Small Beer
Fifteen gallons water, one gallon bran, one and a half gallon molasses, one quart corn or oats, one-quarter pound hops. Let it boil up once; take it off and sweeten with the aforementioned molasses. Put it in a tub to cool. When a little more than milk, warm, add one and a half pint yeast. Cover it with a blanket till next morning, and then bottle.--Mrs. M. P.
A molasses-based household brew of the sort made by the barrel rather than the bottle. The proportions are sound in principle, but the scale, the sanitation and above all the bottling instruction need attention before anyone attempts it.
- The bottling is the dangerBottling roughly twelve hours after pitching yeast means sealing a vigorously fermenting liquid into glass. Household brewers of the period bottled in whatever was to hand, often thick stoneware or heavy glass, corked and tied, and bursts were a recognised risk; modern bottles will fail explosively. Fermentation should be complete, with a stable gravity reading over two days, before any liquid goes into a sealed vessel.
- ScaleFifteen gallons of water plus a gallon and a half of molasses gives about seventeen gallons of finished beer — well over 130 bottles. Divide everything by ten for a manageable trial batch.
- "A little more than milk warm"Milk warm is blood heat, about 98F, so a little more than that means around 100F or a shade above. Modern ale yeast is happier pitched at 65–75F; pitching much above the mid-80s risks harsh fusel flavours.
- The yeastA pint and a half of yeast means liquid barm skimmed off another fermentation — a slurry, not dried granules. A single 11 g packet of dry ale yeast is ample for a five-gallon batch.
- Bran and grainBran and a quart of whole corn or oats contribute a little starch, protein and husk for the yeast to work on, but without a proper mash at 148–158F the starch will not convert to fermentable sugar. Essentially all the alcohol here comes from the molasses.
- "Let it boil up once"A single boil-over extracts very little bitterness from a quarter pound of hops. A 45–60 minute boil is what actually isomerises hop acids; the brief boil here is chiefly for preservation and sterilising the wort.
- SanitationThe recipe cools in an open tub under a blanket, which invites wild yeast, acetobacter and lactobacillus. Anything touching the liquid after the boil should be sanitised, and the fermenter kept covered with an airlock.
- StrengthA gallon and a half of molasses across seventeen gallons works out to a very modest beer, likely 2–3 percent alcohol. That was the point: small beer was for drinking all day.
Small beer was the weak, quickly made household drink of the English-speaking world — brewed from the second or third runnings of a mash, or, in America, from molasses and whatever grain was to hand. It was often said to be safer than doubtful well water, cheap, and mild enough that field hands and children drank it; the small beer recipe attributed to George Washington, conventionally dated to a notebook of about 1757, uses bran and molasses in much the same way as this one. Molasses is the giveaway that this is a colonial and post-colonial American formula rather than an English one: West Indian molasses arrived cheaply in Atlantic ports and did the work that malt did at home. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered such recipes from contributing housewives — hence the initials rather than a name — at a moment when home brewing of this kind was already fading.