“Having therefore groond eight bushels of good malt upon our querne, where the toll is saved, she addeth unto it half a bushel of wheat meale, and so much of otes small groond, and so tempereth or mixeth them with the malt, that you cannot easily discerne the one from the other, otherwise these…
Category: beer
Yorkshire Oat Ale
Thoughts: When I saw this for the first time, I thought that something got lost in this recipe’s time travel. The malted oats are cold mashed, which is very unusual in brewing. Since I’m such a fan of the strange historical recipes, I figured I would give it a go, and see what happened….
Kvass
Thoughts: Quirky, but it grows on you. It smells like plain rye bread, so the sweetness of the honey is somewhat surprising at first taste. I thought the mint would be more prevalent, but it reduces to just a hint, combining with the sweetness of honey and apple. There’s some fizziness from the residual carbonating,…
Apple Beer SG – Maple Oatmeal Scones
Thoughts: Dense, lightly spiced, and a little too easy to eat, these might be my favorite use yet of spent grain. They’re hearty, but the spent grain doesn’t overwhelm the scone, giving it instead a rustic, country-cottage feel. They’re much heftier than my usual batch of currant scones, so I might continue to try and…
Apple Beer Barley Pudding
Thoughts: This is a rustic, cottage sort of a pudding, but the whiskey whipped cream elevates it up and beyond ordinary tastiness. The spent grains from the apple beer give the pudding some husky body, but the regular barley helps keep the texture from being too rough. The cloud of boozy whipped cream adds yet…
Apple Beer Trub Bread
“Trub” is the name for that yeasty sludge left in the bottom of a carboy after the beer has been racked out. With many beers, the trub will absorb the bitterness from the hops, leaving an unpleasant set of flavors to work with. With the apple beer, however, there’s so little of the hops used…
Colonial Apple Beer
Thoughts: The basic idea of this beer is that it uses apple cider instead of water in the wort. It ended up quirky, in that at least half the fermenting beer was sediment in the jug. I ended up making a great bread from that sediment, and a variety of other recipes from the spent…
Greywater Watch Gruit
Thoughts: When I heard about gruit, a historical hopless ale, I knew I wanted to try it. And then, the more I learned about it, the cooler it became. Gruit waned in use as the popularity of hops grew throughout the Middle Ages, but has enjoyed somewhat of a revival as a result of the…
Last Hearth Heather Ale
In our world, heather ale (or Fraoch, the gaelic word for “heather”) was enjoyed by the ancient Picts in what is now Scotland. With various conquests and later laws, the original recipes for Fraoch were lost. As the legend goes, the Pictish king, when taken captive, leapt from a cliff rather than share the secret of…
Ginger Beer
Thoughts: To make your own ginger beer couldn’t be much easier. This recipe is based on the method detailed in the wonderful book, The Art of Fermentation, by Sandor Katz. It uses natural yeasts from the ginger (that’s why organic ginger is important), and produces a fizzy, effervescent beverage that is delicious. A wide…
Game of Brews 