Hop Beer
Boil and strain one handful of hops, and add 1 pint of molasses and enough water to make 2 gallons. When lukewarm. add 1 cake of yeast and let stand over night. Skim and pour off from the yeast carefully, add 1 tablespoon wintergreen and bottle for use. -Mrs. Wm. Holdsworth, Hanbury, Ont.
This is a nineteenth-century "small beer" — a lightly fermented molasses-and-hop drink made in the pail and bottled the next day. Two things in it are genuinely dangerous by current understanding, and neither can be fixed by adjusting the wording.
- Bottling an actively fermenting liquidBottling a still-fermenting liquid -- The yeast is pitched at night and the liquid bottled the following day, and no gravity or sugar reading is taken. Even after skimming and pouring off from the yeast, enough fermentation continues that carbon dioxide can build in a sealed bottle with nothing to limit it, and glass bottles can burst. There is no measured endpoint anywhere in this recipe.
- A tablespoon of wintergreen"Wintergreen" in this period could mean an alcoholic essence or true oil of wintergreen, which is roughly 98 percent methyl salicylate. A tablespoon of the oil is far outside any safe dietary range for salicylates, and the recipe gives no way to tell which product Mrs. Holdsworth meant. That ambiguity alone rules the recipe out.
- No sanitation stepThe hops are boiled, but the added water, the vessel and the bottles are not, and the liquid is cooled to lukewarm in open air before pitching. A modern brewer's care over sanitising bottles, tubing and vessels exists because low-alcohol, low-hop beverages like this one spoil readily and can support unwanted organisms.
- "One handful of hops"An unmeasurable quantity, and the hops of the period differ in bitterness from much of what a shop sells today. Even as a flavouring guide the instruction gives nothing to work from.
- One cake of yeastProbably a compressed fresh cake, of the order of 0.6 oz, though dried yeast cakes were also sold by the cake at this date. Either way it was general-purpose baker's yeast rather than a brewing strain, and drinks of this kind were in any case drunk young rather than kept.
- If you want the flavourRoot beers and hop beers of this type are still made, and current recipes specify sugar quantities, priming rates, bottle types and refrigeration times. Use one of those rather than this.
Hop beer belongs to the family of household "small beers" — spruce beer, ginger beer, root beer, molasses beer — that Canadian and American kitchens turned out by the pailful before commercial soft drinks were cheap and universal. They were barely alcoholic, sweet, faintly bitter and drunk young, made from whatever aromatic was to hand: spruce tips in Quebec, sassafras and sarsaparilla further south, wintergreen in the eastern woodlands, where Gaultheria procumbens grew wild and its leaves and berries were long used as a flavouring. The Five Roses Cook Book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and drawing on recipes contributed by women who baked with the company's flour, carries dozens of these signed domestic formulas, among them one credited to Mrs. Wm. Holdsworth of Hanbury, Ontario. That the instructions assume you already know how full to fill a bottle and where to store it is typical — this was a recipe passed between people who had all watched it done.