There are four mashes of decreasing length. The last sentence where it talks of "starting into butts" refers to vatting the beer for maturation.
Porter Brewing for 40 Quarters
Malts
14 quarters of Brown }
14 quarters of Pale } Ware
12 quarters of Amber }
Hops
160 pounds of New }
160 pounds of Old } Kent
Turn over four liquors devide into 3 worts
First wort boil 3 quarters
Second wort boil 1.5 hours
Third wort boil 1.5 hours
First liquor turn over at 160 degrees with 60 barrels of liquor turned over. Mash for one hour and stand on the goods for one hour and a quarter.
Second liquor turn over at 166 degrees with 60 barrels of liquor turned over. Mash for three quarters and stand on the goods for one hour.
Third liquor turn over at 170 degrees with 40 barrels of liquor turned over. Mash for half an hour and stand on the goods for three quarters an hour.
Fourth liquor turn over at 150 degrees with 40 barrels of liquor turned over. Mash 20 minutes and stand on the goods for half an hour. Afterwards sett tap.
Lett the worts down into the square at 67 degrees and in the Summer at 66 degrees with six scoopes of yeast well rousd together to mix them.
Rouse the head well in and cleanse at 78 degrees. Cleanse in full vigour.
Start from the barrels into butts or puncheons 14 hours after cleansing.
If you're interested, it contains several other recipes. Brown Stout. London Ale. Windsor Ale. Amber. Table Beer. Common Small Beer. No doubt I'll post them. It'll save me having to think. Or translate that description of Broyhan printed in a virtually illegible Gothic typeface.
Pretty impressive temperature control for so early in the century. How did they do that?
ReplyDeleteThis recipe seems relatively light on hops.
Gary
Awesome. I imagine the brewer who took the time to write down these recipes in such detail would be mighty tickled if he knew that 200 years later brewing history nerds would pour over them with fascination.
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering how standing on my mash tun for 75 minutes will make a better beer.
ReplyDeleteThat looks suspiciously like a manuscript that was intended for publication - I wonder if it ever was.
ReplyDeleteFar more interesting to me than some esoteric German beer that I had never heard of until now.
We are seeing "Entire Gyling" here, and of course it is staled in butts, "Entire Butt".
A hangover of triple-mashing, when brewers of standard beers mashed three times and usually produced three different beers from the same grist, was that the mash tun was three times the capacity of their copper.
Parti-gyling, which became almost standard practice with smallish regional brewers in the twentieth century was a hangover from the days of triple mashing. Even after the introduction of sparging, unless the brewery re-equipped, their mash tun was still three times the capacity of their single copper, so producing three beers (in fact all their beers) from the same grist continued, almost to the present day.
There is probably the odd brewery or two still remaining with huge mash tuns and underbacks (to hold the sweet wort in readiness for the copper), compared to the copper itself. Gales was very much like that from what I remember.
Graham, there's a lot more to party-gyling than just being a leftover of multiple mashes. That's why breweries like Fuller's still party-gyle.
ReplyDeleteI don't quite understand why the mash tun would be triple the capacity of the copper for this method. As not all the wort would be in the mash tun at once.
Incidentally this is not from one of the classic (original) porter brewers since I recall you stating, Ron, that Courage started off as an ale brewer.
ReplyDeleteAs I read this, there are four successive mashings, all from one set of goods.
As each is made, it must I would think be transferred to a larger holding vessel, or a series of smaller ones, until they can be combined. When combined (thus constituting an entire gyle - one beer to result from all the extract available in a set of mash goods), they are then divided into three worts. Each is boiled per the directions given, either successively or in more than one copper simulaneously if they had more than one copper. Then the worts are mingled and sent to the fermentation square. If they were using one copper, the earlier boils would be cooling in cool-ships (still used for the process of making steam beer in San Francisco I understand).
A variation (in the same era) is that the fourth mash was not combined with the first three. Rather, it was left to sit on the by now almost-exhausted goods. That very-low gravity mash would be added to the water used for the next new mashing, to use up whatever extract it had. Logically, this was called the Return (see Booth at pp.18-19, Art of Brewing).
Gary
What did "turn over" mean? I can't figure it out from the context. The first time it sounds like it means mashing, but the subsequent usage wouldn't make sense then.
ReplyDeleteRon, I can read blackletter if you want me to have a go at the Broyhan recipe.
Barm, in this context, "turn over" just means pouring the water into the tun.
ReplyDeleteGraham, the date is extremely important. 18th century brown malt was diastatic, 19th century brown malt wasn't. There was a change in the method of its manufacture sometime around 1800.
ReplyDeleteThe hornbeam-dried, rather roasted brown malt is the 19th-century type. I've yet to see any evidence of 18th century brown malt being produced that way. And I've read plenty of passages where it's called "supposed malt" because the blown, rossty type had no diastase and little fermentable material.
http://books.google.com/books?id=CGQ7AAAAcAAJ&pg=PA70&dq="brown+malt"&lr=&as_drrb_is=b&as_minm_is=1&as_miny_is=1700&as_maxm_is=1&as_maxy_is=1800&as_brr=0#v=onepage&q=%22brown%20malt%22&f=false
ReplyDeleteAbove is Richardson's rather precise explanation of the difference in fermentable extract between pale malt, brown malt and blown malt. Richardson rates the Ware type, which he indicates is a choice production, at 56 pounds per quarter, while brown and pale malts are some 30 pounds higher (the latter two differing by only 5 pounds).
Thus, in this period (1700's), blown malt clearly had fermentability but at much less rate than the other malts.
On the issue of smoke flavour, I will summarize what I just read in Thomas Hale's 1700's husbandry text. Smoke flavour is never desirable for any type of malt. In the best qualities regardless of type, straw or well-made coke should be used to dry. Because they impart the least smoke. Hale notes that any fuel can darken malt, it is a question only of which is to be used. He states that some cheap malt - brown malt - is smoky from use of wood to dry it. He regards this again as a fault. That some porter in the 1700's was smoky seems unquestioned, but it was regarded as inferior by this author.
By the 1800's, we know that brown malt was smoked with oak wood and hornbeam (beech) - intentionally in other words and making what clearly were well-regarded varieties. Why the switch in emphasis?
I think there is a simple answer. Once pale malt became the base of porter, to get the formerly mild smoky taste it often had when made from all-brown malt, you had to smoke the minority malts in the grist (brown and probably amber) to achieve over all the same effect.
What was a drawback in an earlier time became a virtue.
Gary
The final part of the puzzle:
ReplyDeletehttp://books.google.com/books?id=u18CAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA358&dq="brown+malt"&lr=&as_brr=0#v=onepage&q=%22brown%20malt%22&f=false
Brown malt is too expensive in relation to its merits, even when used as part of the grist only. So, dispense with it entirely and use the new black patent malt. The author in this brief commentary (American in origin) believes that the same flavour will result as from use of brown malt. Over-optimism I think, although perhaps the early black patent malt did have a some tang. Some coffee does, and patent malt production is sometimes compared to coffee roasting.
Gary
Gary
Of course 19th-century brown malt was diastatic. You've just published two 19th-century recipes that could not possibly work otherwise. Diastatic brown malt was around in Robin Hood's day and survived until 1956. It remained the premier malt until pale malt became cheaper than brown and, just as importantly, when pale malt could be made on a commercial scale, which took a radical change in kiln design and malting technique (Nothing to do with coal or coke as is commonly suggested - It is a myth that pale malt needs to be kilned over coal and coke - it doesn't and at one time it wasn't).
ReplyDeleteCertainly the malt used in 18th-century London porter would have been smoked over hornbeam. The reason for the once huge malt industry of Ware, Stanstead Abbots and the like, was the abundance of local managed hornbeam forests and the proximity of the River Lea.
Ware's malting industry grew in sympathy with the growth of porter and died alongside the death of porter. 100+ maltsters in Ware alone in 1800; just 21 in 1855.
Hornbeam was important to porter, probably because of its flavour. Ware also made oak-dried malt, but it was never used in London porter. Berkshire produced beech-dried malt, but it was never used in London porter.
There is a porter recipe given (disparagingly) in Tizard that has distilled wood oil as one of its ingredients - presumably to replicate the smokiness.
I have no idea when drum-brown began to replace "proper" brown, but I would suspect that drum brown was never used in porter until well into the 20th century, after people had forgotten what porter was supposed to taste like.
I think you are confusing brown malt and blown or snapped malt. They are not the same thing. Blown malt seems to have been a very short-lived thing. Of course lots of brown malt was accidentally blown if the maltster was stupid enough to go "modern" and fit a kiln floor made from perforated cast-iron plates; he could hardly make anything else.
I don't know about diastatic activity, but Tizard gives brown malt as having 15% to 20% less extract than pale malt. Those figures would be acceptable today and no different to some modern malts. That indicates that the demise of brown malt had nothing to do with extract, but to do with other things; initially the relative cost of the stuff.
Tizard gives blown malt as having 20 to 25% less extract than pale.
Belgium still makes diastatic amber malt, which is as dark as old-time British brown malt was, just unsmoked.
Graham, all I can say is that the 18th century texts I've read all say:
ReplyDelete- London malt came mostly from Hertfordshire
- it was dried using straw
- London brewers didn't like smokly malt
The first mentions I've seen of hornbeam are from the 19th century. From a description of the 1830's, it's clear that the method of manufacturing brown malt had changed considerably.
I agree with Gary's explanation - that when the percentage of brown malt was dropped to well under 50% they started using a different type of brown malt. One that was darker and roastier to compensate the the reduced percentage.
It's impossible to talk generally of 19th century amber malt. It filled in virtually the whole gap between pale and brown, in terms of colour. There was huge variation. At least some was diastatic.
Correction: I suggested that hornbeam and beech are the same and having double-checked, I see they are not. However, both seem similarly hard tough woods. This does not mean they may not offer different flavours in malt (I don't know). I suspect though that the wood most commonly used when a smoky tang was wanted was that most commonly available and cheapest.
ReplyDeleteGary
I thought it might be useful to lay out Thomas Hale's discussion (again pre-1800):
ReplyDeletehttp://books.google.com/books?id=sto6AAAAcAAJ&pg=PA318&dq=fuel+to+dry+malt&lr=&as_drrb_is=b&as_minm_is=1&as_miny_is=1700&as_maxm_is=1&as_maxy_is=1900&as_brr=0#v=onepage&q=fuel%20to%20dry%20malt&f=false