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Cream of Tartar Beer
Mix two ounces of cream of tartar, three pounds of brown sugar, three quarts of yeast. To be mixed and allowed to work. This makes ten gallons, and should be drunk as soon as worked. A strong syrup of pie-plant stalks makes an excellent beer prepared as above, but without the tartaric acid.
A small beer of the plainest kind: sugar, an acid, yeast and a great deal of water, fermented briefly and drunk young. The original assumes a household that keeps liquid barm from a brewing or bread-making and knows without being told how much water goes into a ten-gallon cask.
- The missing ingredient is waterNothing in the text says so, but the ten gallons is almost entirely water. No method is given; the sugar and cream of tartar would be dissolved in water, the whole topped up to volume and cooled before the yeast goes in.
- Three quarts of yeastThis means liquid barm skimmed off a working brew or a bread sponge, which is mostly water with a little live yeast in it. Three quarts of it is not three quarts of anything sold today; a couple of teaspoons of modern dried ale or bread yeast will start ten gallons.
- Cream of tartar is not tartaric acidCream of tartar is potassium bitartrate, the acid salt; tartaric acid is the free acid. The recipe uses the terms interchangeably in its last line. Two ounces in ten gallons is there for tartness and to help the yeast along, not for preservation.
- Pie-plant is rhubarbA common nineteenth-century American name for rhubarb, from its use in pies. The stalks only: rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not food. A strong syrup would be the stalks stewed down with sugar and strained.
- "Allowed to work"Kept at ordinary room temperature until the surface foam falls back; with only three pounds of sugar in ten gallons that is likely a matter of days rather than weeks. The recipe gives no temperature, and there is no hydrometer reading here.
- It is barely alcoholicThree pounds of sugar spread over ten gallons is under five ounces per gallon, about 36 grams per litre. Fully fermented that is roughly two per cent alcohol, which is why it was a summer table drink rather than a strong beer.
- Drink as soon as workedThe instruction is doing real work. There is no hopping, no fining and no pasteurisation, so the liquid sours quickly and is not a keeping drink. If any of it is bottled while still fermenting it will build pressure fast; leave it slack-stoppered or keep it cold and use it up.
- YieldTen gallons is a farmhouse quantity. Scaled to a single gallon: about 5 oz brown sugar, a scant quarter-ounce of cream of tartar, water to a gallon, a pinch of yeast.
Small beers like this one belong to a long tradition of household ferments made to be drunk within days rather than stored: spruce beer, ginger beer, molasses beer, root beer. They needed no hops, no malt and no cellar, and their low alcohol meant they sat comfortably alongside the temperance sentiment common in American domestic manuals. The cream of tartar is a leftover from a period when it was a common pantry item for baking powder and cake work, and using it to sharpen a sugar-and-yeast ferment cost almost nothing. "Pie-plant" for rhubarb was standard American usage through the nineteenth century, and the rhubarb variant here shows the same household logic: a glut of spring stalks turned into syrup, and the syrup turned into drink.