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Hop Beer
Mrs. Dickinson.
One handful of hops, boil an hour, strain, and add one pint of molasses, and enough water to make two gallons. When milk warm, add one cup or cake of yeast : let it stand over night; skim and pour it off from the yeast carefully; add one tablespoon of wintergreens, and bottle for use.
This is a 19th-century small beer — hops, molasses and yeast fermented briefly and bottled while still active. Two things in the text put it outside what can be recommended today: the wintergreen and the bottling.
- "One tablespoon of wintergreens"The word is ambiguous and both readings are a problem. If it means oil of wintergreen (methyl salicylate), a tablespoon is roughly 15 ml of a substance for which a single teaspoon has caused fatal poisoning in children; it is a concentrated salicylate, not a flavouring to be measured by the spoon. If it means an extract or dried leaf, the dose is unknowable from the text. There is no way to read this quantity as safe.
- Bottling a live fermentThe beer is bottled the morning after pitching yeast, with much of a pint of molasses still unfermented, and no priming measurement, no gravity reading and no pressure-rated bottles specified. This is how small-beer bottles burst. The recipe gives no storage instruction at all.
- "One cup or cake of yeast"In this period a "cake" could mean a home-raised or brewer's barm of unknown strength, or one of the commercially sold yeast cakes then coming into use; the text does not say which. Either way the recipe gives no way to judge whether the ferment has gone as intended, and modern cake and dry yeasts are not a like-for-like substitute.
- Units, for reading the recipeA handful of hops is perhaps half an ounce to an ounce of dried flowers; "milk warm" is about 95-100F, the temperature at which yeast was traditionally pitched. Two gallons is the finished volume, not the boil volume.
- If you want the drinkHopped molasses small beer is still made, and a current homebrewing recipe will give you measured hop weights, a target gravity, a priming rate and safe bottles. Use one of those rather than this.
Hop beer belongs to the long tradition of household small beer: a lightly hopped, quickly fermented, weakly alcoholic drink brewed in the kitchen rather than the brewhouse and drunk within days, alongside relatives like spruce beer, ginger beer and root beer. Molasses did the work of malt in North American homes, being cheap, always in the pantry, and fermentable without mashing grain, while the hops contributed bitterness and a measure of preservation. Wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens) and birch were common regional flavourings in the same family of drinks, which is why it appears here as a matter-of-course household recipe credited to a contributor, Mrs. Dickinson, rather than as a brewer's formula. The Toronto Home Cook Book of 1877 was credited to ladies of Toronto and other Canadian cities, and was derived from the earlier Chicago Home Cook Book; its brevity is typical: it assumes a reader who already knows what barm looks like and how long her cellar keeps a bottle.