Summer Beer
Twelve quarts water, one quart molasses, one quart strong hop-tea, one-half pint yeast. Mix well and allow to settle. Strain through a coarse cloth, and bottle. It will be good in twenty-four hours.--Mrs. E. W.
A molasses small beer of the kind kept in a cellar crock through July and August — lightly alcoholic, lightly fizzy, and meant to be drunk within days. The whole recipe hinges on the fact that it goes into bottles while still actively fermenting.
- Bottle pressure is the real problemYeast added at the start is still working hard at twenty-four hours, and sealed glass will keep building pressure until something gives. Period bottling of such drinks would have relied on corked stoneware or tied-down corks, kept cool and drunk quickly; modern screw-top glass and a warm kitchen are how you get a burst bottle. If you make it, use proper swing-top or crown-capped beer bottles, refrigerate immediately, and drink within three or four days.
- The quantitiesTwelve quarts is three US gallons of water, and with a quart of molasses, a quart of hop-tea and half a pint of yeast the batch comes to something over fourteen quarts — roughly 57 cups, enough for a large household or a hayfield crew. A half pint of yeast is one cup of liquid barm from an active brew or a bread sponge; a single sachet of ale or bread yeast will stand in for it, rather than a cup of anything.
- Hop-tea"Strong hop-tea" means dried hops steeped in boiling water until bitter and then strained — figure about an ounce of whole hops to a quart of water, simmered fifteen to twenty minutes. Pellet hops measure denser than loose, air-dried flowers and many modern varieties are more bitter, so weigh rather than scoop and err on the light side. The hops are there as much for preservation as for flavor.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is harsh and low in fermentable sugar. One quart to three gallons of water gives a very thin wort; the finished drink probably lands somewhere around one to two percent alcohol, the sort of strength that let small beer be handed round to children and field hands.
- "Allow to settle"This means letting the mixture stand in a covered crock in a cool place until the first violent foam subsides and the trub drops; the recipe's promise of a drink ready twenty-four hours after bottling suggests a short rest rather than a long one. The straining through coarse cloth removes hop debris and the yeast head, not the suspended yeast, which is what carbonates the bottles.
- ServingChill hard and open over a sink. It pours cloudy and brown, tastes of molasses and bitter hops, and is closer to a rough root beer than to anything sold as beer today. It does not keep; by the end of a week it will be sour.
Small beer — grain or molasses beer of very low strength, brewed weekly and drunk fresh — was ordinary household work in America well into the nineteenth century, and it is often said that water of uncertain quality made a lightly fermented, hopped drink the safer thing to hand a thirsty household, though this is more tradition than established fact. Southern versions leaned on molasses because it was cheap, shelf-stable, and already in every pantry for gingerbread and cured pork. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) gathered its recipes from named contributors across the state, and the terse attribution here, "Mrs. E. W.," is typical: a formula passed along as common knowledge rather than instruction, assuming the reader already kept yeast on hand and knew what a crock of working beer looked like. Recipes of this type sit alongside spruce beer, ginger beer and persimmon beer in period books, all of them summer drinks made in quantity and consumed before they could spoil.