THE LUMMOX posted:Gonna jump in on this one although it's by no means a definitive answer. AlphaDog posted:As far as I know, what they were talking about was "small beer" - beer with very very low amounts of alcohol. You can make small beer at home pretty easily, and it comes out to around 0.5% alcohol (you can do this by accident when you gently caress up your homebrew process). You'd have to drink 10 pints to get as much alcohol as a single pint of normal beer. What happens is when you have a mash (150 degree water + crushed grain) you can run water through twice- the first is going to get a super high concentration of sugars, but the second running is only going to get a minimal amount. While Alpha dog is correct that boiling had a lot to do with killing off initial bacteria, it stayed clean because of the alcohol and hops. There were also some other things used in place of hops till they became common place (1500's iirc), so there was a while when ale and beer were distinguished by whether hops were used, or instead a mixture of plants that also bittered beer called gruit. Gruit was made of ivy's, mugwort, heather, and things like that. In 1516 germany passed their beer purity law which required beer to be only hops, barley, and water- many countries including britain followed this example. (yeast wasn't discovered till much later) Calling it watered down isn't exactly correct because it's the same exact process, you're just getting less sugars each time you run water through a bed of mashed grains. Alchohol of the bigger beers was also not meaningfully less than today's normal sized beers, but they didn't have the yeast technology to reliably make the 10%+ beers that are common today. (in fact yeast wasn't even known as an ingredient in alcohol production till much later) Really the primary reason the strength was often less was a simple fact that they separated the available sugars into two beers rather than just combining it into one. Technology also played a role as well. e: the most common thing today is to just combine the first and second runnings, though sometimes when efficiency isn't a concern you can just ignore the second running which some say improves the beer flavor. http://www.byo.com/component/resource/article/2021-parti-gyle-brewing-techniques quote:The traditional approach was to conduct separate mashes on a given parcel of grain. The first wort would be completely run off, then the grain re-mashed with hot water and the second wort completely run off, and so on for a third, and even sometimes a fourth mash. It was customary to make strong ale from the first wort (sometimes combined with the second), and to produce a much weaker “small beer” from the remaining worts. It seems that this practice may have changed in the first quarter of the 18th century, when porter came onto the English brewing stage. London brewers came round to the idea of combining all the worts from separate mashing so as to make one beer, known as “Entire,” or “Entire-Butt,” and later becoming porter. 312 fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Jan 26, 2013 |
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Jan 26, 2013 00:11
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 23:15 |
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