modern vs. medieval ale

[Hegh]

We need a nutritional anthropologist...

...waiting...

What, Deb didn't show up? It works for Alton Brown all the time!

 

[ghack]

I think the whole smokey character to be over way over estimated.

Perhaps a little in the background, but it is actually rather difficult to make smoked malt. You have to pretty much put the malt in a smoker made for that purpose and smoke the sh** out of it. A kiln is not a smoker.

 

[jdc2]

George Washington's recipe:
To Make Small Beer:
Take a large siffer full of bran hops to your taste-boil these 3 hours. Then strain our 30 gall[o]n into a cooler put in 3 gall[o]n molasses while the beer is scalding hot or rather draw the molasses into the cooler. Strain the beer on it while boiling hot, let this stand till it is little more than blood warm. Then put in a quart of ye[a]st if the weather is very cold cover it over with a blank[et] let it work in the cask-Leave the bung open till it is almost done working-Bottle it that day week it was brewed."

Now, this was long after the medieval period, but long before any
understanding of yeast and other microbes. Yet Washington knew he
could get his hands on a quart of yeast. So there must have been
reproducible methods for getting it, they weren't just standing around
waiting for some lucky microbe to make their beer.
Jim

 

[glockentalk]

I use gruit herbs as additives to my Brewhouse kits. I'm still experimenting, but I really like the results so far. The herbs (myrica gale, yarrow, labrador tea) are stimulants, as opposed to hops which are soporific. Thus gruit is great for parties.

 

[Nyxator]

I think the whole smokey character to be over way over estimated.

Perhaps a little in the background, but it is actually rather difficult to make smoked malt. You have to pretty much put the malt in a smoker made for that purpose and smoke the sh** out of it. A kiln is not a smoker.

After a little more research I think you're right. Here's an interesting link from someone in the SCA trying to recreate a medieval beer. He's quoted a primary source (from 1503) regarding the malting process.

they carry it to the kiln covered with haircloth, where they give it gentle heats (after they speard it very thin abroad) till it be dry, an din the meanwhile they turn it often that it 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.

So they used gentle heat to dry the malt. I'm guessing it wasn't very smoked at all.

Also, it seems from other research I did that ale was served very green in the Middle Ages, which means it probably didn't have time to sour.

At Elmley Castle (Worcestershire) in 1446, for example, alebrewers were proscribed from selling ale more than four days old.

I now think both the sourness and smokiness were over estimated.

 

[jdc2]

I now think both the sourness and smokiness were over estimated.

And the yeastiness underestimated!
Jim

 

[olllllo]

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?

Three letters B M C.

 

[scone]

Three letters B M C.

I wonder if BMC came first, and then people decided they desired it (based on price and marketing, and eventually self-imposed, self-taught "preference"), or if people's desire for BMC came first, and then the BMC itself. (I would say the first is truer.)

Honestly, I think those beers are entirely a construct of cheap corn, industrial automation, and shareholder driven profiteering. Removing the first two, and probably the third as well, I have a hard time imagining they drank anything like it 500 years ago. They are notoriously hard to clone right? I would imagine they would have been unlikely to spend so much time and labor trying to create something that tasted so much like pilsner + urine.

 

[Revvy]

I wonder if BMC came first, and then people decided they desired it (based on price and marketing, and eventually self-imposed, self-taught "preference"), or if people's desire for BMC came first, and then the BMC itself. (I would say the first is truer.)

Honestly, I think those beers are entirely a construct of cheap corn, industrial automation, and shareholder driven profiteering. Removing the first two, and probably the third as well, I have a hard time imagining they drank anything like it 500 years ago. They are notoriously hard to clone right? I would imagine they would have been unlikely to spend so much time and labor trying to create something that tasted so much like pilsner + urine.

Actually Maureen Ogle in her book Ambitious Brew: The Story of America Beer cleared up a lot of those "beer myths" that we beer snobs used to harbor to "keep us warm" and to somehow make us think that we're better than those who drink Bud products.....


It covers everything from the migration of the Buschs, the Miller's, etc fro Germany until the 80's THEN it goes into a good deal about the history of CRAFT BREWING...so it's a pretty good into to beer history and culture as a whole.

Maybe you should learn a little of the truth, instead of just bud bashing, that old song and dance.

America like most of the world had quite an extensive array of beers available prior to the German Invasion of brewer's which later introduced the light lager. They pretty much had the "brewing culture" of all the countries that people immigrated from...Most English beer styles..you know Porters, Stouts, Partigyles, stuff like that. As well as mostly heavy German Styles of beer. Not to mention people from Scotland, Ireland, Russia and other places where beer was drank.

Remember up until then, beer was food.

But in the prosperous new world, people could actually eat meat with nearly every meal if they wanted, so their dietary needs change. They didn't WANT filling beers anymore.

Beer sales started to slip....

In fact the whole history of the light lager is the American populace's (not the brewer's) desire to have a lighter beer to drink, which forced the German brewers to look at adding adjuncts like corn and rice...not as the popular homebrewer's myth has been to make money by peddling and "inferior commercial product" by adding adjuncts, but in order to come up with a style of beer that the American people wanted.

Not the other way around.

Maureen Ogle proved that it actually made the cost of a bottle of Budweiser cost around 17.00/bottle in today's dollars.

When AH released Budweiser with it's corn and rice adjuncts in the 1860's it was the most expensive beer out there; a single bottle retailed for $1.00 (what would equal in today's Dollars for $17.00) this was quite difference when a schooner of beer usually cost a nickel.

The American populace ate it up!


It wasn't done to save money, it was done because heavy beers (both english style Ales and the heavier Bavarian malty beers) were not being drunk by American consumers any more. Beer initally was seen around the world as food (some even called it liquid bread), but since America, even in the 1800's was a prosperous nation compared to the rest of the world, and americans ate meat with nearly every meal, heavy beers had fallen out of favor...

And American Barley just made for heavy, hazy beer

Bush and other German Brewers started looking at other styles of Beers, and came upon Karl Balling and Anton Schwartz's work at the Prague Polytechnic Institute with the Brewers in Bohemia who when faced with a grain shortage started using adjuncts, which produced the pils which was light, sparkly and fruity tasting...just the thing for American tastebuds.

So the brewers brought Schwartz to America where he went to work for American Brewer Magazine writing articles and technical monographs, teaching American brewers how to use Rice and Corn...

The sad moral of the story is....The big evil corporate brewers did NOT foist tasteless adjunct laced fizzy water on us, like the popular mythology all of us beersnobs like to take to bed with us to feel all warm and elitist....it was done because our American ancestors wanted it.

Listen to this from Basic Brewing;

November 30, 2006 - Ambitious Brew Part One
We learn about the history of beer in the USA from Maureen Ogle, author of "Ambitious Brew - The Story of American Beer." Part one takes us from the Pilgrims to Prohibition.

http://media.libsyn.com/media/basicbrewing/bbr11-30-06.mp3

December 7, 2006 - Ambitious Brew Part Two
We continue our discussion about the history of beer in the USA with Maureen Ogle, author of "Ambitious Brew - The Story of American Beer." Part two takes us from Prohibition to the present day.

http://media.libsyn.com/media/basicbrewing/bbr12-07-06.mp3

The truth is a little different than the snobby lie that make us feel more "elite" than the masses, eh?

It's alway easier to swallow a good delusion than to accept a painful truth. For example I constantly tell myself that those "19 year old bisexual strippers" that send me messages on myspace actually did read my profile and really do think my 45 year old sorry ass is "hawt." I never write back, (I wouldn't want to deprive them of their fantasies) but simply bask in the glory of my uber-studliness...It keeps me warm at night while I sleep in my bed...alone.

 

[jamesnsw]

Sure, there was competition, but if no one had consistently good beer, there isn't anything to compete on here.

 

[olllllo]

My BMC point is that, tastes did change.

 

[scone]

Very informative Revvy. As of now, that book is on my to-buy list...

Here's where I'm getting my ideas, and I remember reading this but I don't remember where (so perhaps it's not true). I *thought* the dominance of BMC was largely an effect of prohibition, where the biggest breweries were able to survive selling animal feed and other industrial grain products, and the smaller ones all went out of business. Fast forward to WWII, suddenly there is a growing number of women who drink beer proportional to the men, a new market opens up, plus it's the 40's so marketing is really taking off on a national scale, and the big breweries all want to create the one "perfect" and perfectly-marketable brew that appeals to the most number of people. Am I supposed to assume they kept the recipe the same? I haven't read the book, someone fill me in. Prohibition has wiped out the competition, and it won't be back for some time to come... now we have a situation where the big breweries are only competing amongst themselves, and only in one or two styles of beer that are the most profitable to make.

So what if those beers have been around for a while and people like them because they are light, and eminently drinkable. I cannot believe that in those 40 years of utter market dominance, the tastes of the American public did not change a bit to prefer the only available and affordable beer. There is obviously a desire in people for more choice (hence the popularity of craft beer and its rising market share), and that is something that BMC denied the public for a long time.

However I was wrong about them being a function of cheap corn and marketing. I eat my words.

 

[DKershner]

A bunch of American beer history...

You will actually find a similar story in many countries even without prohibition, just without all the local breweries going out of business (with regard to the food vs light beer thing). Beck's is still the most popular beer in Germany, with light, regional beers following the Macro. Heine and Amstel light from Holland, Eastern European lagers like the Urquell and Staropramen.

The fact that these beers are cheapest is merely a factor of their popularity (combined with some non-expensive ingredients).

OK, now get back to the medieval stuff, very entertaining.

 

[scone]

Also, I should really add (just so we are clear on the BMC bashing) that I like Budweiser, and also often order Blue Moon at the bar. The first beer I ever liked was Killian's Irish Red. And I hear American Ale is pretty good too, though I haven't gotten around to trying it. All BMC products. Not that this changes the fact that I'm a beer snob. Their "light" versions all taste like piss to me.

 

[beerthirty]

Since we are talking medieval VS modern, hops is a strong key. Medieval beers were a food, water purification and taste was not as strong of a factor as need. I have tasted midas touch and several beers brewed with wormwood and gruit. The worst was the wormwood, it left a bitter taste you could not wash out of your mouth, horrendous. The gruit and midas touch were almost as bad. Todays beers are better even when you let BMC into this. Beer is cooking, cooking is science and science has progressed, why would you think beer has not progressed? I am not 500 years old but some days I feel like it.

 

[jdc2]

I have tasted midas touch and several beers brewed with wormwood and gruit. The worst was the wormwood, it left a bitter taste you could not wash out of your mouth, horrendous. The gruit and midas touch were almost as bad. Todays beers are better even when you let BMC into this. Beer is cooking, cooking is science and science has progressed, why would you think beer has not progressed? I am not 500 years old but some days I feel like it.

Who brewed them and what was the recipe? Do they have an
authentic recipe? If you brew a beer and serve it four days after
pitching, it's going to have a yeast taste and a lot of residual sweetness
that balances the bitterness. Were those beers served that way?
I don't put too much trust in on person's perception of a beer. I can't
stand lambics but many people like them. Many Americans go to England
and report how bad the beer was - too bitter, too flat.
Jim

 

[beerthirty]

The wormwood and gruit beers were brewed by fellow homebrewers that have made good conventional beers. I have no idea of the recipes as they were not something I would ever want to recreate. The Midas Touch was Dog Fish Head, and by all reports an accurate recipe. Still not one I would want to recreate.
No you should not take one persons word on it. I think you need to experience the effect of wormwood for yourself. It pretty much ruined the taste of every beer afterwards for that night and made morning OJ taste like crap also.

 

[Nyxator]

Here's some more food for thought. It's been speculated that Medieval English brewers did not boil the wort after mashing. Bennett, in the book Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England, wrote that due to the extra costs of fuel and the apparent cloudiness of medieval beer (evidenced from sources like poems and songs), medieval brewers wouldn't bother with a post-mash boil. If it's being consumed within 4 days, then the bacteria in the husks of the grain wouldn't have time to spoil the ale. While I think there's some merit to that, I don't think cloudiness is evidence of a lack of boiling when you're drinking beer 4 days old with tons of suspended yeast.

And to get back to the smokiness, here's a Cornish rhyme from 1540 cited in the book Beer (A History of Suds and Civilization from Mesopotamia to Microbrews):

Ich am a Cornishman, ale I can brew
It will make one cacke, also to spew.
It is thick and smokey and also it is thin
It is like wash as pigs had wrestled there in

Maybe it was smokey stuff after all!

 

[scone]

Midas Touch is an attempted clone of a "beer" that archeologists found dried remnants of in a 2700 year old tomb tomb of a king, I wouldn't necessarily accept it as a medieval brew, especially not one that was widely available to the public. It was brewed with saffron, the most expensive spice in the world.

I was simply trying to posit the idea that beer 500 years ago may have held striking similarities to beer nowadays given that their food wasn't so different either. It's just an idea, and maybe their food was very different. However, even if you consider that the general taste of people around the world is gravitating towards lighter beers brewed with less barley and more corn, pilsners are still very similar to other beer styles (they are still obviously beer, not champagne, not wine, not mead). Not to mention that the proliferation of lighter beers obviously haven't completely eliminated heavy beers from the human diet. Even though we eat a lot more dense nutritious food (and perhaps prefer light beers more often because of it), there are still plenty of options for darker, heavier beers. That's because we still like them.

I would guess that there are a few styles still around that are pretty close to beers that would have been available in the middle ages. Don't forget that they had table beers made from the second or third runnings of the sparge (or possibly from a lighter grain bill, I'm not sure). These were 2-3 percent beers the likes of which are still brewed in monasteries to be consumed in house by the monks.

If we are talking about gruit beers, then there is nothing like them nowadays unless you choose to brew one yourself. They are obviously out of fashion now, but hops have been around long enough that you could have found a hopped beer pretty easily after 1500 for sure. I'm sure beer has progressed since then, the question is would we recognize ancient beer as beer if we could taste it now? Would we enjoy what they made back then?

I have an interesting counter example to my own theory. In the middle ages they used to torture animals before killing them because they thought that pain and fear made the meat taste better. Now we know that it actually releases toxins into the meat and poisons it.

 

[DKershner]

I have an interesting counter example to my own theory. In the middle ages they used to torture animals before killing them because they thought that pain and fear made the meat taste better. Now we know that it actually releases toxins into the meat and poisons it.

They just said it tastes better, not that it wasn't killing you slowly!

 

[Laughing_Gnome_Invisible]

In the middle ages they used to torture animals before killing them because they thought that pain and fear made the meat taste better.

So all that waterboarding was just making terrorists more delicious? Interesting! :fro:

 

[mpruett]

I have an interesting counter example to my own theory. In the middle ages they used to torture animals before killing them because they thought that pain and fear made the meat taste better. Now we know that it actually releases toxins into the meat and poisons it.

Another counter to your theory is the fact that back in the day (pre-refrigeration), "well hung" meat was aged in the open air, often to the point of smelling bad! They'd just cut off the rotted parts and go to town.

I think it's not unlikely that the meat produced by this method wouldn't be too palatable to today's consumers, even those who really love dry-aged meat.

This would point toward tastes changing over time to me.

Another thing to remember is that tastes change over distance; for example, in parts of Europe, people dig aperitif liqueurs like Aperol, Campari or Cynar. They're not so popular here in the US- people don't go for that type of bitterness (or we're not so crazy as to like a bitter artichoke liqueur) here.

I suspect that medieval beer was certainly infected by our standards, if it was kept for any reasonable length of time. However, like someone else said earlier in the thread, it was consistently infected with whatever was in the brewhouse, much like Lambics. The flip side is brewing constantly re-inoculated the brewhouse, so the microbial flora probably changed very slowly over time.

I bet that combined with much shorter shelf life guidelines (4 days!), would tend to make for a pretty consistent product, if the malt and other ingredients were also consistent.

I doubt that it tasted like today's beer, but it probably changed at a very slow rate, with watershed events like the invention of Pale Ale or Pilsner changing the landscape. For example, we can identify something like a Coors Light as having derived ultimately from the Pilsner style, especially if we backtrack through regular Coors and then the pre-prohibition pilsners that preceded it, all the way back to Pilsner Urquell.

 

[Homercidal]

When you are hungry, almost anything is palatable...

I don't doubt that beer back then was consistent at the same brewery. I imagine that the brewers used the same proven procedures each time. I highly doubt it was the same beer as we have today though. And I doubt it tasted as good in general (although I still don't see why people brew Lambics either...)

 

[scone]

Another counter to your theory is the fact that back in the day (pre-refrigeration), "well hung" meat was aged in the open air, often to the point of smelling bad! They'd just cut off the rotted parts and go to town.

I think it's not unlikely that the meat produced by this method wouldn't be too palatable to today's consumers, even those who really love dry-aged meat.

This would point toward tastes changing over time to me.

I seem to be waging a lost war here, but I still insist on playing devil's advocate. What I wonder, is whether they prefered to eat meat this way, or where they doing it out of necessity? Without further reading I'm really not convinced that this proves anything. They didn't have refrigerators and I'm sure not everything could be smoked/salted all the time to preserve it, yet people still had to eat. If you peruse any medieval recipes, you'll find that their cooking wasn't so different from ours. A somewhat different combination of spices and flavors, but I can't imagine it would be gross to eat. Just look at the number of Middle Ages recipe books and the popularity of recreating food of the times. With beer, I think it's a little harder since there isn't as much out there to guide us.

Check out this link: http://www.badger.cx/brewing/1503.html
The sources are from the early 1600's so we're out of the range of "medieval" by a bit, but instructions like this make me think they had a pretty good handle on the situation:

"Now for the brewing of ordinary beer, your malt being well ground and put in your mash vat, and your liquor in your lead ready to boil, you shall then by little and little with scoops or pails put the boiling liquor to the malt, and then stir it even to the bottom exceedingly well together (which is called mashing of the malt) then, the liquor swimming in the top, cover all over with more malt, and so let it stand an hour and more in the mash vat, during which space may if you please heat more liquor in your lead for your second and small drink; this done, pluck up your mashing strom, and let the first liquor run gently from the malt, either in a clean trough or other vessels prepared for the purpose...."​

This is from Markham, G., The English Housewife, Best, M. ed., 1986 McGill-Queen's Press. (originally published 1615, 1623, and 1631.) It goes on to describe boiling with hops for an hour, cooling, straining the hops, and racking to a wooden barrel. I can only imagine that this technique would have resulted in something pretty close to a cask of real ale. Of course this is after hops and the advent of boiling the wort which became necessary for hops utilization.

Another thing to remember is that tastes change over distance; for example, in parts of Europe, people dig aperitif liqueurs like Aperol, Campari or Cynar. They're not so popular here in the US- people don't go for that type of bitterness (or we're not so crazy as to like a bitter artichoke liqueur) here.

Sure but we aren't talking about the US, we're talking about Europe in the middle ages. Which is still a pretty big area to be sure. I've read an argument that goes something like: beer was brewed primarily in areas where grape cultivation (and thus wine) was impossible. If that's true, then we are probably talking England/Belgium/Germany and a few of their neighbors.

I suspect that medieval beer was certainly infected by our standards, if it was kept for any reasonable length of time.

I totally agree, but many infections take a long time to affect the beer, especially with a healthy culture of yeast in there competing with them. Then again, that time period is not known for its hygiene so maybe funky beers were the norm. Still, we have funky beers nowadays and many people still think they are delicious.

 

[Munsoned]

Wouldn't the failure to boil the wort after the mash mean that whatever water impurities and resulting diseases that the consumption beer was meant to avoid, may not actually have been avoided? Seems to me that the boil would have been a necessary process to ensure that the end product wasn't as "bad" as the water source it started from...

 

[Nyxator]

Wouldn't the failure to boil the wort after the mash mean that whatever water impurities and resulting diseases that the consumption beer was meant to avoid, may not actually have been avoided? Seems to me that the boil would have been a necessary process to ensure that the end product wasn't as "bad" as the water source it started from...

The water was boiled prior to mashing in, so it was still 'safe' even without a post mash boil.

 

[Munsoned]

Also, my recollection from somewhere was that brewing was a household process, done by the women along with other cooking for most of human history. Maybe a distinction in this thread needs to be drawn between commercial and household production.

 

[jdc2]

When you are hungry, almost anything is palatable...

I don't doubt that beer back then was consistent at the same brewery. I imagine that the brewers used the same proven procedures each time. I highly doubt it was the same beer as we have today though. And I doubt it tasted as good in general (although I still don't see why people brew Lambics either...)

In the old poem Piers Ploughman, written in the 1300's a little before
Chaucer, a corrupt priest says that he would have no more conscience about
taking silver than he would about taking a "drought of good ale". FWIW.
You could interpret that as meaning only that there was such a thing as
good ale, or it might mean that good ale was so rare that he would take
some without a thought.
Jim

 

[scone]

In the old poem Piers Ploughman, written in the 1300's a little before
Chaucer, a corrupt priest says that he would have no more conscience about
taking silver than he would about taking a "drought of good ale". FWIW.
You could interpret that as meaning only that there was such a thing as
good ale, or it might mean that good ale was so rare that he would take
some without a thought.
Jim

Hmm, I don't know that a priest would think twice about drinking ale. Priests have always been allowed to drink, and I would imagine they did a lot of it back then, in fact a lot of brewing happened in monasteries. I would assume this just means he wouldn't think twice about taking silver, just as he doesn't think twice about drinking a "drought of good ale", meaning that it was available. Though this doesn't prove much, his definition of good may not be ours.