different libation.

I whole-heartedly disagree with your theory on consistency. Medieval Europeans weren't brainless zombies. I can assure you that, while the didn't know what was happening on the microbial level, they could consistently reproduce recipes. If they didn't, then they couldn't maintain a business just like today. Every medieval brewer knew they could manipulate flavors just as modern brewers do.

I'm certain that if a medieval armorer could make a breastplate with a specific thickness within 1,000th of an inch, and architects could design and build Notre Dame and Chatres chathedrals, then a brewer could ascertain that orchard "A" produces this kind of beer best consistently, or orchard "B" produces this kind of cider best consistently.

 

[bonsai4tim]

Even in medieval times, there was accurate measure of weight and volume, just not the measure we use. While they may not have had a hydrometer, they could have used almost any floating object (some medieval recipes say to make a solution "strong enough an egg will float in it" which is reasonable accurate)

The beer from one master brewer would have been very consistent--he would have years of training as an apprentice, and know the "secret knowledge" of his trade, including how to adjust the amount of ingredients for quality. He would be using the same yeast all the time, and his entire establishment would be heavily "contaminated" by this yeast, essentially keeping out all the other "bad bugs".

t