SC - Horror tales and happy endings

[Varju@aol.com]

If you will please pardon the interception, I can offer some answers:

1) at some places in the middle ages, brewing was Guild controlled. 
They were reticent to give secrets to any non-guild members.

2)  The recipes were handed down generations, not in cookbooks. 
There are recipes available if you know where to look.  I and THLAnsel
made a beer from an Elizabethan 'recipe' he found in accounts of a
household expense listing from the period.  I will look up the actual
reference when I get home to the info. Recipes can be redacted from
expense lists, purchase orders, tax records, warehouse inventories,
journals of time, wages and activities in manors, etc.  The book Ansel
found had notes and descriptions of brewery remains found in
archeological studdies in England.

3)  You didn't want to give your secret brew recipe to the competition
for fear of losing business.

4) Mead recipes went away REAL early as grapes usurped honey as a
cheaper fermentable sugar in the meditteranean basin.  Honey still was
produced, but was too expensive to import to use for wines in
volume.....grapes grew far cheaper and reliably in volume locally as time
went on.  

These are not THE answers, but some I have come across in my
readings.  Recipes are, indeed, few and far between, but brewers and
vintners can start by using raw ingredients (whole grain and
fruits/honey) rather than concentrates....and open flame rather than
kitches, eliminate chemical preservatives, etc. to approach the road to
historic brewing.  Even wonder what they used for timing and
thermometers in the brewing; afterall, yeast is VERY temperature
sensitive.

niccolo difrancesco


**************************************************************************************
Greetings,

Your Grace, you wrote something that sparked a question.

>>>>>Very few, actually. There don't seem to be many surviving period
recipes
for fermented drinks, and most people in the SCA who do fermented
drinks
are not even using the 17th century recipes, of which there are a lot (in
Digby).

David Friedman


Now my question is, why are there few surviving recipes?  

I have heard that the first *recipe* for bread dates from somewhere in
the 14th ot 15th centuries.  This doesn't mean that bread isn't period for
earlier times.  I was told that they didn't write a recipe because
everyone *knew* how to make bread.  Does this hold true for fermented
beverages?  Does the literacy rate amongst the alewives have an
effect on this and how most of their knowledge was probably verbal? 
Or, is there some other reason (like some crazy people buyrned most of
the books with beer recipes in them? hehe)?

Thank you,
Avelina Keyes
Barony of the Bridge
East Kingdom

http://www.geocities.com/athens/academy/9523
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