Milk contains amylase....

[TimT]

And of course if they boiled for 'several days' there'd be nothing left. I think the interpretation may be that 'boil' is used as a loose term here - 'boil' meaning 'slow bubbling'.

My philosophy is this Mark - beer and ale and wine and related fermented drinks have been with us for many, many centuries. So I find it both interesting and instructive to really understand how these people that have been before us brewed and thought about their brews. One way of doing this is through trying out their techniques, or just through reading around in this area. Yes, science is incredibly useful in brewing and has helped many brewers refine their own methods. But I also think for a full understanding of brewing we need to understand the long tradition that we have come from. I love being part of that long tradition and I'm really enjoying finding out more about it

 

[TimT]

Crozdog, done. Just put on my best coat and hat and tie and went a knockin' on Randy Mosher's virtual door. He may or may not respond (him being all very busy and important and stuff), but hopefully he will!

 

[TimT]

Well got a mail back from Randy, who says he doesn't really have anything to add to the discussion already had, though he agrees the talk of "boiling", possibly over days, does sound suspicious and likens it to the sort of sloppy reporting you get in newspapers on a subject the journo isn't really knowledgeable about. He also mentions he's got a new book on historical brewing coming up, and would be interested in hearing back if anyone else comes up with an interesting/knowledgeable interpretation of the same passage

 

[klangers]

"Boiling" up until recently just meant moving/bubbling/violent. eg "the sea was boiling" does not mean at boiling temperature. One has to read these passages with the context of the scientific knowledge at the time. Since they did not have thermometers, the concept of "boiling temperature" was foreign to them and an observer would unlikely be able to distinguish from ~70 degrees and 100 degrees if not experienced in the process.

 

[TimT]

Since they did not have thermometers, the concept of "boiling temperature" was foreign to them and an observer would unlikely be able to distinguish from ~70 degrees and 100 degrees if not experienced in the process.

Not sure I entirely agree with that. Though "boiling" has a loose meaning as well as a precise scientific meaning, the concept would have been fairly well known. There's an obvious, observable difference between simmering (bubbles moving through the liquid) and boiling (violent, rapid, constant motion of the liquid). And in order to mash early brewers had to know how to keep the liquid at a constant hot-but-not-boiling temperature (which they did in a wide variety of entertaining and creative ways). Obviously the idea of a "boiling temperature" hasn't been well defined for very long, but it's certain early brewers did know of the existence - and importance - of temperature differentials to their brew.

BTW, in my Martha Washington Cookbook, there is an instruction somewhere to hold a broth at just below simmering temperature - which Martha Washington describes as "simpering!" You can just imagine a whole array of cooking terms like that - "I sniggered the butter and sugar, then I smirked the cheese in the smirker...." etc etc.

 

[klangers]

I totally agree that brewers (or others who worked on the process) would certainly know the difference. My point was mainly about the observer, who most likely would have little experience in the subtleties of brewing.

 

[TimT]

Yes, either he knew little about brewing or that wasn't what he was focusing on. The observer was Gustav Radde; it's from his book "Die Chews'uren und ihr Land". Here's a little bit about him.

The other thing that interests me about that passage is that the Chewsurian brewers excluded women from their brewhouse - it was a man activity. It's an old cliche that traditionally, brewers were women. Evidently this was not true for all brewing cultures.

 

[technobabble66]

The way i might interpret it, having read that passage a few times, is that the author is getting his process mixed up and mislabelled.
It seems like what he's calling the Mash is actually the Boil - i.e.: the process used by the brewer involved some sort of Mashing step (not observed or recorded here) and then the Boil was done without removing the grain.
So the Observer is watching this huge cauldron of boiling grain, called it the wrong thing (by our modern definition) and because the pot contains grain, we're just assuming it is actually the Mash (as he's called it).
This seems confirmed by the fact that as you continue reading his description, the next stage is draining the contents into a vat where it ferments. So if it isn't the Boil he's describing then it would infer no Boil actually occurs. So if you assume the Observer's description is 100% accurate, the process avoids using either a Mash or a Boil. Unlikely for successful brewing, so it seems safe to assume the observer's missed something.
Also keep in mind what we call a Mash is well defined these days, maybe back a few hundred years they were more loose terms used differently in different regions.

So ... good luck doing your Boil with all the grains still in it.
Hey, you'll definitely achieve Ye Olde Grainy Flavour in your historical brew!!

PS: Glad to see you're happy to throw these random ideas out there, Tim ... even if it's to generally be shot down most of the time. It's good to occasionally review history, even if it's to be re-assured thing's have improved. And there's always the off chance something good that fell away can be rediscovered (anyone heard of the Prohibition Era?).

 

[TimT]

Maybe Techno but again not everything is revealed in the description - this boil goes on, according to the description, for several days? Like I said, that would mean there wouldn't be any brew left. In the absence of more detail I'm sticking to my extended mash theory.

 

[technobabble66]

Maybe boiled for several days, while adding regular top-ups with water?
It'd be very caramelised! ... Maybe to help offset the grainy flavour from the boiled grains?

 

[TimT]

In the absence of more information what can we do but guess?

I just tried to find 'Chewsurians' by doing a little google search (almost nothing). And the listings under 'People of the Caucasus' are super-confusing. (Prepare to enter a world of Mingrelians and Lazs, of Kartvelian languages, and be extra careful not to confuse the Svans with the Zans).

 

[MHB]

[SIZE=medium]I actually do read a lot of brewing history and do believe it can be very useful to our understanding of beer and brewing. Which is why I get so ticked off by pointless theorising and wild guesses based on little or no evidence; even worse completely wrong misinformation.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=medium]The first thermometers appeared in the early 1600’s; by the mid 1700’s (150 years before this writhing) they were quite widely available.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]You will also note that he has the hops going into the ferment rather than the kettle.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]Decoction was widely used across Europe from medieval times; it was developed to cope with the absence of thermometers and inconsistent, badly modified malt.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=medium]If you look at the batch size, I suspect that what he was observing (badly) was part of a contagious brewing operation where the decoct was being boiled, and that they were keeping the decocting pot busy.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]Reading between the lines a bit I think he was observing a bunch of piss poor, primitive, backwoods brewers making something to get drunk on. He didn’t have a clue what he was observing and scant useful information can be drawn from his observations.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]Mark[/SIZE]

 

[Feldon]

The word 'boil' was at its roots a word for describing something that had the appearance of lumps, bumps or swellings. This meaning survives today as the name for pus-filled skin boils, and as a poetic term to describe the state of the sea or a raging torrent of water.

But boil was not originally a word used to describe the heat needed to make a liquid phase change to gas. It was used to described the appearance of the lumps and bumps (ie. bubbles) of the boiling liquid, not the heat. But by extension it has come to mean something very hot, such as ones boiling anger or the temperature on a summer day.

With regards to the word's use in the brewing text cited by Tim, it could mean the bloop, bloop type 'boiling' you see when heating up porridge. Long before the whole body of porridge gets to 100C little volcanoe-like bubbles bloop up to the surface. This is caused by the oatmeal blanketing the base of the pot trapping heat. The lowest layer of the porridge starts to boil, sending up steam-filled bubbles that erupt as lumps on the surface which can still be quite cold. Such a situation might be something the writer of the text observed.

 

[TimT]

It is a translation, so it would be useful to see the original text too.

 

[TimT]

Feldon - Etymology Online offers two separate etymologies for the carbuncle-type boil and for the cooking-type boil. The first they trace back to an early Germanic root ("bele" "bulia", "beule"); the second, they say, enters English through old French ("bollir", bubble, ferment, gush). The original text seems to have been written in German; I wonder what the word is that Radde uses that is translated to "boil"?

 

[Feldon]

Slightly OT, but for those interested in learning from the past, this story was in today's Guardian.

Belgian scientists recreate 150-year-old shipwrecked beer



Belgian scientists have successfully recreated a 19th-century beer that was discovered during the search of a shipwreck off the coast of Finland in 2010.
The bottles had lain 50 metres underwater since 1842. The government of the autonomous Åland Islands called on researchers at Belgium’s KU Leuven’s Brewing Technology Research Group to analyse the antique brew.
Following several years of reconstruction work, a Finnish brewery is now marketing what it claims is an accurate recreation of the beer.
Stallhagen is ready to introduce the unique flavour to the international market, whilst producers in Belgium gear up to mass-produce the 172-year-old liquor with a price tag of €113 (£89) a bottle.
Brewmaster Gert De Rouck fermented a lineup of test beers using the same ingredients found in the shipwrecked bottles.
“Based on the micro-organisms in the bottles, we were able to figure out which type of yeast and bacteria were used by the beer’s 19th-century brewers. This information allowed us to trace the beer back to Belgium,” said De Rouck. [continues]

Link: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/oct/13/belgian-scientists-recreate-150-year-old-shipwrecked-beer

 

[Feldon]

The original text seems to have been written in German; I wonder what the word is that Radde uses that is translated to "boil"?

Further down the page you linked to was this definition of 'brew':

brew (v.) Old English breowan "to brew" (class II strong verb, past tense breaw, past participle browen), from Proto-Germanic *breuwan "to brew" (cognates: Old Norse brugga, Old Frisian briuwa, Middle Dutch brouwen, Old High German briuwan, German brauen "to brew"), from PIE root *bhreue- "to bubble, boil, effervesce" (cognates: Sanskrit bhurnih "violent, passionate," Greek phrear "well, spring, cistern," Latin fervere "to boil, foam," Thracian Greek brytos "fermented liquor made from barley," Russian bruja "current," Old Irish bruth "heat;" Old English beorma "yeast;" Old High German brato "roast meat"), the original sense thus being "make a drink by boiling." Related: Brewed; brewing.

Just a possibility.

 

[TimT]

It'd be great if there was a historical brewing corner of this forum. I guess it doesn't warrant quite enough interest to have a separate sub-forum but it's something that lots of brewers try out a few times. And it's a wide and rich area all right. There's always a few people who will try out some gruits, or chichas, or historical porters, or whatever. My happiest old-time brewing experiments have been in the area of meads - they used to be just a word in books, and up until a few years ago there probably wasn't even one Australian pub or Bottle-O that had a mead in store. They taste absolutely magical, and they are so simple to make.

I have a bit of a standard rant about how CUB and other megabrewers have changed our perceptions of beer in ways that we don't always notice. But maybe we'll leave that for another time

 

[TimT]

My brew's been fermenting for a few days now, about 5/6, and I just took a sample. It's down to a gravity of 1.016. Assuming it's going to stay that way, that's fairly pleasing. The lactose in the whey would have nudged it up a few points, so if that unfermentable sugar was taken out maybe it would have gone down to 1.011?

I did a preliminary mash in whey at about 45-46 degrees for half an hour, before heating up to around 64 for a second round and 67 for a third round - the idea being to get a lot of fermentables from the malt (mostly Munich) to offset the unfermentables from the whey. I think a got a bit of enzymatic action in all three mashes, though the majority of sweetness came from the second and third. As Mark observes the amylase in milk would provide fairly minimal starch-sugar conversion on its own; my hope is that in action with the enzymes in the malt it might have proved more potent.

Just gave the brew some spices and I'll let it clear up!

 

[MHB]

How much permeate did you add in total, its about 4.8%w/v Lactose, from there you can work out exactly what the effect will be on the FG.
Mark