 Home Library Newsletters Competition Info Links Join CASK! Contact CASK Virginia Beer Blitz 
Follow @CASK_VA of the Year Leader Board
CASK is a proud supporter of Independent Brewers (Craft and Home)!! |
NHC 2013 Frank Clark's Guide to Brewing the 18th Century Way. This also appeared as an article in our Summer 2013 Newsletter. This is for making beers pale to brown. Guidelines:Base malt is generally Maris otter since it is one of the older varieties’ still available and has a slightly darker color. The malt kilns were often fired with wood or even straw so some smoked malt is acceptable. The malts were not as uniform as today but generally fell into three categories
Process:Brewers typically brewed 2 or 3 batches from one set of grain, thereby creating beers of descending strengths. THEY DID NOT SPARGE! So you would make strong ale or keeping beer, and a small beer, or a strong beer a table beer and a small beer. You want at least 10 pounds of base malt and anywhere up to 8 or 9 more pounds of specialty malts for two or three five gallon batches. Single infusion is fine but wooden mash tubs lose heat quickly so they often capped the mash with fresh malt to insulate it. Mash times started at an hour and went up a half hour more with each additional mashing. This is why it is good to have two people doing it or at least two kettles so you can heat water for mashing while boiling the first wort and thenswap it for later boils. They would usually run the mash through the hops in a sack often with a handful of salt added to them and then add it to the wort to boil.Hops should be Kent Golding’s or WGV or first gold and possibly fuggles hop rates varied depending on how long the beer was intended to last. It could be pretty high for export styles and dry hopping was very common. Yeast was not single strains and probably varied to the pretty funky. We use English strains mostly but some of the less powerful Belgian strains might work and you could also find some Brett and other bugs I would imagine, but they shouldn’t overwhelm the taste. Beer was often fermented, shipped, and sometimes even served in wood so wood flavors are expectable. Have fun and good luck! Old Ale From First Runnings (5 gallon batch) ...
Ferment with an English Ale yeast Small Beer from the second runnings of the same mash as above (5 Gallon Batch) ...
Pumpkin Ale (5 gallon batch):
Single infusion mash for 152° F for 60 min 1 Package of Muntons GOLD dry yeast |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
| CASK
Colonial Ale Smith and Keggers P.O. Box 5224 Williamsburg, VA 23188 Problems? Tell the Webmaster!  |