The Working Man's Beer

What if beer was more than a recreational drink?  What if it was made in every household what if   it was drank by everyone including children what  if beer was about survival. That was the reality   in 18th century America not every water source  was safe to drink and everyone kind of knew that   and so they would stay away from water when  possible and drink other kinds of beverages.  Coffee and tea and especially something  like hard cider but beer, beer was important   because it was already sterilized they  didn't know exactly what was going on   with beer and why it was safe to drink. We know today that if you boil all those   ingredients you're killing off things like  dangerous bacteria you introduce your yeast   and you get this mildly alcoholic beverage.  Now they weren't sure about the science behind   that at all they had lots of different ideas  about why the beer was safe to drink they knew   it was safe they knew it was better than  water that it actually had health-giving   properties that it could make you strong. When we read in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography   he talks about workers the workers when they get  ready for work they drink beer and at lunchtime   they drink beer it's part of their wages they  know that this strong beer makes them strong he   disagrees with that he drinks water instead but  they believe that it's a very very healthy drink.  Beer also plays an incredibly important role  in the military both the landbased forces and   the sailors at sea they are given rations of  beer up to a gallon a day and if they don't   have beer to give these sailors or soldiers  they have to give them a substitute something   like Grog which is watered down rum they need  something like that to get them through the day.  Water isn't good enough for those soldiers. Beer was an alternative to water which might   be dangerous to drink but there was  also pressure from the other direction.  There were hard Liquors that were available  at the time something like gin that was really   becoming popular in the early 18th century that  was a giant societal problem especially in the   United Kingdom because the Gin was so cheap it  was being drank by everyone children included   and so beer was a much much better alternative. If the water is dangerous and we don't want them   to drink gin then let's have them drink beer. Now their beer is different than our beer today   and they are lots of different kinds of beer  in our time period there is strong beer there's   common beer there's table beer there's small beer. Now all these are probably a little weaker than   our beers today they had a much more difficult  time extracting all the sugars out of their   grains and their yeasts weren't as let's say  efficient as the yeast strains that we have today.  So we can generally think that a strong beer  it might be 8% alcohol and a standard beer   is definitely going to be something like 3 or  4% and table beers and small beers which the   children and women are more likely to drink are  maybe a half percent or a percent in alcohol.  In places like Great Britain and North America  beer is a working man's drink and it's drank   by everyone that means the Brewer is very very  important and in many places he's very highly   regulated because this drink is so important to  society. So beer can only have very particular   ingredients for example the beer that we're  talking about today that will be making was   actually illegal in the early 18th century  for Brewers to make it was very simple it   used molasses to create the beer so it was very  easy to make very inexpensive it became regulated   or even banned in this setting. I think because  it makes a kind of a substitute beer that's very   inexpensive to make and they could pass it off  as something that had much better ingredients.  Home brewing is incredibly popular in our time  period just about any household can make a simple   beer like this with very very simple equipment  if you have a couple of large cooking vessels   and a barrel or anything to keep your finished  beer in and then your ingredients you need soft   water you need some kind of sugar whether it's  malted grains or something like Molasses maybe   a few spices like ginger and a little bit of  yeast and you're ready to start making beer.  It's very interesting to delve into 18th  century Brewing especially compared to   Modern Brewing we have a lot of home brewing  that goes on these days and brewing in the last   100 years so much scientific research has gone  into it we know exactly what's happening with   brewing we understand all these different  strains of yeast and the malting of grains   and where all these flavors are coming from. They didn't have any of these ideas in 18th   century brewing and if you read so many of the  recipes about Brewing you can't actually figure   out why they work at all they break all kinds  of rules things like putting the yeast in when   it's way too hot or putting hot water on top  of the yeast as it's working maybe they don't   boil the things that they really need to boil  and so there's sanitation problems there's all   sorts of issues when you read an 18th century  Brewing recipe and if you really want to make   it work especially the first time you have  to kind of break the recipe a little bit you   have to rearrange it and do some extra steps  because when they were writing it down they   didn't understand what was really going on. They didn't understand how clean everything   needed to be they didn't even really  understand the true nature of yeast.  So let's talk about this very very simple beer  that anyone could Brew at home it's called a   molasses beer in our time period and what's  really interesting is there's almost exactly   the same recipe that George Washington talks  about he writes about in the late 1750s while   he's a military officer at Fort Lowden  he writes down in his book a very simple   molasses beer recipe. Well in 1790 there's  a molasses beer recipe it says molasses beer   according to the methods said to be practiced in  Philadelphia Take 5 lbs of basses half a pint of   yeast a spoonful of powdered race Ginger and  put these ingredients into your vessel pour on   them 2 gallons of scalding hot soft and clear  water shake them well till it ferments and add   13 gallons of the same cold water to fill up the  cask let the liquor ferment about 12 hours then   bottle it off with a raisin or two in each bottle. Now if we follow this recipe exactly like it says   it would fail because of course they're mixing  up this yeast and the ginger and the molasses   and then they pour hot water right on top of  it and of course that would instantly kill   your yeast and then it wouldn't work anymore and  then the whole purpose of course of sanitizing   everything with the scolding water they break  that rule by adding regular water after that.  So we don't want to make our recipe exactly  according to this now this probably could   work for them for two different reasons one  is that if they put their killed yeast into a   vessel that already had some yeast in it like  say a barrel that already had beer in it old   yeast would actually be working and not the new  yeast and this new water that's introduced that   would in our sense break our sanitation rule  and possibly bring in bacterial contamination   well it's likely that this beer did not last very  long it was drank right away it was a green beer   it wasn't aged for a year or you know 6 months or  anything like that because by then it would have   gone sour so it was likely drank right away. I've shrunk this way down so that it will be   easy for anyone we can make this in a gallon  or two batch because nobody needs 15 gallons   of molasses beer so if we take two gallons of  water and we bring it up to heat and we can add   about a pound or so of molasses to that all we  really need to do is bring it up to about 200°   for let's say 15 minutes and that will be plenty  to sterilize what's going on with our water and   our molasses then we can add our race Ginger and  that's just regular Ginger race Ginger just means   like a ginger root then it has to cool off that  has to cool off to a temperature that doesn't   kill off the yeast and depending on on what kind  of brewers yeast you have that might be down to   say 90° and more likely even cooler and we're  just going to put our yeast on top of here if   you have a standard powdered yeast you can just  pour that right on top they've got their yeast   from the Brewer so they weren't exactly sure what  kind of yeast they had whatever yeast the Brewer   was using at that time period was the yeast that  you would use just like if you were baking bread   we're going to keep that at 70 or 75° we want  to cover our vessel up as well as we can but   still let it breathe and we will start to see  that yeast work after 12 hours it'll probably   float to the top that's good that's the yeast  working it's eating up the sugars inside of our   beer it's working and it's it's starting to make  uh carbon dioxide and start to make a little bit   of alcohol at this point we can actually start  to drink this green beer we can strain off that   yeast now in this recipe it says to bottle it now  they say put raisin or a little bit of sugar in   there that's priming the bottle that's making it  so the yeast can still work and kind of seal it   up and it will start to carbonate in that bottle  so they made special bottles in the 18th century   that could hold the pressure so yeah sometimes  they had carbonated beer many people would at   this point just go ahead and drink it this batch  would probably be finished up in a couple of days   maybe a week and you would make a brand new batch  now this is a simple beer it's a table beer it's   a small beer it's a beer drink by everyone it is  not meant to be an expensive beer that would stay   in a bottle for 6 months now some people might not  even call this beer because it doesn't have hops.  There are some recipes for this type of molasses  beer that do have some hops in it but generally   the hops is just there for a bittering flavor  not there because of its preservation technique.  So true beer has hot hops in it and the  hops is there to help preserve that beer   to keep it from going bad with bacteria  so this might not be perfectly a beer   maybe more closely related to cider  than to beer but let's try it out. It's got a good flavor there's some sweetness to  it because the yeast hasn't eaten up all those   sugars so it's very very mildly alcoholic but  you can hardly detect it at all there's a little   bit of that Ginger there mostly the Molasses  flavor and if we don't use black strap which is   a little too bitter for this kind of thing just a  standard baking molasses make sure it's unsulfured   it makes a nice little table beer. This is the working man's beer.

Channel: Townsends

Views: 546,634

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking

Id: nAZZGlK4E3Y

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 17 2024