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Bran Yeast
A good serviceable yeast can be made from a pint of bran boiled in two quarts of water for ten minutes, with a handful of good hops. Strain the liquor, and when lukewarm, add three or four table-spoonfuls of beer yeast, and two of brown sugar or treacle; put it into a jar or small wooden cask, and place it before the fire to ferment; when well worked it may be bottled, tightly corked, and kept in a cool place.
A nineteenth-century way of keeping a baking leaven alive at home, in the days before packeted yeast. The method still works, but the quantities are given by handful and jugful and the keeping advice belongs to a cold larder.
- A pint of branMeasured by volume, not weight: a pint of loose wheat bran is roughly 4 oz / 110 g. Two quarts of water is a little over 2 litres, and boiling for ten minutes will reduce it somewhat.
- A handful of hopsReckon on about half an ounce (15 g) of dried whole hops. They are there as much for their antibacterial effect, which suppresses spoilage organisms while the yeast takes hold, as for flavour.
- Beer yeastThis means barm — the live, actively fermenting foam or sediment from a brewer's cask. The nearest modern equivalent is the sediment from a bottle-conditioned unfiltered beer, or a spoonful of active sourdough starter. Dried baking yeast will also seed it, though the character will differ.
- Lukewarm means lukewarmThe hinge of the whole thing. Pitch the barm at around 25-30C / 77-86F. Well above blood heat kills the yeast and you will have nothing but sweet hop tea going sour.
- TreacleBritish treacle here is closest to molasses; golden syrup or brown sugar do the same job of feeding the first burst of fermentation.
- Before the fireA warm spot of 20-25C / 68-77F for a day or two, until it froths and then subsides. A wooden cask is not needed; a wide crock or bowl covered with a cloth gives the yeast the air it wants during the vigorous stage.
- Tightly corkedBottling a ferment that is still working builds pressure and can burst glass. Wait until the froth has fallen right back, and use a bottle with a swing top or a loose cap you can vent daily.
- Keeping and quantityEven in a cold place this is a short-lived thing — likely a week or two under refrigeration before it turns sour and loses lift. The batch yields perhaps a litre or so of liquid yeast; a teacupful is the sort of quantity such recipes tend to call for in a large batch of bread dough.
Before compressed and dried yeasts reached ordinary kitchens in the later nineteenth century, a household that baked its own bread had to obtain barm from a brewer or publican, or keep a leaven going itself. Recipes like this one — bran or potato or malt liquor, hopped and fed with sugar, then pitched with whatever live yeast could be begged — are common in Victorian cookery books, the supply being unreliable and barm going off quickly in warm weather. The hops are the telling detail: brewers had long known that hopped worts kept better than unhopped, and the domestic yeast-maker borrowed the trick to buy her jar a few extra days.