[Sca-cooks] small beer

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Terry Decker:
>You also get the question, was it bottom or top fermented?  Ale was
>traditionally top fermented.  Beer (as in the hopped lagerbier produced by
>the Germans) is bottom fermented.

However, FWIW, beer, even in period Germany, is likely to have been
top fermented, IIRC. I think the bottom-fermented styles and yeast
strains show up later, like in the 18th century.

>It probably doesn't matter, as the encompassing term is beer.

Yup. Small beer is beer that is small. Small ale, similarly, is...
well, you get the idea.

>   Small beer
>could easily have begun as an ale and gone on to being a lager as well.
>
>Bear
>
>
>>Was this small beer, really "beer" or was it actually an "ale"? The
>>
>>former having hops added. Since I believe the hops and other herbs
>>were added for lengthen the time the beer would last, as well as
>>perhaps for flavor, I'm not sure this would have been added for small
>>beer as that was drunk rather fresh. I believe the main reason the
>  >alcohol level was low was the short brewing time.

Either that, or it was mashed at a hotter temperature, which can
result in either barley porridge or, if you do it right, some
unfermentable dextrin sugars which add body and "chew" to your brew
without really contributing to the alcohol content, especially given
the yeasts involved.

My experience, based on actually making such brews and using various
late-period instructions for them, is that small beer is either a
second mashing of previously mashed grain, or simply a relatively
weak infusion or decoction (depending on how heat and water are
applied), resulting in a watery beverage, low in alcohol and also
(usually) low in dissolved unfermentable sugars.

Regarding ales versus beers, the terms seem to be used
semi-interchangeably in the Middle Ages, depending on whether you
speak a language derived from Latin (cerevisia, etc.), Scandinavian
(øl -- that's a slashed "o" for you Unix types -- also known as ale),
and various Celtic and Celtic-influenced languages (bior).

The idea that ale is unhopped and beer is hopped seems to originate
from around the time of Andrew Boorde, writing in the mid-15th
century. At the time, both were made, I believe, with top-fermenting
yeasts.

Later still, probably starting in the eighteenth century and
continuing to the present day, most brews were hopped, and the major
distinction between ales and beers was based on whether the brew was
fermented with a top or a bottom-fermenting yeast.

Adamantius