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So, how can something be "revisited" if I never posted it here, before? It's a revisit to an ale that I formulated and brewed in 1997.
The original for it is:
To brewe Beer
X. quarters malte, ij. quarters wheet, ij. quarters ootes, xl. ll'. weight of hoppys. To make Ix. barells of sengyll beer.
And that's the whole recipe. My original foray can be found at https://groups.google.com/g/rec.crafts.brewing/c/XQ9YlmnaDJY/m/T2HBONWKyH8J and it's a creditable attempt by somebody who made a LOT of assumptions and didn't have access to the research stuff I can get now. Oh, yah, and as y'inz can easily see, I did this SIXTEEN YEARS before that nobody Terry Foster did his schtick with it. (As an aside, he made a really stupid goof. The dingleberry automatically assumed that the "barells" in question were sized in Imperial gallons which were not codified until 1824. The gallons used for beer in 1502 were sufficiently larger to make a difference in outcomes--even I knew about Ale gallons in 1997, sloppy work.)
Anyway, a writeup of the most recent version is at https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/view/1575024/arnold-s-ale
Some notes on what I'm doing differently this time around.
Turns out that quarters were standardized by weight for multiple goods, allowing me to just slap those conversions in.
A good deal of digging led me to believe that the jury is still out regarding malting of wheat and oats. Given the expense of malting, a household brewer could very likely have used them as unmalted adjuncts, especially because:
Two-row barley wasn't grown in England in 1502. That was a big good I made (echoed by every other version of this recipe that has appeared--one wonders why). That's right. The 16th century saw Britain still using 6-row landraces for brewing. Alas, I can't find a commercial source for bere malt (that's the closest we can find to the old landrace) but I did find a 6-row "heritage malt". I also got silly with the malts and used a bunch of dark and smoky thingies on the premise that maltsters back then couldn't be expected to actually control temperature or timing so they'd make unevenly kilned boogers. As I have learned more about the skills of the day, I no longer have that delusion.
The last time around, I violated the one instruction in the original. I did two runnings when this was a "sengyll beer". That means "single beer"--one running. So, this time, ALL the mash water goes in at once and then gets run off to be boiled, which is why the new recipe has a lot of mash water for the amount of grain.
Oh, why do I call it "Arnold's Ale" when it labels itself as a beer?
Back then, anything with hops was a "beer" and "ale" was unhopped. So, in 1502 it was a beer. Today, given the presumably English character and use of an English (top fermenting) yeast, it's an "ale".
I'm now awaiting equipment to re-start my brewing and this will be the first one I try.
The original for it is:
To brewe Beer
X. quarters malte, ij. quarters wheet, ij. quarters ootes, xl. ll'. weight of hoppys. To make Ix. barells of sengyll beer.
And that's the whole recipe. My original foray can be found at https://groups.google.com/g/rec.crafts.brewing/c/XQ9YlmnaDJY/m/T2HBONWKyH8J and it's a creditable attempt by somebody who made a LOT of assumptions and didn't have access to the research stuff I can get now. Oh, yah, and as y'inz can easily see, I did this SIXTEEN YEARS before that nobody Terry Foster did his schtick with it. (As an aside, he made a really stupid goof. The dingleberry automatically assumed that the "barells" in question were sized in Imperial gallons which were not codified until 1824. The gallons used for beer in 1502 were sufficiently larger to make a difference in outcomes--even I knew about Ale gallons in 1997, sloppy work.)
Anyway, a writeup of the most recent version is at https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/view/1575024/arnold-s-ale
Some notes on what I'm doing differently this time around.
Turns out that quarters were standardized by weight for multiple goods, allowing me to just slap those conversions in.
A good deal of digging led me to believe that the jury is still out regarding malting of wheat and oats. Given the expense of malting, a household brewer could very likely have used them as unmalted adjuncts, especially because:
Two-row barley wasn't grown in England in 1502. That was a big good I made (echoed by every other version of this recipe that has appeared--one wonders why). That's right. The 16th century saw Britain still using 6-row landraces for brewing. Alas, I can't find a commercial source for bere malt (that's the closest we can find to the old landrace) but I did find a 6-row "heritage malt". I also got silly with the malts and used a bunch of dark and smoky thingies on the premise that maltsters back then couldn't be expected to actually control temperature or timing so they'd make unevenly kilned boogers. As I have learned more about the skills of the day, I no longer have that delusion.
The last time around, I violated the one instruction in the original. I did two runnings when this was a "sengyll beer". That means "single beer"--one running. So, this time, ALL the mash water goes in at once and then gets run off to be boiled, which is why the new recipe has a lot of mash water for the amount of grain.
Oh, why do I call it "Arnold's Ale" when it labels itself as a beer?
Back then, anything with hops was a "beer" and "ale" was unhopped. So, in 1502 it was a beer. Today, given the presumably English character and use of an English (top fermenting) yeast, it's an "ale".
I'm now awaiting equipment to re-start my brewing and this will be the first one I try.
