[HN Gopher] Recreating Medieval English Ales
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Recreating Medieval English Ales
Author : DerekBickerton
Score : 40 points
Date : 2023-05-18 20:13 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cs.cmu.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cs.cmu.edu)
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| I'll take this opportunity to try and bust the myth a bit more
| about people drinking alt because water wasn't safe:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u5dxoy/how_d...
|
| TLDR; People drank ale all the time because water is boring to
| drink!
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| I'm not entirely convinced by that. The author establishes that
| water sources exist, which is obviously true because you can't
| brew without it. But water is heavy, and hard to store. If
| you've gone to the trouble to fetch and move a couple gallons
| of water, you might reasonably prefer to inoculate it with
| yeast rather than whatever happens to take off in your barrel.
| reillyse wrote:
| The author seems confused about beer and ale. Ale is beer but not
| all beer is ale. He seems to think it's about hopping. It's not.
| It's about top and bottom fermenting yeast. Top is ale bottom is
| lager. That's all there is. Nothing to do with hops.
| detaro wrote:
| You seem to be confusing modern-day terminology with medieval
| use of words. At the time the article discusses, the
| distinction between top and bottom fermenting yeasts wasn't
| even made yet as far as we know.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Also, see my sibling comment.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| To be even more pedantic, all yeasts ferment throughout the
| WHOLE column of liquid. Ales are generally made with
| Saccharomyces cerevisiae and lagers with Saccharomyces
| pastorianus. So called top cropping was the practice of
| scooping yeast(barm) off of the top of an open fermentation
| vessel used for ales. Whereas lagers (lager meaning to store)
| were fermented cooler in (generally) closed barrels and yeast
| was harvested from the bottom of an emptied barrel.
|
| However, you can top crop or harvest from the bottom of either
| type. And furthermore, some historical beers were made with
| wild yeasts or hybrids of S. cerevisiae ans S. pastorianus and
| may have fallen into either category.
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but I remember reading many years ago about a
| brewer who wanted to do something special for his brewery's tenth
| anniversary. Whilst researching, he came across what
| anthropologists thought was a hymn, only partially translated.
|
| He realized it was a recipe! With his domain knowledge, he was
| able to fill in some of the blanks. He then worked with the
| linguistic anthropology community to extend our knowledge of the
| ancient language in question. (Sumerian, maybe? It's been a long
| time....)
|
| He brewed the beer/ale and the result was a think rich brew best
| described as liquid bread.
| rikthevik wrote:
| "Beer is liquid bread, it's good for you" - They Might Be
| Giants
| J5892 wrote:
| Ah, so that's how Soylent was founded.
| aterris wrote:
| I recently found the youtube channel Tasting History with Max
| Miller and I would highly recommend checking it out.
|
| If this post caught your eye, I think you will find it very
| interesting, wholesome and worth the sub.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/tastinghistory
| carabiner wrote:
| Just drink Trappist beers.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Those are beers not unhopped ales.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The gruits are.
| cammikebrown wrote:
| They're not necessarily old recipes. One of the more popular
| ones, Westmalle Tripel, was first brewed in 1934.
| [deleted]
| jeron wrote:
| This professional historian[0] recreated the recipe last year and
| documented the process
|
| [0]:https://braciatrix.com/2022/02/10/medieval-english-small-
| ale...
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(page generated 2023-05-18 23:00 UTC)