Jumble Beer
Take two spoonfulls of ground ginger, and one pint of molasses, to 2 1-2 pails of water; first mix the ingredients with a little water warmed, especially in cold weather; then add the whole compliment of water and shake it very briskly, and in about six or eight hours it will be sufficiently fermented.
A harvest-field small beer: molasses, ginger, water, and whatever wild yeast happens to be in the air. The proportions are enormous by modern standards and the units are loose, so treat the original as a ratio rather than a formula.
- How much is a pailA household water pail of the period held somewhere around 8 to 12 quarts, so two and a half pails is very roughly 6 to 7 gallons, though the figure is a guess. Halved, the ratio is about 1 tablespoon ground ginger and 1 cup molasses to 3 1/2 gallons of water.
- Spoonfuls are ambiguousAn unqualified "spoonful" in this period often meant a tablespoon, but the book does not say. Start at the low end and taste the mix before fermenting; ginger is the only flavour here besides molasses.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cane molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral than what was meant, and modern light molasses will give a cleaner, sweeter drink closer to the original intent.
- No yeast is addedThis relies entirely on wild fermentation from the molasses, the vessel and the air, which is why it wants warmth. A pinch of ale or bread yeast makes the result predictable; without it the batch may sour instead of ferment.
- Six to eight hours means warmThat timing implies a warm room; the recipe itself only says to warm the mixing water in cold weather. In a cool modern house expect considerably longer, and judge by fine bubbles and a faint yeasty smell rather than the clock.
- Ferment loosely coveredCover the vessel with cloth, not a lid. If you bottle it, use plastic soda bottles or swing-tops and refrigerate within a day: a live wild ferment will keep producing gas and can burst glass.
- It is barely alcoholicWith a pint of molasses across several gallons and only a few hours of work, the yeast has very little sugar to convert. The result is a tart, gingery, slightly fizzy field drink, not a beer in the brewing sense.
- Drink it freshThere is no hop and no preservative. It is best as soon as it finishes and will sour fairly quickly, even refrigerated.
Drinks like this belong to the long tradition of small beer, the weak, quickly made household brew that stood in for water when water was suspect and for cider when cider ran out. Molasses did the work sugar does now: it was cheap, it arrived in barrels through the West Indies trade, and it fermented readily. The name "jumble beer" is not standard and appears to be a local or family term, of a piece with the switchels, spruce beers and ginger beers that fill the drink pages of nineteenth-century receipt books.