Lemon Beer
Cut two large lemons in slices and put them in a jar. Add one pound white sugar and one gallon boiling water. Let it stand till cool; then add one-quarter cupful yeast. Let it stand till it ferment. Bottle in the evening in stone jugs and cork tightly.--Mrs. G. W. P.
A one-gallon batch of small beer, lightly alcoholic and heavily carbonated. The whole thing hinges on how you handle the pressure once it is bottled.
- Corking tightly is the risky stepThe recipe bottles the liquid while fermentation is still active, so carbon dioxide keeps building with nowhere to go. Stone jugs and tight corks were the period's answer; glass canning jars and screw-top wine bottles are not built for it and can burst. Use bottles rated for pressure, and refrigerate after a day or two to slow the yeast.
- "One-quarter cupful yeast"This most likely means liquid barm or the sediment from a previous brew, not modern granules. A small fraction of a teaspoon of dry ale or bread yeast is nearer the mark; a full quarter-cup of dry yeast would be wildly excessive.
- "Till it cool""Let it stand till cool" -- Hot liquid will stress or kill the yeast, so let the sugar-lemon water come down to roughly 75-80F before pitching; a gallon takes some hours to get there.
- "Bottle in the evening"An old rule of thumb rather than a rule of chemistry; the recipe gives no timing beyond "let it stand till it ferment." Bottle while the brew is still barely fizzing -- look for a steady fine bead rather than a hard foam.
- The lemonsSliced whole, so pith and peel both go in. The pith turns the drink bitter if left more than a day, so strain the slices out before bottling.
- Sugar and strengthOne pound of sugar per gallon gives a finished drink of roughly 1-2 percent alcohol if fermentation is stopped early, more if it runs on. It was made as a household refresher, not a beer in the modern sense.
- YieldJust under a gallon after straining, or about seven pint bottles. It is meant to be drunk within a week; there is no preservative and no pasteurisation.
Lemon beer belongs to the large family of home-brewed "small beers" that filled American pantries before commercial soft drinks -- ginger beer, spruce beer, molasses beer, root beer -- all built on sugar, a flavouring, water and whatever yeast the kitchen had going. They were cheap, mildly alcoholic almost by accident, and made in a day rather than a season. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, who are credited throughout by name or by initials such as the "Mrs. G. W. P." here. The reliance on borrowed yeast is the period detail worth noticing: until packaged yeast became widely available in the later decades of the century, a cook kept a live culture going from batch to batch, and a beverage like this was one of the ways to use the surplus.