Ginger Beer
Take forty quarts of water, thirteen pounds sugar, twelve good lemons, or a proportionable quantity of lime juice, eight ounces of bruised ginger, and the whites of six eggs, well beaten; mix all together, skimming it before it begins to boil, and boil it for twenty minutes; add an ounce of isingglass, and a spoonful of balm, after it is put into the cask, stir it well; it will be ready for bottling in ten days.
A ten-gallon brewer's batch, written for a household with a cask in the cellar. Scaled down and read carefully, it still works, but two words in it mean something other than what a modern reader assumes.
- "A spoonful of balm" is yeastThis is barm, the foaming top yeast skimmed off fermenting beer, not lemon balm the herb. Substitute a small quantity of ale or champagne yeast; a spoonful of barm slurry is roughly what a modern packet delivers.
- Scale firstForty quarts is ten gallons, with 13 lb sugar, 8 oz ginger and a dozen lemons. Divide the whole list by eight for a manageable gallon-and-a-quarter: about 1 lb 10 oz sugar, 1 oz ginger, 1½ lemons, one egg white.
- Bruised gingerDried whole ginger root, cracked with a mallet or the flat of a cleaver rather than grated, so it gives up flavour during the boil without clouding the beer. Ground ginger is not a fair swap; it will stay in suspension.
- The egg whites are a fining, not an ingredientBeaten whites added to the cold liquor coagulate as it heats and carry protein haze and scum to the surface. This is why the instruction to skim comes before the boil begins — once it is at a rolling boil the raft breaks up and the point is lost.
- IsinglassA collagen fining from fish swim bladders, still sold to homebrewers as isinglass finings; gelatin is the usual domestic stand-in. Add it to the cooled wort in the cask, not to boiling liquid, which destroys its clearing power.
- Cool before pitchingThe recipe reads as one continuous operation, but yeast pitched into hot liquor will be damaged or killed. Bring the boiled liquor down to blood heat in the cask before the barm goes in.
- Bottle pressure is the real hazardTen days is not a finished fermentation, and bottling a still-active brew in sealed containers builds serious pressure. Use proper crown-capped beer bottles or swing-tops, store them cool, and vent or refrigerate if they feel hard. Screw-top glass jars and old wine bottles are the ones that fail.
- YieldThe full recipe fills about a hundred 12-oz bottles. The eighth-batch gives roughly a dozen.
Ginger beer of this kind belongs to the brewing side of the household rather than the pantry: it is made in a cask, fined with egg white and isinglass as small beer and cider were, and pitched with barm from whoever nearby was brewing ale. Its alcohol content depended largely on how long it sat, which is why the instruction is simply "ready for bottling in ten days" — the drink was understood as a mild, quickly drunk household beverage, not a keeping beer. Ginger was available in enough quantity that a recipe could call for half a pound of it without comment, and the alternative of "a proportionable quantity of lime juice" for lemons is in the same spirit. The commercial bottled ginger beers of the later nineteenth century, sold in stone bottles and eventually made non-alcoholic, descend from formulas of this kind; the modern soft drink keeps the name and the flavouring but has lost the cask and the barm.