Hi everyone, welcome to Tasting History.
I'm your host max Miller, and today in Los Angeles it's a little chilly, it's a little overcast. It's very odd but it's fortuitous because it is the perfect
weather to make one of Tudor England's favorite ale house brew, hot buttered beer.
Kinda sounded Australian, its meant to sound English, but there it is hot buttered
beer. Today on Tasting History. Now I'm sure most of you have read or seen Harry
Potter so of course you know butter beer, but this is not JK Rowling's butter beer.
Though I do love that JK Rowling goes to historic references for so many things
in the Harry Potter books butter beer being one of them. That butter beer was
drank by a bunch of eleven and twelve year olds, so probably not highly
alcoholic. Maybe a little bit as it is England, but you know in the stuff that
you get at Harry Potter world really nothing like this recipe. The recipe
we're using today comes from Thomas Dawson's 1594 book "The Good Housewives
Handmade For the Kitchen" which reads take three pints of beer, 'put five yolks
of eggs to it strain them together, strain meant mix
back then, but anyway and set it in a pewter pot to the fire, and put to it
half a pound of sugar one pennyworth of nutmegs beaten, one pennyworth of cloves
beaten, and one half pennyworth of ginger beaten and when it is all in take
another pewter pot, and brew them together, and set it to the fire again. And when it is ready to boil take it from the fire, and put a dish of sweet
butter into it and brew them together out of one pot into another. Now the
thing about most medieval and renaissance recipes is we have to guess
at a lot of this stuff because they weren't terribly specific, but this
recipe is awesome because with the exception of exactly how much clove or
ginger or nutmeg you got for a penny we can basically recreate it exactly as it
would have been done in Tudor times. I'm way excited about that. So let's get
started! What you'll need is three pints of ginger, 1/2 teaspoon of cloves, 1/2
teaspoon of nutmeg, and 225 grams of Demerara natural brown sugar. Now you can
use just regular dark brown sugar if you can't find Demerara because finding
Demerara sugar is not so easy in the US. Than five egg yolks, and one stick of
unsalted butter diced. First take your 5 egg yolks and beat them with the sugar
until light and frothy then set that aside for the ale. Into a saucepan now
the recipe calls for a pewter pot but who has that. I want one but I don't have
one, yet. Christmas list. So I'm just going to use a deep saucepan. Needs to be
fairly big for the amount of beer that we're putting in there but you can also
use stock pot or a Dutch oven anything works just as long as it can go on top
of the stove. So pour the Ale into the saucepan and try not to let it get too
frothy then stir in the ginger, the cloves, and the nutmeg, and heat over medium heat until the
mixture comes to a light boil then turn it down and simmer on low for about two
minutes. Now if you do want to make this for kids if they're having a Harry
Potter party, or something like that you can heat the beer up to 285 degrees
Fahrenheit (which is about a hundred and forty degrees Celsius), and let it boil
for 20 minutes you'll burn off almost all of the alcohol at which point you
can serve it to children it'd be like a rum cake, but if you're serving this to
adults don't do that two minutes is more than enough you want to keep that
alcohol in there. Once it's simmered for about two minutes remove the pot from
the heat, and add in your egg, and sugar mixture stir it in then return the pot
to low heat until the liquid starts to thicken. Now this takes about five to
seven minutes if you don't really see it thickening that's okay it's not gonna
actually thicken that much. Don't turn it up because if you turn it up to medium
heat you can actually scramble the eggs, or you can burn the sugar and then
you've just wasted three pints of of good ale.
So once you've simmered it on low for five to seven minutes stir in the diced
butter until it melts then froth the butter beer with a hand whisk then still
on low let it simmer for another ten minutes. Now while that's simmering you
really got nothing else to do so go ahead and hit the Like button, subscribe,
and listen to me chat ya up about beer. I don't know why that keeps coming out as
Australian I really want to do English. Anyway, beer. Now beer or Ale, porter, all of it
was dranked by pretty much everyone in Tudor England everyday, and by some
accounts the country was essentially a giant frat house. There was a big problem
with binge drinking. Queen Elizabeth the first even issued a ban on double-double
beer which had an extremely high alcohol content. Now don't get me wrong she was
no teetotaler, because in 1593 her own household went through 600,000 gallons
of beer. Tt's good to be the queen. Now you're probably starting to wonder
why does this drink exist who thought it was a good idea to put spices and butter
and eggs and a beer and I'll tell ya. It's because beer was so important to
the diet back then, that it was extremely well regulated by the government. There
was actually an official post of Ale Taster or Ale-conner so if you owned a
tavern and you had a cask of ale that was starting to smell a little funky,
throw some nutmeg in there, some cloves, heat it up, put an egg in it, now it
tastes great. But you couldn't do that to every cask of ale, most people wanted
just regular ale and that's why they had the Ale-conner would go from
tavern to tavern to test the quality of whatever beer was being sold. If he
deemed it unworthy you got a fine, or maybe a day in the stocks and had the
ale poured over your head, or in some extreme circumstances you would actually
be dunked into the river which because a lot of people didn't swim back then
could mean death, so you know make good ale. Now while it's called the ale taster
there are anecdotes and they might just be anecdotes of Ale-conners wearing
leather breeches. They would go to the different ale houses, pour the ale out
onto a wooden bench, and then sit in it. After a while once the ale dried they
would stand up, and if their breeches stuck to the seat then that meant there
was too much sugar in the beer they would be fined. Now again that might just
be an anecdote, an old wives tale there's no way to tell, because according to most
contemporary accounts and to the official ale tasters oath the best way
to taste the ale was to taste the ale. And speaking of tasting our ale should be
just about done. So after your 10 minutes of simmering is done remove the saucepan
from the heat, and allow the butterbeer to cool to a warm but drinkable
temperature, then whisk it up again or if you want to follow the exact recipe you
whisk it by transferring it from one cup to another very quickly, but I don't have
a scullery maid on hand to clean up all the cups so I'm just gonna use a whisk.
Pour the butter beer into a glass and serve warm. Here it is, hot buttered beer. It's
actually really good, it's really, it's quite nice, really nice. I don't even
know how to explain it, it's like creamy beer with spices,
but it's really really good. Now if it's a hot day, and you don't really feel like
a warm beer you can have it chilled and it is actually really nice. You can
take one part milk, and one part the cold beer, mix them together, delicious. Now the
recipe and the ingredients are all in the description down below so while I
sit here and drink three pints of butter beer all by myself make sure to hit that
Like button, subscribe and if you make your own butter beer leave me a comment
and tell me how it went and as always join me next time on Tasting History.
I take great offence at the thought that we Brits are drinking at age 11-12.
It is much younger than that.
Heat to 285 F?? You'll get taffy!
States use english ale. Then uses Sierra Nevada. Great beer but very different to a good old pint of the brown stuff.
I am definitely going to have to try this!!! This may have to become a Halloween tradition, just as mulled wine is already our Christmas tradition!!
You know it's authentic because they spelled beer with an extra E!
but if you bring a liquid up to a simmer, that's already the boiling point. that's plenty warm enough to curdle the eggs.
Let me start by saying that I think the butter beer served at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter is absolutely horrid stuff. I’m not much of a fan of those cream soda or root beer flavours.
That being said, this sounds delicious and I think I’ll make some this weekend.
I wasn’t a very smart kid (not claiming I grew into a particularly smart man), but back then, I just assumed Butter Beer was just regular beer with butter in it, thus making it suitable for children?
Nice, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale... Now I want a pack...