SC - Bounced message from Kelsa - non-member submission

[CBlackwill@aol.com]

Balthazar of Blackmoor said:
> Two statements, and then I'll move on...
> 
> 1)  Not all beer is hopped (or very heavily hopped).  I have brewed some 
> exquisite unhopped ales, robust and malty, which would make great bases for 
> distillation.

I've gotten two different answers to the question of what was the differance
between an ale and a beer.

One is that beer uses top feeding yeasts while ale uses bottom feeding yeasts.
This may be a modern definition.

The second is that beer was hopped, but ales were not.

> 2)  Why do you 'not' want hopped ales for distillation?  Is it an A&S thing, 
> or a flavor factor?  Hops were used in period...

See above. A good example of how the statement "X was used in period, thus
I can use it for recipes throughout period" can be false. Hops does not
appear to be used much early on and even when it started being used, was
not used uniformly. It does appear to have been used more and more as
the making of beer changed from a cottage industry to the first mass
production factory based industry. Probably because of it;s perservative
properties. This shift may have been helped along by the use of hops since
it allowed larger batches to be made and sold before they went bad.

For a little more on this, check these files in the Florilegium. In
the BEVERAGES section:
beer-msg          (95K)  6/12/00    Making beer, period beer and ale. Hops.

And this new file in the PLANTS, HERBS AND SPICES section:
Oops. no hops-msg file yet. If anyone wants it, let me know and I'll
send you the info or finish it and put the file in the Florilegium.

- -- 
Lord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas           stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****