Just an update. Put a 1/2 pint of saved wort with a piece of doubled up cheese cloth on the front porch upwind of my orchard. Two days two nights. I could see a cloud on the bottom with little telltale towers. Brought it in shook it and stuck in an airlock. Within an hour it was pushing bubbles. Going to build it up and see where it goes.
Keep us posted Cat, This is really interesting.
I very much doubt that they were doing wild fermentation of beer on the farms. There is still an active tradition (stretching back at least 800 years) here in Finland of making an indigenous style of beer called Sahti on the farms. They use bread yeast. One of those things that every farmwife did regularly was bake bread, so using that readily available yeast was an easy and reliable way to get the fermentation going.
That does contrast with cider making, where wild fermentation was the norm. But there is a lot of yeast present on the apple skins when they are harvested. Same as with grapes.
You are probably right about farmers using what they had on hand, but that could also include things like potatoes or pumpkins. And I wouldn’t rule out sugar additions to give it an extra kick. Every colonial American beer recipe I’ve seen has molasses or something similar as part of the recipe.
Hops would likely be used, they grow pretty easily and you need something to cut the sweetness of the malt. Any farmer who wanted to brew could easily put some bines on the side of a barn or such.
Where would they get bread yeast? When you make sour dough bread you capture wild yeast. Put some flour in water in a jar on the window and you get yeast. I’m not looking to make colonial beer I’m looking to do a beer made by probably immigrant farmers from around the 1800 -1900. Many were from Germany and they knew how to make beer. They would grow some barley. By the way a guy at Cornell university got back to me with a lead on some heritage NY hops from that period. My yeast is growing in my jar now I need to find some local barley malt.
Huh… based on my quick research, commercially available bread yeast (in yeast cake form) for baking didn’t happen in the US until the turn of the century. Prior to that, you’re right, yeast was either saved from a bread starter, or purchased as a byproduct of brewing. During WWII, granulated bread yeast was developed. So if you’re trying to recreate a pre 1900 beer, either wild yeast or sourdough starter yeast would be appropriate. For prohibition era beer, a bread yeast cake makes sense. I’m really curious on how your experiment turns out, now…
I had to register to reply to this. Yes, we used crocks. Redwing 10 gal was a good one. I covered with plastic sheeting. Ingredients were available through wine making supply stores on occasion, but very little selection. They usually had dry brewer’s yeast, but you could try to get some from the bottom of a bottle of import beer and grow it up. You couldn’t use domestic because it was too filtered and pasteurized, although I’ve read that Charlie P managed to culture a budweiser yeast and that is what he used for many years. Fred Eckhardt was the book, Brewing Lager Beers, I think. You could also get a couple of british books. And hippie newspapers, like Hundred Flowers in the Twin Cities area, occasionally had recipes, although those were more of the can of malt, can of sugar, no boil styles. Hops were availalble as boiling or finishing, with no identification as to type.
My first brew was a lager, and pretty good, it took many years to repeat or surpass. I bought a 6 pack of Sam Adams Golden lager in the 90’s and did a double take; this was my brew; somehow, they’d copied it. Unfortunately, since ingredients were hard to find and not clearly identified, duplication of a recipe was pretty hard.
I’ve been brewing off and on since '69 or '70, and have always enjoyed it. When ingredients became more easily available in the 80’s, we went at it pretty hard for a while. Started again in the mid-90’s. That’s when I got my current stock of bottles; cases of returnables had a $1.50 or $2.00 deposit, a lot cheaper than buying a case at the supply store, and they came in great heavy duty cardboard carriers. I still have a dozen cases, although I’ve gone to the new style bottle for beer that I give to friends, since they don’t always return them to me, thinking that recycling beer bottles with the city is better than recycling with the brewer. I tell them that if you don’t give them back to me, I can’t re-fill them for you, hint, hint.
Priming was a bigger problem than brewing, actually. Priming and bottling info was sort of sketchy. I brewed a batch and primed it, and bottled into disposable glass screw-top quarts (remember those?). Lost over half in one event; 1 blew, and the action must have triggered others. We ran to the basement not knowing what had happened. The ones that didn’t blow were either flat due to poor reseal on the screw-top, or gushers when opened.
The old days were good, a lot of fun, and we made some interesting beer when not much was available to buy. And we sure didn’t have a great resource like this forum. The state of homebrewing is greatly improved. Like Carly Simon once said, “these are the good, old days”.
If you do it that way if you’ll get sour beer. When making a sourdough starter you are getting yeast AND lactic acid bacteria. It is the bacteria that makes it sour. And I suspect the majority of those microbes are already present on the flour, not dropped in off the air.
Yeast cultures - both sour and non-sour - were traditionally saved and samples passed around as needed. That is pretty easy to do, you just set aside a bit of risen but unbaked dough to use for the next bake day.
I’ve read that the first couple days you get yeast the longer you leave it you get the nasties. I put the airlock on after two days hoping to get mostly yeast. And I think the traditional homebrew would be a little sour.
[quote=“Willy”][size=80]…Ingredients were available through wine making supply stores on occasion, but very little selection. They usually had dry brewer’s yeast, but you could try to get some from the bottom of a bottle of import beer and grow it up. You couldn’t use domestic because it was too filtered and pasteurized, although I’ve read that Charlie P managed to culture a budweiser yeast and that is what he used for many years.
… hippie newspapers, like Hundred Flowers in the Twin Cities area, occasionally had recipes, although those were more of the can of malt, can of sugar, no boil styles. Hops were availalble as boiling or finishing, with no identification as to type.
…The old days were good, a lot of fun, and we made some interesting beer when not much was available to buy. And we sure didn’t have a great resource like this forum. The state of homebrewing is greatly improved. Like Carly Simon once said, “these are the good, old days”.[/size][/quote]
Ahhhh, yes…I remember those days well. I remember the article in the old Whole Earth Catalog (the famous and comprehensive user’s manual for the hippie mind. LOL)
I brewed my first batch in 1971 (during my college years) with Blue Ribbon extract, typically enough except for one thing: at the suggestion of an apparently prescient biology major friend, we used 2 cans of the extract and skipped the sugar in the recipe entirely, except for priming the bottles. It was a good call and that initial very decent first try is probably what kept me interested, quenched, and curious to pursue the hobby.
Some grocery stores back then (especially, it seems, in the midwest) actually sold the Blue Ribbon extract in the baking supply section, but the Wine Hobby USA stores of the time were indeed the main source for ingredients (such as they were)I brewed on and off for the next few years before diving in head first at the end of the 70s, switching to all grain and wet yeast a few years later,and building an electric keggle in the mid 80s. I’ve brewed regularly ever since and except for the odd bottle here and there or a six pack on those rare occasions when I ran out of homebrew, I virtually stopped buying commercial beer (mega or micro). Most of the commercial stuff out there just isn’t worth the often inflated prices.
That is true, and the cooler you keep the fermentation the less impact the bacteria will have. But refrigeration wasn’t invented yet during the days you are talking about.
I’ve got it. I’ll try to remember to check, but I think it was bread yeast.[/quote]
I figured that if anyone here had a copy of that book, it would probably be you! You’re most likely correct about the bread yeast. I can’t imagine what else would have been available back then. The only other thing anyone could have used, as far as I can figure, would have been yeast cultured from bottles of commercial beer, and most likely only from ales- which would have been pretty scarce back then. This whole topic is something that a whole TV series could be made out of, I think!
I still think they just would have saved the yeast from making cider. You forget back then people didn’t buy stuff. Scenario , I’m an immigrant farmer I have some grain because I grow it for making bread I have an apple tree for making cider, which was the main use of apples back then. I want a beer, my neighbor is miles away, a saloon even further even if I had money. I know how to make beer because back in the old country everyone made beer. So I save the yeast dregs out of my jug of cider or I steal some from my wife who was making sourdough bread because they don’t sell yeast yet. Malt some grain. Low and behold I can make beer and I havnt bought diddly. Now if I had thought ahead I would have dug up a few hop rhizomes along the way because one they were free and two they traveled well when dormant. Carbonation and bottling might be more of a problem. But if I was smart and clever, which I would have to be to survive, I might figure that out also.
Or you could drink it very quickly after fermentation finished - perhaps before the CO2 went out of solution. Or just drink it warm and flat. That would have been very traditional. Flat is, by the way, how Sahti is enjoyed. They cool it now that refrigeration is available, and that extends the shelf life, but still not to more than a month.
I would put it in corked jugs and any other bottle I could salvage in the root cellar. It probably wasn’t super carbonated anyway so it wouldn’t pop the cork. I found an old capper this weekend at the flee market with a bunch of old cork lined caps, remember those. I had forgotten about them. I also got a 4 gal. crock.
I repitched my saved yeast into a quart of wort and left it on the counter in a brown bag. I have been away but my wife informed me it was bubbling quite vigorously and forming a krausen. I won’t be back for another week so I hope the yeast is still good. I plan on making a 1 gallon test batch then. I may take the liquid an taste it and maybe bottle with a fizz tab to Tate the yeast.
Brewed up a batch today and boiled up a extra large batch. Saved 1 gallon to make a sample with my wild yeast. Started fermenting pretty quickly. We will se where it goes. If it has a good flavor I plan on making a full batch with it . It had a distinct smell to it so I’m curious about the taste.
The yeast in the wild yeast beer is keeping time with my main batch with us -05. Smells sweet. All good signs.I was worried the fermentation would be slow but that’s not the case. Bubbles are starting to slow after 6 days, beer looks clean . Going to let it clean up and then bottle.
Here is the update. Fermentation looks to be complete. The krausen didn’t completely fall but activity has stopped. Tonight I will take a gravity and bottle. Any tips on bottling 1 gallon batches. I have some fizz tabs but only five gallon equipment.
FG .004. Tasted good, smelled good. I’ll taste the beer in a couple weeks after it’s conditioned. Then I will make a beer using 6row maybe a little wheat and some hops
Tasted the carbonated product and am very impressed. Got a good amount of yeast so I will do a five gallon batch. The beer is aromatic with fruity yeast flavors. I think it will be nice with less hops. The wort I used for the one gallon was from an IPA. I will use 6 row and a bit of wheat. Cluster hops since they are the oldest strain. Going to be a pre prohibition saison style. Will have to wait a couple weeks to free up a fermenter .
