Old-time brewing.... according to the BBC

[TimT]

Last night we caught a couple of episodes of the BBC series Tudor Monastery Farm on iView and youtube. The usual shtick.... here's a bunch of people who will be living for a year just like people did in Tudor times! They'll be plowing, worshipping in Latin, fasting during Lent and - (just ignore that bunch of completely irrelevant cameramen over there thanks, we know they're not strictly historical....)

But anyway there was also a spot of stuff about old-school brewing. We saw the barley being sprouted (couple of blokes in a room with huge shovels just piling up the barley that had been plumped with water) before being malted. Also, according to the BBC -

- Water couldn't be drunk because of the bacteria, but alcohol 'protects from bacteria'. (I wish I could have told that to my - now infected - juniper porter before I bottled it).
- In order to make beer, you have to catch a 'wild bacteria'. Yikes!
- Apparently malted barley was turned into beer by putting it in a pot with water and boiling it up. Actually, this one seemed a reasonable assumption - especially if you were brewing in very large amounts, since the liquid would only heat very gradually and would take the mash through all the important stages - 55 degrees - 68 degrees celsius - 77 degrees celsius - boiling, and in the process the bacteria would surely be zapped out of existence.
- The wort from the first boil made the strong beer, from the second boil the regular beer. (I already knew this one.)
- Unfortunately, thanks to the magic of editing, viewers would have walked away with the impression that straight after you pour off the boiling wort from the grain you add yeast to it. Eeesh!

It gladdened my heart, though, to see the brewer lady pouring off the wort through some cheesecloth into a pot to filter out the particulate matter. Why? I do that too. Not the most advanced brewer, me.

Not a bad show, though everything simplified and dumbed down for a mass audience. Here's the .

 

[Liam_snorkel]

- Unfortunately, thanks to the magic of editing, viewers would have walked away with the impression that straight after you pour off the boiling wort from the grain you add yeast to it. Eeesh!

nice find, watching it now. Pretty sure she mumbles "now that it's cooled" prior to straining it.

 

[TimT]

Could be - we were doing the washing up while watching it so we weren't concentrating well.

 

[pommiebloke]

So funny. I watched it the other night and was shouting at the TV. Wild bacteria?

 

[TimT]

Though the participants are themselves historical experts it sounds like whoever wrote the script wasn't. Interested in the beekeeping bit too - those old-time skeps they used to use look lovely. The bees were quite docile (presumably selected for docility by the keeper), but I reckon the honey wasn't removed just by squeezing with hand. In large quantities, they probably would have folded a cloth over it and hefted a big weight on it, or even squashed it in a cheese press.

 

[TimT]

BBC - Bodgy Brewing Club?

 

[Greg.L]

It's perfectly true that the alcohol in beer protects against human pathogens. Despite all the jokes about people getting sick from bad beer, that doesn't happen. Even an infected brew is safe to drink. In those days a lot of infected brews would have been happily consumed. They only had wild yeast in those days.
The traditional hillbilly way to mash is to bring the water to boil, remove heat and dump in the grain, then leave to cool. Not best practise but it will produce a drinkable brew

 

[TimT]

I've also seen the method 'bring the water to boil, take off heat and add grain, let drop down to room temperature'. A recipe of Sumerian ale that I used said that you crumbled the bappir (grain cakes) into hot water but just never brought it to the boil: kept it simmering. It was very like making a soup.

 

[manticle]

Boiling can also help degrade starches in less modified malted barley - one reason for decoction originally.

 

[Airgead]

They only had wild yeast in those days.

Kind of... if you read old sources, particularly Digby (which was a little later... say early 1600s) they knew that adding some yeast from a good brew would produce another good brew or that putting your wort into a barrel that had produced a good brew would also produce a good brew. So they were (without understanding it), actively cultivating good yeast strains.

They also distinguished between wine yeasts, beer yeasts and ale yeasts. Quite a few recipes say things like "put to it a piece of yeast of beer the size of your thumbe" or "put to it some yeaste. Yeaste of ale will worketh it best".

They even had a primitive hydrometer - "adde honey until it shall bear up an egge the width of a groat" - then the mix will cause an egg to float with the "width of a groat" sticking above the liquid, it was strong enough. A groat BTW was a thick silver coin with a value of 4 pence.

Cheers
Dave

 

[TimT]

I love the egg trick. And the use of egg whites in clarifying.

 

[TimT]

Good way to make yourself a boiled egg while you're brewing, too

 

[TimT]

Oh wait no, you don't do it during the boil.

PHEW. Good thing I haven't made any boiled eggs that way yet.

 

[TimT]

From a 13th century mead recipe -

and þanne tak it doun of þe fier and let it kole in oþer vesselle til it be as kold as melk whan it komith from þe koow. than tak drestis of þe fynest ale or elles berme and kast in to þe water & þe hony

The interpretation here says 'drestis' means 'lees'; 'berme' is 'barm', old word for yeast - ie yeast cultivation, the ability to use yeast from previous ales, or to otherwise harvest yeast prior to making the must/wort was established long before Tudor times - backing up what Airgead says.

In the program they did just harvest a wild yeast (went out into the fields with a bowl of water and flour and waited for it to catch something). I presume they just used it for all their bread making and ale making from then on, though I may have missed out on a detail.

 

[Greg.L]

Kind of... if you read old sources, particularly Digby (which was a little later... say early 1600s) they knew that adding some yeast from a good brew would produce another good brew or that putting your wort into a barrel that had produced a good brew would also produce a good brew. So they were (without understanding it), actively cultivating good yeast strains.

They also distinguished between wine yeasts, beer yeasts and ale yeasts. Quite a few recipes say things like "put to it a piece of yeast of beer the size of your thumbe" or "put to it some yeaste. Yeaste of ale will worketh it best".

They even had a primitive hydrometer - "adde honey until it shall bear up an egge the width of a groat" - then the mix will cause an egg to float with the "width of a groat" sticking above the liquid, it was strong enough. A groat BTW was a thick silver coin with a value of 4 pence.

Cheers
Dave

The trouble is they only had a basic understanding of microbiology. The yeast they used would be a mixed population with lots of different strains of yeast and bacteria, with no control over what was in there. Very easy for it to go bad if you keep using it over and over. Sourdough bread works the same way but the fermentation is faster so less chance of going off. I think it would have been safer to use wild yeast, rather than some sludge that could be anything.

 

[Liam_snorkel]

at 34:20 she uses "a little bit of my ale barm, from the last brew" but I don't think she says where it originally was harvested. I think during the bread making part they said they were using "Ruth's yeast"

 

[yankinoz]

Did the editing show the faces of people sampling the stuff? It sounds like something you'd drink as soon as the yeast dropped, if it ever did, and before the other organisms got to work. That was true of a lot of earlier, medieval beers.

It appears from contemporary accounts that early modern farmhouse and monastery brewers had found ways to make beers that lasted in barrels for months. Possibly by saving yeast and stirring sticks from good batches and tossing those from bad batches they gradually selected for clean strains. Just a guess.

 

[indica86]

. Sourdough bread works the same way but the fermentation is faster so less chance of going off.

Sourdough uses yeast from the wheat or the rye. Hence why unbleached organic is used to make a starter, also why it can be made perfectly well in a covered container.

 

[TimT]

I suspect they would have (knowingly or not) found ways to make it work Greg - using the same vessels for making beer over and over again (one generation providing nutrient for the next); having a beer-making cellar, the "buttery" they mention in the program, where yeast from the ales will proliferate in the air so it's more likely to get into brews (and not bacterias); making the same sort of beer all the time for predictable results; using yeast from one first-generation brew in several second-generation brews (so if one batch goes bad there's plenty of back up), and so on.

 

[Airgead]

The trouble is they only had a basic understanding of microbiology. The yeast they used would be a mixed population with lots of different strains of yeast and bacteria, with no control over what was in there. Very easy for it to go bad if you keep using it over and over. Sourdough bread works the same way but the fermentation is faster so less chance of going off. I think it would have been safer to use wild yeast, rather than some sludge that could be anything.

They had absolutely zero knowledge of microbiology. It wasn't until Anton van Leeuwenhoek's discovery of "animacules in the 1670s that they even contemplated the existence of microorganisms.

They did seem to have a good idea about how to transfer yeast from one brew to another though. Yes it would all have been guesswork and experimentation but I suspect their techniques (and beer) weren't nearly as bad as we think they were. After all, many home brewers do some form of yeast re-use from batch to batch and few home brewers have much knowledge of microbiology...

Also, the more you culture good yeast in your brewery, the more it dominates the local microflora and the easier it becomes to avoid other strains.

Cheers
Dave