Recreating Medieval English Ales (1998) | Hacker News Reader

Recreating Medieval English Ales (1998)

cs.cmu.edu

113 pointsDerekBickerton73 comments

This is interesting, but the amount of flavor that the yeast provides make it basically impossible to taste the ale as it was, without having access to the original strain.

This time period predates the understanding of microbes, there was just some essence that needed to be moved from one ferment to the next (flocculated yeast, basically a yeast starter.)

There are a few old yeast strains, like the Trappist beer strains that are specific to each monastery, left over from this time period, and that specific yeast MAKES the flavor of those amazing beers.

Yeast mostly turns water and sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. What flavors are you expecting to differ? Serious question - I know yeast will also produce vinegeary substances.

Also in medieval times people used to infuse beer with mushrooms, herbs, plants - often psychoactive. I'd argue that this might very well have contributed the dominant taste component.

Yeast is one of the most influential flavor creators in a fermented beverage. It would have huge effects on the final beer. But since sanitation was low, bacteria probably had a huge effect (acidic sourness) as well.

Take the same base recipe from the article and ferment it with a hefewizen (banana and/or clove flavors and a resulting yeast in suspension haze), Belgian strain ( bubblegum all the way to barnyard aroma), wine yeast, bread yeast or as they mentioned the lambic yeast (resulting in a slight sourness) and you would have totally different beers.

Modern brewers have access to hundreds of different strains just for beer, resulting in different flavors from each.

In simple terms vinegar comes from bacteria and yeast. Yeast eats the sugar making alcohol, Bacteria eats the alcohol and makes acids. Kombucha style. Eventually resulting in vinegar.

There is a saying that brewers make the wort (unfermented beer), and yeast makes the beer. You could have the same wort and use two different strains of yeast and end up with markedly different beers.

A huge amount of flavor comes feom the different esters, which are associated with different yests and techniques https://winning-homebrew.com/esters-in-beer.html

Yeast also dies, and then is broken down, and consumed by the other yeast. Yeast also consumes other proteins and sugars in the fermenting liquid. It leaves behind a protein-enriched liquid with a unique taste. It's actually a useful culinary trick in general; allow some yeast to grow aggressively and then boil it. If you concentrate it, you end up with something much like sold commercially as Vegemite or Marmite. It's savoury and tangy. Often described as mushroom-like. Can be used to thicken, and otherwise add some flavour to, a flat stew or sauce.

Different yeasts eat themselves, and metabolize sugar, with different efficiencies and slightly different chemical pathways. It would not surprise me if this has an effect on the overall end product. Anecdotally, based on my cousin's home brewing experiments, beers brewed with standard baking yeast compared to specialized brewing yeasts are significantly "yeastier" tasting -- they start to die at relatively low alcohol concentrations and so more yeast mass ends up in the final product, I think.

> they start to die at relatively low alcohol concentrations and so more yeast mass ends up in the final product

up until that very insightful. but this seems rather counter logical. if the yeast dies earlier it grows less and hence mass should be also less.

having said that i guess less yeast activity means more sugar and starch in the final product.

There are tons of living yeast after a fermentation. Once the sugar content goes down and they’ve converted the long chain fermentables, they go into sleep mode.

I re-use my yeast, I have about 10x more yeast after a ferment than I threw in at the start. They are very much alive.

Most beers are not considered finished if they are hazy, dead yeast or byproduct do not end up in the finished beer except for a few styles that allow it.

i tend to choose hazy over clear beer. i associate hazy with more rugged, natural, manly ... clear seems industrial, commercial. hazy beer also seems to taste more complex. is that just bullshit? is properly brewed beer always clear?

There is a style guide for every beer type, and you have to meet it to compete in beer competitions and do well. Until the hazy IPA craze, pretty much every beer was supposed to be clear except for a Hefeweizen.

Pro brewers crash cool and/or filter the final product to get a consistent product. You don’t want active yeast making it into the package and creating little bombs. Consumers also expected a clear drink.

Home brewers have always had a more flexible scale in the clarity of beer, leaving traditionally clear styles hazy has been the mark of a home made (and therefore better) beer to a lot of home brewers. The hazy IPAs have flipped this logic on its head. These styles can be brewed with oats, lactose, all kinds of adjuncts that would never clear and add to “mouth feel” for this style of beer. This change in the industry seems to have left some room for the pro brewers that are local sized (like a brewpub + some distribution in the region) to leave their beers hazy for many styles. It does save a step, and running a small brewery is done on razor thin margins.

So, long way to say, yes hazy beer can have more complex flavor, it’s probably the mark of something produced on a less industrial scale, and to many that would be better. Large commercial beer really shoots for the middle, and if your tastes are more complex it won’t do it for you.

I only clear the German traditional styles I brew. Kölsch, Helles, etc. The rest is hazy if it wants to be.

Yeast is really the main flavor producing element in beer/ale that is lightly hopped and with relatively lightly roasted malt. You can get drastically different flavors with the exact same grain and hop bill just by changing the yeast, and then furthermore changing the yeast pitch rate, temperature of fermentation, etc.

Most of what we perceive as flavor in beer, floral notes, spicy notes, even banana flavor or “horse blanket” which is a real funk flavor for some English beers comes from the microbes. Even in the heavily hopped modern IPAs, the yeast do incredible things to what goes into the fermenter. If you’ve ever sampled “wort” (beer before fermentation) you’ll know what I mean. It’s foul. Hop water tastes like bong water. Yeast turn this into bright mango, pineapple, papaya flavors.

> If you’ve ever sampled “wort” (beer before fermentation) you’ll know what I mean. It’s foul. Hop water tastes like bong water.

are you kidding? that's one of my highlights when brewing to sip from the wort. it tastes sweet and delicious. i love it.

I hate it, I love the smell but the raw hop flavor… ugh. I just can’t stand it. I also don’t love a lot of the dry hopped with high hop weight per barrel IPAs, there is this hop burn skunk flavor under the taste that I can’t ignore.

For example Galaxy I usually avoid if I see it on a label because many people leave it on too long and it gets that hop burn. I’ve talked to people who brew with it well and they leave it in contact for 24 hours or less. Not sure what that process actually looks like since it’s added during primary fermentation.

well, okay, I was talking about the wort before hop is added - while cooking the malt or right after filtering it off.

If you’re at all interested in this, try home brewing. You’re going to learn that most of what you think you know about yeast is very wrong

i've been brewing about a dozen times. but only from kits. doing everything from start to finish. but the yeast is provided. i just assumed it's basically an optimized baking yeast. also when talking to professional brewers they never really get into the yeast but talk about hop all day long. so i assumed that's where it's at.

Brew yourself some Saison.

You’ll get pepper flavors from the most boring grain bill and hop choices you’ve ever seen.

As you get further into brewing, and more expertise, you’ll end up caring more and more about yeast. If you’re chatting with pro brewers, usually if you’re there with a sanitized mason jar when they are harvesting yeast, they’ll give you some of their strain if it’s not something secret. Then end up with way more than they can use.

You can go down the rabbit hole trying to figure out what the best brewers use, like Trillium brewing. There are rumors but they sure won’t admit it, the yeast is the secret sauce, the hops are on the label.

i'm an all-round serious fun guy anyway - so yeast is right up my alley

If you’re into this kind of thing, I’d like to recommend Historic Brewing Techniques, The Lost Art of Farmhouse Brewing by Lars Marius Garshol.[1] Absolutely fascinating and practical. It does focus on Norway to a large extent, but covers a little from other north-eastern European countries too. His associated blog is also great reading.[2] The author was really instrumental in the mainstream exposure of kveik yeasts.[3]

Another interesting little book I have is Old British Beers and How to Make Them, by Harrison and the Durden Park Beer Circle. Not medieval, but still some really great recipes for approximating a lot of old beer styles.[4]

There are also some good blogs still around on this subject. I’d recommend Shutup about Barclay Perkins[5] as a good starting point. The most recent article there is about brewing a stout from 1812.

[1] https://www.garshol.priv.no/download/historical-tech/

[2] https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kveik

[4] https://durdenparkbeer.org.uk/index.php/product/old-british-...

[5] https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2022/?m=1

Actually, the Shutup about Barlcay Perkins link should have gone directly to the blog's homepage. The author writes something every day, not always exclusively about beer but mostly related to it.

https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/

I think this is a worthy try but I am skeptical if it tastes anything like medieval beer. I imagine the malt is significantly different. Are we still using the same barley varieties as we did hundreds of years ago? Were they able to malt as efficiently? I also think the yeast would have been very different. Which he touches on. Even if you had the exact yeast you would need to know pitching rates. That said, what he created most likely tastes a lot better than what they had in the 1300s.

My take away from https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sr7zk5/has_t... is that even very well-intentioned, well-researched attempts at recreating historical recipes and being techniques are unlikely to yield historically accurate results.

The malt definitely had less diastatic power, which is its ability to convert the starches to sugars during mash. They may have had some tricks of the trade, or they may have just ended up with less conversion. If it was the latter, you could manipulate your mash to emulate, but without knowing the goal you'd just be guessing. And the yeast, you're absolutely correct. And that's one of the biggest contributing factors in the finished product, especially with no hops involved.

Malting is harnessing natural enzymes produced in germination, better malting is a side effect of faster sprouting (something they'd plausibly breed it for). Wild barley is still around, one could hybridize as early a variety as he wishes. Lambic beers are still produced on wild yeast too.

It would be hard to match an exact beer as a particular early brewer made, but seemingly easy to cover the entire spectrum of beers plausibly open to them. Then again, I have doubts they were consistent and reproducible with the kind of instruments they had.

I’d guess that individual brewers with years of experience could have produced remarkably consistent results and their apprentices would have picked up the skills. But every brewer would have produced different flavours. The weather conditions would have led to variations.

Not from what I understood from working at a brewery. They would have to eyeball the brewing temperatures and fermentation temperatures would not be constant either, so both sugar initial wort sugar content and yeast-defived flavours would be all over the place.

They didn’t have pitching rates, because they didn’t know what yeast was or have any idea of microbes. It was just the “essence” left over from beer making, and if they didn’t move it into the next barrel it didn’t work.

Using commercially malted barley was the first huge red flag in the article. I would expect Malting the barley would be hugely different from place to place with such limited options. I didn't see the article mention it at all.

Pitching rates don't effect the final flavor all that much. Pitching too little is a problem as it will take longer to ferment, giving wild yeast more time to sour/ruin the beer. But pitching too much yeast would not really result in much change in flavor in this case.

Yeah. The author is careful to note the difference in yeast strains, equipment, water hardness, etc, but doesn't talk about the grain itself.

The main conclusion is how much more grain was used and how inefficient the procedure is compared to modern practices. Is it plausible that the grains of the time were just less starchy?

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

Great channel. Very informative, interesting and tasty. I also recommend it.

Max Miller also just published a cookbook:

https://www.amazon.com/Tasting-History-Explore-through-Cookb...

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.

"Beer is liquid bread, it's good for you" - They Might Be Giants

Ah, so that's how Soylent was founded.

I'm not sure if this is what you're thinking of, but there's a story like that behind Dogfish Head's "Midas Touch"

http://www.biomolecular-archaeology.com/?page_id=143

https://www.dogfish.com/brewery/beer/midas-touch

Though more reconstruction of ingredients from residue than linguistic reconstruction I guess.

Ninkasi, goddess of beer.

Well, that explains why there's a Ninkasi brewery in Eugene, Oregon and another unrelated one in the UK.

This professional historian[0] recreated the recipe last year and documented the process

[0]:https://braciatrix.com/2022/02/10/medieval-english-small-ale...

This reminds me of one of may favorite recipe books, Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrets of Ancient Fermentation by Stephen Harrod Buhner[0], also published in 1998. It's much more than a recipe book, there's lots of history and information on herbalism.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Herbal-Healing-Beers-Fermentat...

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!

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.

I'd rather take the trouble to move a couple of gallons of ale than water. But more for the enjoyment.

Is it actually possible to drink just beer? Isn't it a net dehydrator? I drink a lot of beer, but always end up drinking a ton of water, certainly way more than if I hadn't had any beer. If I just drank beer I think I'd feel horrible, no?

Just a guess but I’ve heard medieval beer would’ve been low alcohol and I think most of the diuretic effect of alcoholic drinks is due to the body processing the alcohol. So it might be possible.

There were many different strengths of beer which (often)corresponded to different runnings/washing’s of the malt. The initial wort has higher amounts of sugars/fermentables while the later washes have significantly less. It could get down to 2-3% which. As to being a diuretic I think people are confused about how that works. It’s not like adding minus water if you drink coffee or alcohol, eg you wouldn’t die of dehydration if all you had to drink was coffee or beer.

The idea that beer (at least normal low alcohol content beer) dehydrates you is also something of a myth: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26702122/

Your daily beers would have been a "small" beer like the kind they served school children in Belgium until very recently [0]. Maybe 1.5% alcohol by volume tops.

It's not the alcohol that prevents the spread of disease but the fact that the water gets boiled for hours during manufacture. By the time that's done you could have used water drawn from John Snow's well in London and it would be fine.

[0] https://www.amazingbelgium.be/2016/08/till-70s-belgian-kids-...

Just drink Trappist beers.

Those are beers not unhopped ales.

The gruits are.

They’re not necessarily old recipes. One of the more popular ones, Westmalle Tripel, was first brewed in 1934.

The strong ones are modern innovations (in response to Belgium banning bars from selling spirits for much of the 20th century) but those aren't the type the monks drink themselves.

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.

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.

Also, see my sibling comment.

Yea, but the author is in the present day and is using the terms beer and ale which are present day terms - not speaking a medieval language. They seem to think that beer and ale are different because of hop content- which isn’t true. To quote “The difference between medieval ale and beer was that beer also used hops as an ingredient.”

> medieval ale

So the difference between medieval ale and (present day)ale ? Or the difference between medieval ale and (present day) beer ? Is that what you think they mean?

At the time these historical recipes would have been brewed, folks referred to a beverage made with malted barley and yeast as "ale" and beverages made with malted barley, yeast and hops as "beer."

> In medieval England, ale was an alcoholic drink made from grain, water, and fermented with yeast. The difference between medieval ale and [medieval] beer was that [medieval] beer also used hops as an ingredient.

detaro is correct. At the time, that was the way the words were used. Makes sense to me to use the historical language in this context. At any rate, I think it's pretty safe to say the author is not confused.

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.

Sure. The difference is definitely not the presence or lack of hops.

No, that’s just nonsense.

The distinction isn’t about where the yeast is harvested, but where its most observable peak activity occurs. S. cerevisiae activates and ferments rapidly at the top of the brew and settles, becomes dormant more quickly and in lower temperatures.

S. cerevisiae Has the higher active temperature range, as high as 80F in some cases, and 90+ for kveiks. Both types ferment throughout the column of liquid and have krauesn. I can assure you, I have a number of clear fermenters. You cannot identify the type visually.

Point taken. The krausen is much less pronounced at lagering temps, but you’re right that the yeast ferments throughout.

But they are all harvested at the bottom unless you’re doing something pretty unusual. And brewers do all sorts of unusual things!

Ales were historically harvested at high krausen, which is the origin of the phrase top cropping. But you're right, almost no one does that anymore. You can do it really effectively at the small scale an get a lot of live active cells that way though.

Yes, and kinda mostly yes.

In some circles, even among brewers and even in some brewing literature I’ve encountered, the ale/lager distinction uses the terms ale/beer (where “beer” is the term specifically for lager). And the introduction of hops may not have necessarily made this specific terminology distinction, but it did contrast what we now commonly call beer from earlier (gruit) ales which were brewed with any number of different herbs. Hops, like those other herbs, were added for their preservative qualities. But hops are now generally considered an essential ingredient in beer, ale or lager, and most people would find unhopped beer brewed with other herbs rather odd (at the very least).

Are there any unhopped beers on the market? They seem like they would be an interesting thing to try.

I tried googling for the one I tried before I brewed my own, and the results were disappointing, mostly pointing to beers with minimal hops not traditional gruits. I know they exist, your best bet might be to check out your nearest beer emporium of whatever shape it takes.

The normal usage in the UK desn't follow this. Beer and ale are fairly generic terms. "Lager", "Bitter" and "Pale Ale" (for example) are fairly specific.

If someone says "would you like a beer?" and then offered be a pale ale, a lager or a bitter I wouldn't feel I'd been decieved. They are all beers.

If someone says "would you like an ale?" then the ony one that wouldn't quite fit would be the lager.

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