Beer
of balling is mostly at first), till at last a bus. of dry malt is left for a top-cover; thus let it stand 3 hours. In the meanwhile, another copper of water is directly heated, and put as before into the other mash-tub, for mashing 2 bus. of malt, which stands that time. Then, after the wort of the 4 bus. is run off, let that also of the 2 bus. spend, and lade it over the 4 bus., the cock running all the while, and it will make in all a copper and a half of wort, which is boiled twice; that is, when the first copper is boiled an hour, or till it breaks into large flakes; then take half out, and put the remaining raw wort to it, and boil it about 1/2 an hour till it is broken. Now while the 2 worts are running off, a copper of water almost scalding hot is made ready, and put over the goods or grains of both tubs; after an hour's standing the cock is turned, and this second wort is boiled away, and put over the grains of both tubs to stand 1 hour; when off, it is put into the copper and boiled again, and then serves hot instead of the first water, for mashing 4 bus. of fresh malt; after it has again lain 3 hours, and is spent off, it is boiled; but while in the mash-tub, a copper of water is heated to put over the goods or grains, which stands 1 hour, and is then boiled for small beer.
And thus may be brewed 10 bus. of malt with 2 lbs. of hops for the whole.
To brew Edinburgh Ale.
Adopt the best pale malt. 1st. Mash two barrels per quarter, at 183° (170°); mash three-quarters of an hour, let it stand one hour, and allow half an hour to run off the wort. 2nd. Mash one barrel per quarter, at 190° (183°); mash three-quarters of an hour, let it stand three-quarters of an hour, and tap as before. 3rd. Mash one barrel per quarter, at 160°; mash half an hour, let it stand half an hour, and tap as before.
The first and second wort may be mixed together, boiling them about an hour or an hour and a quarter, with a quantity of hops proportioned to the time the beer is intended to be kept.
The two first may be mixed at the heat of 60° or 65° in the gyle-tun, and the second should be fermented separately for small beer.
Bavarian or Lager Beer.
The malt is first mixed with water of ordinary temperature; for 1 part of malt about 39 parts of water are employed. The whole is allowed to rest 6 or 8 hours, after which the mashing is begun by mixing the mass with 3 parts of boiling water added gradually during continual agitation, by which its temperature is raised to 106° Fahr. The thick part of the mash is then transferred to the copper and heated to boiling with constant agitation, and after an hour's boiling again returned to the mash-tun and mixed thoroughly with its liquid contents, by which the temperature in the mash-tun is raised to 133°. The thick part of the mash is once more transferred to the copper and boiled for an hour and returned to the mash-tun, by which the temperature is raised to 154°. The fluid part of the mash is then transferred to the copper and boiled for a quarter of an hour, and then poured back upon the mash in the tun, and mixed thoroughly with it. The temperature is thereby raised to from 167° to 180°. After agitation for a quarter of an hour the mash is left at rest for an hour or an hour and a half, after which the clear wort is drawn off.
The fermentation of lager is peculiar, it is performed very slowly, and at a temperature from 32° to 461° Fahr. The yeast, instead of rising, falls to the bottom. The high temperature of the mash causes all albuminous matter to be coagulated, and much gummy matter remains unchanged.
This, together with the bottom fermentation, carries off all nitrogenous matter; the beer is exceedingly clear. It is put in hogsheads lined with common rosin, and is preserved a long time in vaults or cellars before being used.
White Beer.
Boil enough ale wort, preferably pale, for 1 barrel, with 3 handsful of hops and 14 pounds of groats (hulled oats), until all the soluble matter is extracted from the latter. Strain, and when lukewarm add 2 pints of yeast, and when fermenting briskly bottle in strong stoneware bottles.
Cheap and Agreeable Table Beer.
Take 15 galls. of water and boil one-half, putting the other into a barrel; add the boiling water to the cold, with 1 gall. of molasses and a little yeast. Keep the bung-hole open till the fermentation is abated. To make Sugar Beer.
Very excellent beer is made of sugar, and also of treacle. First boil a peck of bran in 10 galls. of water; strain the bran off, and mix with the branny water 3 pounds of sugar, first stirring it well. When cool enough add a teacupful of the best yeast, and a tablespoonful of flour to a bowl nearly full of the saccharine matter, which, when it has fermented for about an hour, is to be mixed with the remainder, and hopped with about 1/2 lb. hops; and the following day it may be put into the cask, to ferment further, which usually takes 3 days, when it is to be bunged, and it will be fit for drinking in a week. Treacle beer is made in the same way, 3 lbs. of it being used instead of 3 lbs. of sugar.
N. B. This beer will not keep any length of time.
Spruce Beer Boil 8 galls. of water, and when in a state of complete ebullition pour it into a beer barrel which contains 8 galls. more of cold water; then add 16 lbs. of molasses, with a few tablespoonfuls of the essence of spruce, stirring the whole well together; add half a pint of yeast, and keep it in a temperate situation, with the bung-hole open for two days till the fermentation be abated, when the bung may be put in and the beer bottled off. It is fit to drink in a day or two. If you can get no essence of spruce make a strong decoction of the small twigs and leaves of the spruce firs.
Another Receipt.
Take of oil of spruce, sassafras, and wintergreen, each 40 drops; pour 1 gall. of boiling water on the oils, then add 4 galls. of cold water, 3 pints of molasses, 1 pint of yeast. Let it stand for 2 hours and bottle.
Root Beer.
Take 3 galls. of molasses; add 10 galls. of water at 60° Fahr. Let this stand 2 hours, then pour into a barrel, and add powdered or bruised sassafras and wintergreen bark, each lb., bruised sarsaparilla root 1/2 lb., yeast 1 pint, water enough to fill the barrel, say 25 galls. Ferment for 12 hours and bottle.
Ginger Pop.
Crushed white sugar 28 lbs, water 30 galls., yeast 1 pint, powdered ginger (best) 1 lb., essence of lemon oz., essence of cloves oz. To the ginger pour half a gallon of boiling water and let it stand 15 or 20 minutes. Dissolve the sugar in 2 galls. of warm water, pour both into a barrel half filled with cold water, then add the essence and the yeast; let it stand half an hour, then fill up with cold water Let it ferment 6 to 12 hours, and bottle.
Ginger Beer.
This is a run of brewing receipts rather than a single recipe, and several of them cannot be followed today — partly because of ingredients now known to be unsafe, partly because the printed quantities have been mangled and partly because the bottling instructions would produce grenades. The notes below explain the terms and the specific failures.
- Sassafras is the disqualifying ingredientThe root beer, the second spruce beer and the flavouring oils all rely on sassafras bark or oil of sassafras. Sassafras root bark and its oil are rich in safrole, which was shown to cause liver tumours in animals and was prohibited as a food and beverage additive in the United States in 1960. Commercial root beer has been flavoured with safrole-free extract ever since; there is no home workaround here, and a current recipe should be used.
- Bottling a beer still in full fermentGinger pop is bottled after six to twelve hours of fermentation with 28 lb of sugar in the barrel, spruce beer after two days, white beer "when fermenting briskly." All of the remaining sugar keeps generating carbon dioxide in a sealed vessel. Modern practice is to ferment out fully and add a small measured priming sugar, precisely because unfermented sugar in glass or stoneware bursts bottles. The receipts give no gravity, no priming figure and no vent.
- Rosin-lined casksThe lager receipt calls for hogsheads "lined with common rosin." Pitching casks with pine rosin was standard practice in central Europe, but ordinary commercial rosin today is not a food-contact material and may carry solvent and processing residues. It is not a substitute for brewers' pitch or a modern liner.
- The quantities are incompleteSeveral fractions dropped out in printing: "hopped with about lb. hops," "wintergreen bark, each lb.," "sarsaparilla root + lb.," "essence of lemon oz." The missing figures were presumably simple fractions, but they cannot be recovered from this page, so the hopping and flavouring rates in the sugar beer and root beer cannot be reconstructed.
- On the lager mashing quantitiesThe water-to-malt proportion was checked against the printed page and stands as given here. The later addition of "3 parts" of hot water is less clear, and the heats quoted with it do not follow from the quantities. The decoction schedule is best read as a description of nineteenth-century Bavarian practice rather than a workable set of instructions.
- Old brewing unitsA bushel of malt is a volume measure, roughly 34–42 lb depending on the malt. A quarter is eight bushels. A barrel is 36 imperial gallons, so "two barrels per quarter" means 72 gallons of liquor for eight bushels of grain. A peck is a quarter-bushel. The gallons in the English receipts are imperial — about 1.2 US gallons each.
- VocabularyThe copper is the boiling kettle; the goods or grains are the spent malt; the gyle-tun is the fermenting vessel; tapping or spending is running the wort off the mash. Small beer is the weak beer made from the final low-gravity runnings, brewed for daily drinking. Treacle is molasses, and groats are hulled oats.
- The paired temperatures in the Edinburgh ale"183° (170°)" appears to give the strike heat of the liquor first and the resulting mash temperature in brackets; the third mash is printed with a single figure, 160°. A mash at the bracketed 183°F would denature the enzymes outright, though 160°F is within the range a modern brewer would use. The numbers reflect thermometers of variable accuracy and a house style built around long stands, not modern conversion charts.
Domestic brewing sat comfortably in a general receipt book for most of the nineteenth century, and Mackenzie's compilation shows the trade in transition: alongside the old English household routine of successive mashes from one bed of malt — strong ale first, then small beer from the last thin runnings — sits a careful account of Bavarian decoction mashing and cold bottom fermentation, the technique that was then remaking European brewing and would shortly dominate American production. The Edinburgh ale entry, with its strike-and-mash temperature pairs, reads as if lifted from a professional brewer's notebook; Edinburgh's hard, gypsum-rich well water gave the city a reputation for pale strong ales that rivalled Burton's. At the other end of the page are the sugar, treacle, spruce, root and ginger drinks, barely alcoholic and ready in a week, which belonged to a different household economy altogether — cheap, quick, brewed from molasses and bark rather than malt, and increasingly favoured through the temperance decades. Spruce beer was long a shipboard and North American staple, often credited with warding off scurvy, and sassafras and wintergreen were standard flavourings of American root beer until safrole was prohibited in 1960.