The Armour Archive

Sharing this since I thought it would be an interesting addition to you folks, and I know some of you brew.

Edited:
This is apparenlty not a 1400's recipe, nor the paper it found on anything special. I received an email morning from my uncle appologising for his practical joke. My Aunt and he have been reading my facebook, he had found an 1700s recipe, and decided to pull a fast one on me in order to get me to make it. My sincere appologies to the archive for my gullibility & wise ass uncle.

So I'm gonna share the recipe, hopefully someone with experiance and knowledge will help me redact this puppy to something good.

Here is the listing:
Malt
Ginger
Linden Blossom
Honey
Hyssop
Chamomile

So where does one begin? Has anyone tried to do a non-hopped beer?
Any brewer imput?

-Takeda

Hyssop is a medicinal herb, antiseptic and cough suppressant, and chamomile has soothing, calming qualities as does linden flower. The antiseptic qualities could hint that the herbs and plants have been used as "gruit", but none of them are known to give the proper bitterness... Gruit was in some places used to give preserving properties and bitterness instead of hops up until mid 1500's. Non-hopped beers were by the way called ale in the British isles, and hopped beer was mostly imported, often by Dutch merchants. (Which, if this is a dutch recipe would also point that it may not be a beer recipe since hops was used a lot more on the continent)

However.. you can use malt in other things as well, for example a braggot (malt-mead), which could also explain the medicinal herbs being used. Since the recipe specifies malt, honey and herbs, but no quantities, it could really be either a beer or a mead(braggot), and even if hops were to be included, it could still be both. Ginger is another ingredient that makes me suspect that this might be a mead recipe instead, since ginger goes very well in a mead, and I'm not sure I've seen ginger in a beer recipe.


So, how to brew a braggot with these ingredients?
Malt before genetic engineering was made using 2-row barley, and you can buy malted and crushed 2-row barley from brewer stores. I don't know the proportions by heart, but check brewing forums to see how much you'll need. (enough for say 3-4% alc.). The process to get the sugars from the malt is a bit complicated, you need some special tools and a thermometer so you get it hot enough to get the sugar out, but not so hot that you destroy enzymes... Again, read some brewing forums.. (You could cheat and just buy spray-malt, which is freze-dried malt extract which you just boil in water, however, a bit more expensive, and not 2-row, but modern 6-row barley..)

Ginger, for 20 litres I'd use a peeled and sliced piece about the size of two thumbs

Honey, again, check a brewing forum to see how much honey you need to produce about 3% alcohol. (If you want more sweetness you can add some more honey afterwards)

Plants and herbs... "enough" is the key amount here You can either boil the plants, but remember that you can get some bitter flavors, or you can just put them in during fermentation, or 50/50, boil some, ferment some.. Testing with a small amount, boiled for 15-30 minutes first is recommended. (This goes for ginger as well by the way.)

To this, use a traditional ale yeast (they typically max out at 6-8%). If possible, choose one which will leave some sweetness unless you want a very dry mead.


For a beer you should use the malt as your preferred source of sugar, so a lot more malt.. and then you have a cooking process with herbs and honey, where some should be boiled just a few minutes, some maybe 15 minutes, and if one of the herbs is supposed to give bitterness, probably 30 minutes or more. I have no idea how well these ingredients would work as "gruit", or bitterness-givers so it's a trial and error process I'm afraid.

Best of luck though!

I have been brewing for many years and have already brewed ~200 gallons of beer this year. Last fall I started to work with gruit mixtures and hybrid gruit/hop beers and have developed a decent working knowledge of typical brewing herbs with a few very solid recipes which my SCA and WMA friends beg me to make.

As to: Linden Blossom, Hyssop and Chamomile... Never used any of those, and they are not common brewing herbs because they lack the bittering agents. The very first thing I would do is go buy some of these herbs and brew a few tinctures on your stove. Throw an oz of each into different pots of boiling water, about 2 quarts should do. After 5 minutes, remove a portion of each and cool them. Do this again after 15, 30 and 60 minutes. Taste all of these, they will likely be quite strong but they will give you an idea of how each herb responds to heat over time.

Armed with this knowledge, and assuming you want a beer with honey, not a braggot.... It's time to develop a recipe. Seeing as mashing grain is going to be way beyond your skill and knowledge level without some help and guidance (and equipment) I suggest starting with a partial boil using spray malt. For this about all you need is a 3 gallonish canning pot and big ass bucket (6 gal is good), some form of sanitizer, a syphon and some plastic PET bottles (available at your local brew/wine shop, usually as a kit for somewhere around $60-100)

Your brewing for 5 gallons here:
Malt - 5-7 lb malt extract
Honey - 1-3 lb

All of these could be anywhere from 1/4oz though 2oz, added anytime from start of boil all the way to fermentation bucket. I suspect you'll be looking at 15 minute, 5 minute and fermentation additions for most of these. Since I have never used some of this I can't really help you other than the tincture advice above. I do think you'll want some bog myrtle or yarrow in there, to the tune of ~1.5oz @ 60 minutes.


Step one, measure 2.5-3 gallons of water into your pot, leave some space for boil over. Get that heating up and add the malt extract and honey and getting it boiling (stir, burn malt tastes awful). Foamy stuff like on boiled potatoes will form, keep stirring and it will go away in 5-10 minutes. Once that goes away, start a timer at 60 minutes and add 1.5 oz yarrow or bog myrtle.

Stir every few minutes. Once you get to 15 minutes left, add your ginger. Once you get to 5 minutes left, add 1/4 - 1/2oz of the herbs. At 0 minutes, turn off the stove. Cover the pot, and sit it your bathtub full of water (and ice if you have some) for a while. You want to the get worts temperature down below 80f.

Gently pour that into your bucket, and top off to 5 gallons and change with water, preferably pre-boiled and cooled but lots of people just use tap water. Add yeast, the remainder of the herbs and cover, but not air tight somewhere cool, like your basement floor (try and keep the beer temp below 70f and above 50f). In a 2-3 weeks, transfer it to a new bucket trying to leave the sludge in the old bucket, add 2/3-1 1/3cup sugar and bottle. Let sit for 3 week, chill and enjoy (I hope).


I do suggest setting your sights a little lower and trying some modern hopped beers first. There are a number of excellent kits available now days to get you going in the right direction. Just avoid the "beer in a can" ones. There is a lot of art in brewing with hops, and wandering into gruit is almost uncharted territory these days. Pure experimentation without a solid brackground is damn hard, and you'll often end up poring beer down the driveway. If you can't make good beer, and know how to diagnose problems you'll never know if it was way to much rosemary or just a problem with your basic process.

Ludewic wrote:...none of them are known to give the proper bitterness... Gruit was in some places used to give preserving properties and bitterness instead of hops up until mid 1500's.

JimC wrote:As to: Linden Blossom, Hyssop and Chamomile... Never used any of those, and they are not common brewing herbs because they lack the bittering agents.

If I may inquire a clarification --
Why assume that there is a need for bitterness?

I was brought up on Kvas - which I always thought of (for translation purposes) as a beer made of bread.
But I have never had a bitter Kvas
Some are more dry than others - but this is more fresh, lacking sweetness.
Sometimes there is a tinge of sourness ( a kind of vinagerness) but the closest thing to bitter is a flavored "exotic" one with horseradish

So - why assume that there is a need for a "bittering agent"?

Probably because of the last 500 years of hops beating out old style ales. People likely have never had something non-hopped, and assume bitter=beer.

As far as I know, medieval beer was not bitter and had a very low alcohol percentage. I've been told this by a brewer in my living history group and saw the same thing on various Discovery Channel productions (most notably an episode where they recreate an ancient Egyptian beer. I think it was one of the "How do they do it" episodes).

Sander Marechal wrote:As far as I know, medieval beer was not bitter and had a very low alcohol percentage. I've been told this by a brewer in my living history group and saw the same thing on various Discovery Channel productions (most notably an episode where they recreate an ancient Egyptian beer. I think it was one of the "How do they do it" episodes).

Gotta watch those pesky generalizations.

Remember, "medieval" is a pretty large span of time. Malt beverages we'd instantly call beer if served it blind starts showing up quite early indeed in the "medieval" period - hopped beer becomes ubiquitous even in England by the latter part of the 15th century.

"Very low alcohol percentage" is another over-generalization. Much of the beer/ale consumed was indeed low-alcohol, but not so low as you'd think. When you start examining extant ingredients lists it becomes apparent that "table beer" or "small beer" could have an ABV as high as 4-5% - in other words, the same as a modern pale lager. Moreover, for every gallon of small beer there was, more often than not, another gallon of much stronger beer being kept.

I suspect the television programs to which you refer were simply regurgitating the same over-simplifications.

Regards,

Bob

quote="Norman"]

Ludewic wrote:...none of them are known to give the proper bitterness... Gruit was in some places used to give preserving properties and bitterness instead of hops up until mid 1500's.

JimC wrote:As to: Linden Blossom, Hyssop and Chamomile... Never used any of those, and they are not common brewing herbs because they lack the bittering agents.

If I may inquire a clarification --
Why assume that there is a need for bitterness?

I was brought up on Kvas - which I always thought of (for translation purposes) as a beer made of bread.
But I have never had a bitter Kvas
Some are more dry than others - but this is more fresh, lacking sweetness.
Sometimes there is a tinge of sourness ( a kind of vinagerness) but the closest thing to bitter is a flavored "exotic" one with horseradish

So - why assume that there is a need for a "bittering agent"?[/quote]

Isn't hops added as a preservative agent? Here in Germany you can get brews without hops, they are usually styled "alt bier", because going without hops is old fashioned. On the other hand, there are some very hoppy brews here. Bitburger and Romer Pils are quite bitter to me, almost to the point of yech.

At work so no sources, but in the very little info there are, the gruits were if not exclusively, to a very large extent consisting of herbs with bittering properties.

The bitter flavour doesn't show until you've boiled the herbs for a longer while, so it is of course not entirely certain that the beverages themselves were very bitter. It could be that herbs that gave bitterness were thought to give preserving qualities and were used for that reason..

Regarding the age of the recipe, I have no idea what was brewed in the 1700's, but I suspect that braggots and meads were sort of out of fashion, so it's probably a beer, so listen to JimC .

Michael Ekelmann wrote:Isn't hops added as a preservative agent?

Yes. Hops have multiple properties which made it win out over other herbs. In fact, most brewing historians say that hops were merely just another bittering herb until its antiseptic properties were discovered.

It is thought - hops in brewing chemistry are still poorly understood - that the same acids which contribute to perceived bitterness also act as preservative agents.

Here in Germany you can get brews without hops, they are usually styled "alt bier", because going without hops is old fashioned.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Drive this fiction from your memory banks.

Altbier is called Altbier indeed because it's old-fashioned - but it's old-fashioned because it uses dark malts and it's an ale. When pale lager - like your Bitburger - became overwhelmingly popular, the coppery brown bitter ale brewed in Düsseldorf and elsewhere came to be called "Alt". Moreover, one of the distinctive characteristics of Altbier is a pronounced bitterness. This bitterness is provided by a significant amount of hops. This is especially true in the examples found in the pubs in Düsseldorf's Altstadt.

Altbier is old-fashioned, but it's more late C18/early C19 than anything even remotely resembling medieval.

Regards,

Bob

Ludewic wrote:Regarding the age of the recipe, I have no idea what was brewed in the 1700's, but I suspect that braggots and meads were sort of out of fashion, so it's probably a beer, so listen to JimC .

They were and they weren't. Hopped beer was the standard, but there were recipes floating around well into the 19th century in Britain and America for honey-based beverage alcohol.

Some brewing manuals in my collection intended for the frontier listed methodology and 'receipts' for mead-like beverages. Presumably this was due to erratic supply chains for brewing supplies - while hops grew (and still grow) wild all over the Mid-Atlantic colonies, malt supply was never certain, even in the settled, populous areas. On the frontier malt supply was even less certain. Therefore it made sense to have a drink which could be made from ingredients you could find near to hand.

Honey can be found easily. Linden (Tilia cordata or Americana) grows from Virginia to Maine. Chamomile (Anthemis tinctoria L. or Matricaria discoidea) is also widespread in Colonial America. Ginger was imported, but fairly common in C18 America.

It surprises me to find hyssop, as H. officinalis is not a native plant to America. Importation would have been prohibitive. It is useful, however, as a bittering agent, as it has a bitter, minty, quite strong flavor. Be very, VERY careful with hyssop. It's used in Absinthe. Seriously, it's a convulsant which affects the central nervous system. Used in very small amounts - like the kind of amount that won't overwhelm the other herbs - it ought to be all right. But use too much and you'll end up like Toulouse-Lautrec.

It's worth a shot. Without access to the original to attempt redaction, I'm flying blind on the herb quantities. But here goes:

Were I to brew this, I'd do two gallons. One pound honey, one pound light dry malt extract. Dissolve in hot water. Bring to boil. Add spices: a generous pinch or two of dried ginger (remember: imported!), a loose palm of dried chamomile, a pinch or two of hyssop (remember, it's powerful!), and a loose palm of linden blossom, more if it's fresh; it's competing against some strong flavors.

Interestingly, the medicinal properties of chamomile and linden blossom are very similar, and hyssop also crosses medicinal paths. The recipe sounds to me like a medicine for lung conditions.

Cheers,

Bob