[Sca-cooks] Beer from unsafe water?

[a5foil]

An early German recipe for mead directs the brewer to do something which is,
in effect, pasteurizing the honey/water mixture before brewing.

William Harrison's 1577 recipe calls for three kettles of boiling water to
be poured over the grain and mashed/drained, and the wort derived from
mashing was also boiled for an extended period. This would likely kill most
deadly pathogens in the brewing water and resulting wort.

It is important to realize, though, that the wooden hogsheads and vats,
where the room temperature brew was fermented after the boil, were not
necessarily sterile, and might even be open vessels, depending on the time
period. Even if the vessels were sterile, various recipes call for the
brewer to stick an arm all the way down into the wort and give it a good
stir (introducing whatever happened to be on the skin or under the
fingernails). Between old wood, open air brewing, and dirty skin, I expect
this often led to somewhat infected beer, yielding a sour, possibly
unpleasant flavor.

Often, though, they started drinking the 'beer' within a day after the yeast
started to work, before the beer could get really sour, so they probably
didn't notice much until near the end of a batch, about two weeks later,
when the beer would be sour, ropey, and cloudy.

Even so, beer and ale were important sources of nutrition, extracting almost
100% of the nutrition available from the grain. I suspect though, that
sterilization was accidental, rather than intentional, and was likely based
on observation.

Cheers,
Thomas Longshanks

----- Original Message -----
From: Irmele von Grünsberg <irmele at thebartholomews.com>
To: <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2001 12:18 AM
Subject: RE: [Sca-cooks] Beer from unsafe water?


> Thanks!
>
> They knew enough to sterilize the brewing containers...did they
> know to boil water for its own sake?
>
> (And to think it took us until the mid-19th century to accept the
> practice of sterilizing surgical instruments to prevent
> infection.)
>
> Irmele
>
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