I Made Viking Age Beer!

am i squared up i'm not squared up insert a sock under the camera because i'm a professional videographer square on one side hello welcome so today i'm giving you a lovely coffee shout out to hellev thank you very very much indeed it's so generous of you if any of you would like to donate to the coffee fund it's always appreciated the link is down there and on the banner art on my channel sakti today we're talking about medieval beer well no we're not we're talking about medieval ale crap great start today we are talking about a finnish medieval ale and it is called sarty and i think i'm pronouncing it right if i'm not if there are any finns watching i apologize i tried so what is this magical medieval scandinavian beer well it's pretty exciting stuff actually and it's really really easy to make so let's dig in a little bit first to the history of this stuff so the first mentions of sarti as we know it today are from the medieval period and i'm talking about the 1300s 1300s ish where we learn about finn's making beer in this way that makes it sati later on in the 16th and 17th centuries it becomes a much more established part of the culture in finland in the 18th and 19th centuries it is firmly established and in the 20th century and in the into the 21st century it has become such a identifiable part of finnish culture that the european commission actually gave sati a special protected status so you cannot call what you make sati unless you are making a uh raw unhopped juniper-infused ale in finland so if what you are making isn't from finland you do not get to call it sakti so what i am making is not sati what i am making is a sakti style ale okay great so is this a viking beer if the earliest we've got mentions of sakti specifically is from the 1300s no it can't be but we do have evidence of beer from the viking age there were beer barrels from the mid 9th century in fact they were deposited in 834 a.d on the ozerberg ship big famous viking ship full of treasures and a skeleton of a woman so is that sarty we don't know there's no real way for us to know it was a beer of some kind or an ale of some kind made from malted grains chicken i'm in focus i'm in focus enough sati is a very specific kind of ale we know that in the 10th century in the orland islands which are between finland and sweden they were molting grains and it would make sense that what they were making is pretty close to sakti but we know that in scandinavia they were also using hops and they were using all kinds of other different ingredients and this is where i take a little bit of umbrage at the magnificent uh greg from how to drink because he did a video on viking beer recently and i absolutely adore his channel i have subscribed to it and i love it so much and i watch him on twitch and he's great his video on viking beers did a naughty thing he did a naughty bad thing greg you did a naughty bad and you said that viking beer would be quite rough and ready the vikings were brewing beer in a tradition that at that time went back at least 800 years they knew beer they knew how to make beer the vikings knew how beer worked they came from a northern european brewing tradition that went back probably further than 800 years but we know that beer was being produced in northern europe in the roman period we know that beer was being made in britain in the pre-roman iron age so the vikings knew how to make beer this wasn't a brand new barbarian society who had no idea what they were doing and were just putting grain into a bucket and praying to odin they knew how to make beer they could make barrel loads of beer over quality good enough to bury with whoever the heck the azerberg woman was somebody portent queen we know that they knew how to make beer brewing was a tradition even at that point so they weren't just throwing stuff into a pot and praying they knew how to create an alcoholic beverage from malted grain malting is something that takes technology it takes time and it takes a great deal of know-how so they were already people with the know-how to get grain to germinate stop the germination through drying and then release the sugar from the grains to create a fermentable wart they knew how to make beer okay tiny mini rantette over i'm really bad at ranting somebody in the comments of one of my videos told me i couldn't ramp properly because i'm too nice so i'm gonna try and rant better next time i guess i don't know i'm not a ranter i'm a lover not a fighter so back to sarty is a is a raw ale you don't boil the wart there are still lots of beers around that you don't boil the wart uh there is a beer in gotland i can't remember the name of it right now i think it's nope it's gone editing jimmy put it on the screen um in fact you probably a lot of you know about hefeweizer which is a type of beer from germany originally that wasn't boiled the wart for a hefervicer wasn't boiled there are lots of other beers in northeastern europe around the baltic where beer isn't boiled so it's raw does that make it dangerous no not really as long as you're careful with it what it means is the cleanliness of your equipment is super important it means that following kind of the traditions quite closely and the instructions in the recipe that you choose to use is really important and it means you have to drink this stuff fast so boiling doesn't just help with cleaning the water it means that you get a longer shelf life now in the medieval period would this be a dangerous drink i mean maybe slightly more dangerous than a boiled beer but let's remember that at this stage in european history there was no germ theory the idea that people didn't drink water in the medieval period is blown out of the water in my basically first video on youtube so go check that out click the card help my engagement grow my channel subscribe gently tap the subscribe button so people were making this beer not because it boiled the water to make the drinking water drinkable but because it contains alcohol and it'll get you pissed beer wasn't drunk in the medieval period because there was no drinking water beer was drunk in the medieval period to get you squiffy and because some people didn't have access to good drinking water always remember there was no germ theory always remember they had no idea that boiling killed germs all they knew was that sometimes if you had dirty water and you boiled it you wouldn't get so sick if you had clear running water they would drink that if the water was running clear in a stream that was considered drinking water if it came out of the well without bits in it that's drinkable water potable so we are making a medieval with possible earlier scandinavian roots possibly viking style ale and this stuff is absolutely amazing sati is also a farmhouse ale so this is something that is made rurally this is made in small batches it's made on a very small scale this is a folk drink if you like and there is a big tradition in modern finland where if somebody is making a bachelor sati you'll go around their house three days after you can smell them brewing it and they'll have a fresh batch of beer like three day old ale and we as modern beer drinkers and brewers are used to leaving our beers for a week two weeks a month six months if you're making an a stout and imperial stout and this is stuff that you can drink in a couple of days and that is how medieval beer worked generally speaking medieval beer was drunk fresh it was drunk whilst the fermentation was still happening so this is an example of that okay so it's not a modern beer it's not a modern ale it's not going to taste or look like a modern ale okay so there we go for one thing it's not going to be fizzy it's not going to have any head to speak of i think what do we start with we start with the recipe i got my recipe from a website called brewing nordic there are lots of other recipes i have actually put a couple in the description of the video here so you can experiment and i scaled this down so the original recipe was for 20 liters out of sati i've scaled that down to one gallon which is eight pints which is about four liters so i'm using a fifth of the ingredients which means that i am using two and a half pounds of grain so i'm using about one and three quarter kilograms of grain and i will be using uh red rye because rye is a very popular ingredient for sakti and there is evidence of rye being grown in finland right back to the i think 12th century so just post viking age so i'm using a lot of rye i'm also using some munich malt which is again pretty equivalent to a lot of the malts being used over in finland there are specific malts you can use that are designed for sakti i can't get hold of those right now and i'm going to be using uh this other malt which is just a fairly standard largemouth how do we go from having bags of seeds to having beer well the process is pretty dang cool i beg your pardon i'm coughing all over the place today it's not the roller so these grains have already been crushed which helps to release all of the goodness in them when you put them in the water i am taking this two and a half pounds of grain and putting them into a gallon of water and originally i was going to try and be clever and put them all in a muslin bag so that i could just take the bag out afterwards and it wouldn't create any mess and it wouldn't create any fuss but the muslin bag was way too small and that didn't work so i just threw the grain into the pot traditionally in sakhti this would all be made in a large wooden tub i don't have access to a large wooden tub right now so i am just using a saucepan all of this has been sanitized the saucepan has been sanitized the tub that i use for transferring the liquid into has been sanitized the spoons have been sanitized thermometer is sanitized i have been sanitized everything has been sanitized that's not a traditional part of the sati and obviously in the medieval period some of the yeast the wild yeast that you use in brewing would have come from unsanitized equipment i'm not doing that because i have a history of my beers going horribly ski with if i don't do good sanitizing so this is the modern thing that i'm doing in this recipe is sanitizing i don't want to get sick i don't want my beer to go wrong i want to just make a good beer so clean your stuff what we then do is increase the temperature really gradually and this is a key part of all of the recipes i found is you increase the temperature gradually the gradual increase in temperature mimics an ancient technique for heating water which is putting hot stones into a tub of water our equivalent here is getting the water up to 40 degrees celsius leaving it there with the grain in for an hour okay get it up to 40 keep it as close to 40 as you can you don't have to clock watch my technique that worked really well was i had it on a big gas hob i got it up to 38 degrees i took it off the big gas hob put it on a tiny gas hob on the lowest heat and just left it there for an hour and it stuck around 40 42 degrees it was fine then making sure you're stirring it and it will look like porridge don't panic it's it's totally fine that it looks like weird oatmeal crank it up to 50 for an hour you crank that bad boy up to 50 degrees for an hour leave it if you need to top up the water level slightly that's fine but you don't want to dilute this weird porridge too much okay if it's affecting the temperature if the temperature is getting too high tip a little bit of water and i'm talking like a quarter of a pint of water half a pint maybe just be careful don't dilute this stuff too much see why later after an hour you crank it up to 60 and then after an hour at 60 degrees you smash it up to 70. you see where this is going this takes a long time and part of the reason we're doing this is so that all of the sugars get released from the grains because that is what gets pooped out of the yeast in the form of alcohol yeast eats sugar and poops out alcohol that's how beer works so that's what we're trying to do here we're trying to get as much of that sugar out as possible now above 70 degrees most of that's not going to happen anymore most of the process that happens the science that happens stops at 70 degrees and that is what is called a mash out so that's how you stop any more sugar from getting released the magic ingredient to a sarty comes after you have finished heating the wart so after four or five hours of gentle increases in temperature the magic happens with sati because then you move on to the process called lautering and lautering is where you pour more water over the grain kind of like a i don't even know what it's kind of like it's lautering um that's all that's all i can't think of imagine you putting tea leaves in a tea strainer and poured water over the top of it and then the tea came out it's like that and that just makes sure you've got all of the sugars out of the enzymes so lautering is the next process in a traditional sati they use an amazing piece of piece of kit called akurna and that is a big trough filled with little wooden plates with a bed of juniper branches and the juniper branches filter the liquid so you literally you just take this grainy stuff you put the water you put the liquid out of it and all of the grain and all of the junk and you filter it through these branches and then you pour water over the top to get as much of the sugary goodness out a lot of modern sati brewers use a metal grill and i don't have kurner so what i did was put some branches into the mash huh like a spruce ale but it's not much like a spruce sale really i don't think i used enough of the branches hey-ho take all of the mush out sieve the mush use lots of water to get as much as possible out of the mush try and keep it up to a gallon using this recipe if you're using a different recipe try not to take it over your maximum level of liquid because you'll dilute the ale if you want to dilute the ale fine go for it water down your beer if you want to make a weaker version of this by all means use less grain per gallon or use this amount of grain for slightly more water entirely up to you and then you add the east this is brewing so once you've strained all of the liquid off the gunk basically there's not much left to do you wait for it to get down to its fermenting temperature and the fermenting temperature for this recipe is around 15 to 25 degrees i'm using bread yeast home brewers don't kill me this is the recipe the recipe said to use bread yeast and honestly i can kind of see where that's coming from prior to the breeding and development of specific brewers yeasts a lot of the yeast people were using was probably the yeast available from baking leavened bread and honestly i've brewed with baker's yeast before and it's been fine just doesn't taste as much like a modern beer but this isn't modern beer this is a medieval ale it's fine so the step that we've just missed out is the boiling normally when you get the mash up to its temperature you then boil the liquid to clean it we haven't done that so now what we do once it's down to its temperature it gets down to 20 degrees and that can take some time unless you have specialist equipment is you chuck in 10 grams of yeast i actually made a starter so i put 10 grams of yeast into a cup of warm water with half a teaspoonful of sugar shook it around left it for half an hour and boom bang a bang it was a little yeasty cloud tip that into the wart tip that into the liquid that you have you now have a gallon of effectively raw beer basically put that into a demijohn with an airlock wait for it to start bubbling now mine took overnight to start bubbling but when it started boy did it bubble it was kind of alarming how quickly it started bubbling but it carried on bubbling for about three days and then it started to slow down as soon as it starts to slow down get it cool cool it right down my mate from finland who gave me some advice on this said that some people don't do that some people will leave it for three days to ferment and then just drink it straight away but his recommendation was to cool it right down almost to freezing so i left it outside in my hallway because i live in scotland and the temperature down there hasn't got above three degrees this week so oh nippy after another two days down there i brought it back upstairs and now we're gonna taste some it's on my windowsill all right so i have taken the liberty of pouring it into a charming little swing top bottle i got from my friends look at that it's cute it's a little bit cloudy i'm just looking at my microphone it's a little bit cloudy microphone it's a little bit cloudy um it hasn't really been it hasn't been filtered in the modern sense in the modern mass production brewing sense it hasn't been filtered it hasn't been fined where you add bits of fish guts to clarify the beer it's this is this is kind of as as raw as a raw ale can be so this is pretty close to how medieval beer would be made actually um i took measurements from it before it went into the fermenter with the yeast and having taken it out of the fermenter and this is 6.5 i measured it after three days before i put it downstairs and it was at 6.3 so in three days using two pounds a gallon of grain you can make a six and a half percent ale this is fresh raw ale there's still a little bit of yeast in there i can see on the top um there's hardly any mush down at the bottom which is nice and i think that's because we didn't boil it so i'm gonna stop putting off the inevitable now okay oh it's a nice color i think that's all the red rye that we used it's giving it's lovely deep red color when it comes out put that i'm not gonna put that on the bed recipe for disaster palette cleanser if it turns out to be horrible it's just a bottle of guinness so here we go this is the sakti this is my finish sakti my medieval finnish ale it's kind of a lovely color actually look a really deep red you can smell the booze oh my god you can smell the alcohol as a piece of fluff in it already reenactor flats doesn't have much of a smell to it it doesn't smell of a lot like it smells a bit yeasty and a bit malty so dang that's actually really refreshing i see where you have it cold i see where i have to cool it down that's really good it's like quite full bodied it's really fun oh wow it's really full bodied oh my goodness it's coming back it's super malty it's super malty there is a little bit of bitterness which might have come from the spruce actually after a couple of sips you can taste the spruce so i think if i'd used um oh i used spruce branches by the way not gina i forgot to mention there's no tuna up around here cannot find any juniper bushes i tried um if anyone knows of any juniper trees around edinburgh dm me so it's a secret shh um oh there's a little bit of spruciness to it yeah there's a little bit of like this christmas it's the smell of a christmas tree it smells tastes like the smell of a christmas tree that's really cool oh my goodness medieval sarty wow super cool i highly recommend you guys make some of this this stuff is super easy to make you could probably experiment a lot with the grain uh with the grain profile but yeah a couple of pounds of grain like a kilogram and a half of grain per gallon so per four liters stick it in a saucepan simmer it for a few hours and then add a little yeast and leave it for three days and you've made a strong ale this is really cool how cool is this you've made an ale suitable for a viking queen to be buried with so i hope you enjoyed that guys i hope this is interesting for you um i'm absolutely over the moon with this this is super cool oh my goodness wow this is really good um i love this that's super strong the blues is strong um yeah i hope you enjoyed this guys i hope this was interesting um thank you once again as ever for joining um it's lovely to see so many new people we're over 6 000 subscribers so thank you to everyone who's subscribing it really warms my heart to see when new people have decided to join thank you for all of your lovely comments and messages recently a few of you have asked about me getting a po box i am working on getting a post office box they're quite expensive um they're like 250 quid so if i can find one that i can afford i will get a post office box because a lot of you guys have been asking about that so it's very sweet of you to ask tantronis and william till the next time thank you very much indeed for watching who will i draw bye for now that is dangerously drinkable what did you do today james my good wank good on saturday saturday style ale it's not society i'll get sued by finland the fins will come for me it was a little bit of gunk um

Channel: The Welsh Viking

Views: 23,267

Keywords: Welsh Viking, Sahti, Medieval, Homebrew, mySCA, viking beer, homebrew beer, norse beer, viking history, norse culture, medieval beer, viking ale, ol

Id: KjSrEwPU2ZY

Length: 25min 32sec (1532 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021