[Sca-cooks] Beverage experiments

jenne at fiedlerfamily.net jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
Wed Feb 13 17:12:32 PST 2008


Well, there's lots of 14th-16th c. garden pictures, etc. of people cooling
something in jugs placed in containers of water, streams, well-heads, etc.
But it's not clear what they are cooling, since we can't really see.

It's certainly possible that fewer of the brewed grain beverages
(ales/beers) made in period were meant to be served chilled-- apparently
lagers are the most outstanding of category of beers-to-be-served-cold,
and lagers, using a more cold-adapted and bottom-fermenting yeast, seem to
have been less common in period. And ales, so says my local beer nerd, are
generally to be drunk room temperature.

-- Jadwiga

> But it _is_ interesting to think of where, on the map of Europe, we
> find people cooling with unglazed pottery wine coolers soaked in
> water, say, and simply drinking things like "warm" ale. There's
> obviously a much broader range than, "Ick, that's warm!" and beverages
> chilled with snow from the mountains. I'd also be curious as to how
> much we really know whether people would even care about beverages
> being cold, bearing in mind that these people may conceivably have
> been a lot more concerned about keeping warm in the winter than about
> being cool in the summer, how the Little Ice Age enters into all this,
> and the fact that there are still entire cultures today  who prefer
> beverages warm even in the summer.
>
> Adamantius
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-- 
-- Jenne Heise / Jadwiga Zajaczkowa
jenne at fiedlerfamily.net




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