Second Gen (2003-2016, 2016- )
A lovely day was had by all. Kingston St. Lawrence Vintage Base Ball Club loses 3-2 to a NY Selects team from Canton and Rochester NY in the final of the RMC tournament. RMC 1 lost to the Selects 7-6 in the first round while the KSL took RMC 2 by 17-3. I got a single.
Some buzz around the beer news that the Coney Island / Shmaltz Brewing Company is brewing up a recipe of George Washington’s beer for a charity gig… and a cheater version with roasted malts for those who might want to pretend. Here is the recipe entitled “To Make Small Beer” as set out by the Gothamist:
Take a large Siffer [Sifter] full of Bran Hops to your Taste. Boil these 3 hours then strain out 30 Gall[ons] into a cooler put in 3 Gall[ons] Molasses while the Beer is Scalding hot or rather draw the Melasses (sic) into the cooler & St[r]ain the Beer on it while boiling Hot. let this stand till it is little more than Blood warm then put in a quart of Yea[s]t if the Weather is very Cold cover it over with a Blank[et] & let it Work in the Cooler 24 hours then put it into the Cask—leave the bung open till it is almost don[e] Working—Bottle it that day Week it was Brewed.
The recipe is in the New York Public Library‘s collection and dates from 1757 – when George was still a Loyalist and a couple of years before Jeffery Amherst’s spruce beer from a couple of colonies to the north. Interestingly, each uses 3 gallons of molasses to thirty gallons of brew. The real difference is that George says hop to taste while Jeff boils seven pounds of spruce until the bark comes off. Neither look all that appealing. And I am not sure what George meant by the “Bran Hops.” Is the sentence supposed to be “Take a large Siffer [Sifter] full of Bran Hops to your Taste” or is there a missing punctuation mark so that it would read “full of Bran – Hops to taste”? Or were “bran hops” something that meant something to someone somewhere?
This report suggested that the Washington beer would work out at 11%… hardly small beer. And Amherst states that his beer can be bottled to keep “a great while.” I dunno. Were these desperate beers for desperate times? In a way, maybe they were the predecessors of commodity beer – a means to an end.
I have been reading a lot this winter. Lots and lots of histories – mainly US but plenty about the founding of Upper Canada, too, though those texts are fewer and far between. Right now, I am reading John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father by Francis J. Bremer, a book about the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony founded in 1630 a decade after the Pilgrims hit Plymouth Rock. It is a great ride, covering his grandfather’s birth in 1480 to his own death in 1648 and contextualizes his life in the ebb and flow of the state’s regulation of religious practices from pre-Luther to the lead up to the English Civil War, also the name of an excellent song by The Clash. But this is the key bit. The middle bit to his sermon to his fellow passengers on the event of their departure to New England from the Old World:
… for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world, wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the wayes of god and all professours for Gods sake; wee shall shame the faces of many of gods worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into Cursses upon us till wee be consumed out of the good land whether wee are going…
See that? The new order of New England shall not only be a candle on a stand rather than under a bushel (basket) – but if they were to screw up “wee shall shame the faces of many of gods worthy servants.” That is a heavy burden but one that acts as a prophesy, reaching to today from 381 years ago. What was the way to avoid having “prayers to be turned into Cursses upon us”? Worship of those other gods, pleasures and profits. And also failing to make “others Condicions our owne rejoyce together, mourne together, labour, and suffer together, allwayes haveing before our eyes our Commission and Community in the worke.” Pinkos! I see Pinkos! Pinkos like me!
Next time you hear about how American was founded on faith, you may want to agree in part and note that what sort of Christian by which it was founded.
I knew this. I think I knew this anyway:
“This process is much like how you would do in a fourth-grade germination science project, where the grains would be soaked in water for about 24 hours, drained and then laid between sheets of cloth until they sprouted,” said Amanda Mummert, an anthropology graduate student helping Armelagos with his research. After germination, the grains were dried and then milled into a flour used to make bread. Streptomyces bacteria most likely entered the beer-making process either during the storage or drying of the grain or when the bread dough was left to rise. Nubian brewers would take the dough and bake it until it developed a tough crust, but retained an almost raw center. The bread was broken into a vat containing tea made from the unmilled grains. The mixture was then fermented, turning it into beer. The final product didn’t look much like the pint of amber you sip at your local watering hole. “When we talk about this ancient Egyptian beer, we’re not talking about Pabst Blue Ribbon,” Armelagos said. “What we’re talking about is a kind of cereal gruel.”
I knew that. Not that bacteria stuff. No, not that. Forget all that medical properties stuff. Look at that word “gruel”! I think there was reference to the thickness of 1500s gruel beer back in Martyn’s Beer: The Story of The Pint which I am surprised to now read that I blogged about seven and a half years ago. There is stuff in Hornsey about beer as gruel as well. Boozy porridge. So, how is it when we are presented with these supposedly authentic ancient beers, well, they pours like water or least an IPA?
More to the point, don’t you want to try some breakfast gruel beer? Couldn’t we make it like it was enjoyed back then? Not the contemporary southern African version for 12 to 20 but the big vat whole dang community serving sized pot o’ Quaker Oats meets Budweiser. If we look again at “Village Kermis With Theater and Procession” by Pieter Bruegel the Younger (discussed in in 2007 in terms of the pub game in the lower left) we see in the lower center the making of a big mess of something being sucked back by the crowd, right across the street from the joint I’d guess was the tavern. Have a look at the painting Bruegel maybe ripped off and the detail is even better. I am not suggesting we need to get all deep about this stuff but does anyone do a village kermis with gruel booze anymore – other than, say, in rural Romanian where I am pretty sure I will never find myself? Would people folk to such a legitimate recreation as much as for another thinly veiled faux stab at brand buffing? Apparently the children’s games scholars are already at it.
Big news out of Lyme Regis in Dorset, England as they are reviving or at least reinterpreting a festival that ended back in 1610.
The ale will be in full flow at Lyme Regis when the town hosts its first beer festival in 400 years. A festival called The Cobb Ale started in Lyme in the 14th century and lasted for around 250 years. The annual knees-up was held to raise money for the maintenance of the Cobb but it was stopped around 1610 by the Puritans. Now three local brewers, the Mighty Hop Brewery and Town Mill Brewery, both in Lyme Regis, and North Chideock’s Art Brew, will revive the tradition for a one-day festival in March.
Friggin’ Puritans. They ruin all the fun. But there is fun – real fun – to be had and it is not some phony baloney made up thing. You know that’s true because the Victorians wrote about it. That clip way up above is from the 1856 books called The Social History of The People of the Southern Counties by George Roberts who spends twenty pages or so – from 327 to 346 or so – on the history of the Cobb Ale festival. It is great stuff.
OK, it may be an utter lie as might be the renewal but it is very entertaining. Martyn and other cleverer folk than me know more about this stuff but the very idea that something celebrating 1376 could be celebrated still is very appealing to me. I might take it so far that, for me, the distinction between “ale” as festival and “ale” as the juice that makes the community festive described by both Martyn and George above escapes me a bit in the light of the knowledge that they who celebrated knew the resonance of one meaning to the other. It’s a bit like “party” as both noun and verb in the sense that one parties at the party. Having an ale at an ale must have been all quite affirming.
Ever since I opened my copy of Julia Robert’s In Mixed Company, a history of the taverns of Upper Canada from the 1780s to the 1850s, I have wondered how many of our Upper Canadian pioneer taverns there might be left out there. Well, I passed one today – the Fryfogel Tavern – and thought I would get out of the car and have a look around.
Fryfogel’s Tavern, more graciously called an inn on the official road side sign, has sat by the road between Kitchener and Goderich for 166 years, though it has not apparently acted as a tavern for most of that time. You will recall from last summer’s posts on Ontario’s history that the land to the west of Lake Ontario starts opening up and breweries start opening up in the 1820s and 30s. The Canada Company’s plan of settlement of the area is discussed here and the way of life at the time of 1830s settlement of the district can be found in this letter from an original settler, John Stewart. Each source mentions Mr Fryfogle or Fryfogel when his tavern was a log cabin. Roberts indicates that the later 1840s form of the tavern is in the Georgian style and that this was the template for taverns for much of the pre-Confederation period:
The Georgian style worked well to project an image of prosperity and comfort, particularly in the practical sense that it enabled different activities to go on in the house at the same time.
Owned by the county’s historical foundation, it well kept but something of a shame that it is not in use though that seems to be in the plans. Next to it to the west sits the site of the 1828 cabin that preceded it as the home of the family. To the east runs Tavern Brook. The original owners are buried across the road.
Mark Dredge has a piece in this morning’s Guardian out of the UK entitled “The Beer of Yesteryear” which scans the range of recent brewing efforts to recreate beers older than, say, 500 years ago. These are beers which use ingredients available to former culture including Theorbrama by Dogfish Head. I had one on hand and thought I would see if it has any appeal. Mark tells me:
Theobroma, part of Dogfish’s Ancient Ale series, is based on “chemical analysis of pottery fragments found in Honduras which revealed the earliest known alcoholic chocolate drink used by early civilizations to toast special occasions.” It contains Aztec cocoa powder and cocoa nibs, honey, chillies and annatto.
The bottle adds that it is based on chemical residual evidence from before 1100 BC with additives from later Mayan and Aztec drinks. So, seeing as the Aztecs come from about 1300 to 1600 AD, it is sort of a made up mish mash. Its as much a traditional drink as one from, say, that one Eurotrash era that stretched from the Dark Ages of around 800 AD to the world of George Jetson in the year 2537 AD. That would be an excellent era… right?
Well, as a beer it is a bit of a disappointment as well. Booze overwhelms pale malt which is undercut by the exotic herbs all of which has an oddly “beechwood aged” tone to it. I get the cocoa. I get the honey. But I don’t care all that much. It leaves me disappointed like that imperial pilsner experiment of Dogfish Head’s in 2006. Only moderate respect from the BAers. A bit of a boring beer that may be the result of a fantastically interesting bit of archeological work. Who knows? Maybe the sense of taste of those Central American practitioners of human sacrifice wasn’t as haute as one might have expected. Or maybe it paired well.
I have found myself wondering what the heck I am doing with all this Albany Ale stuff but I’m not too concerned. It is interesting in itself and I think it is informing me on a pretty interesting big picture question – what makes the Albany and the Hudson River so different from the St. Lawrence Valley, my river. You will recall that during Ontario Craft Beer week this past June, I wrote a number of posts on the development of Ontario after the American Revolution but it is important to remember that, like the Dutch in the Hudson, the upper St. Lawrence also had a 1600s existence when it was all New France.
The big question I have is why did Albany create this export trade while my city did not? There are some basic answers around the odd semi-autonomous existence of early Albany while Kingston has been firmly tied to its Empires. Also, there is simple geography with Albany being a deep water seaport while Kingston has always sat behind rapids and locks. Difference makes sense. But is that it? Looking more closely, there are the details. And details can get obsessive with a range of ways to get at them:
So, there is a lot there – a lot for anyone in any town to use to figure out the path of their local brewing trade. And there are a lot of other people hunting as well. Me, I have no idea what I will learn about Albany or Kingston or beer or anything else. But it is worth the hunt. And why not? Weren’t we all supposed to be citizen journalists, historians and novelists? Isn’t that the promise of the internet or is it really more like that personal jet pack we were all supposed to have by now? I think you might all want to get all be scratching around a bit – even if not as obsessively as others.
Anyone interested in beer in Canada – or even colonial North America – really ought to have this book on the shelf. 2009’s In Mixed Company: Taverns and Public Life in Upper Canada is a series of essays on topics related to the structure, regulation and use of taverns in what later became Ontario but what was called Upper Canada during the era in question. Covering roughly 1790 to 1860, Roberts describes a certain sort of drinking and socializing experience, showing where the lines of class, race and gender existed and also showing how some of those lines were far fuzzier than we might presume.
Be warned: this is an academic text. There are 169 pages of essay and 48 pages of endnotes and bibliography. But like Hornsey or, say, Xhosa Beer Drinking Rituals, it would really do you all a bit of good to get some proper reading in. You’d learn things like the first wave of taverns built after the creation of the colony in 1791 were owned by the government, run by tenants as part of the necessary roads and communications infrastructure. Until the development of more exclusive principle taverns and then hotels in the larger centres, taverns provided space where different backgrounds met and interacted, where people in transit or transistion lived, where business and political debate was conducted. You’ll see how Upper Canadians saw themselves as different from what they called Yankees and, as the late Georgian became the early Victorian, how they developed internal divisions to distinguish themselves one from another
I have been fumbling around unsuccessfully for a reference from Nova Scotia confirming the meaning of “tavern” as a late 18th century offering wine, tea and other proper fare – a great change from my late 1900s use as a beer hall. As the author points out, during this era and in this place, the tavern was a licensed facility, regulated by law, providing civic purpose. It was subject to social and legal rules but offered a location for every thing from the holding of court to the holding of cockfighting. And, while there is no real focus on the drinks consumed, there is interesting information including how hard spirits appear to be quite popular including punches and what we would now see as simple cocktails, including gin slings.
Robert’s style is precise and dense but quite enjoyable – especially given the fairly brief length of the interrelated essays forming the seven chapters of the book. Her observations and conclusions are interesting and well supported both in terms of argument and endnote. The most interesting portions for me were the chapters focusing on diaries, one kept by a tavern keeper in what was then York around 1801 and another on excerpts from one kept a regular tavern goer in my city of Kingston in the early 1840s. The comparison of the earlier period when the colony had a population of 34,600 and 108 licensed taverns to the 1840s when there were over 400,000 more Upper Canadians and 1,446 taverns provides illustration of the growing complexity as well as development of peace in a colony that was born of and suffered threat of war from the south regularly until the mid-century.
This era covered in this book is largely just after the era I wrote about in my Ontario Craft week posts on Kingston and its roots in New York state. It is an important era given that it is when this newly formed part of than British North America distinguishes itself in its controlled settlement patterns from the rougher experience in the United States. By placing us in that era, illustrating its social and civic centres, Roberts provides us with a useful context for understanding even at this distance of years.
I came across this reference to the malting of wheat in a 1869 series of essays and reports called The Annals of Albany. Apparently one Peter Kalm, a professor from a Swedish university, visited North America from 1748 to 1750 making some sort of economic and natural resources survey. He made these notes on 15 June 1749:
They sow wheat in the neighborhood of Albany, with great advantage. From one bushel they get twelve sometimes : if the soil be good, they get twenty bushels. If their crop amounts only to ten bushels from one, they think it very trifling. The inhabitants of the country round Albany are Dutch and Germans. The Germans live in several great villages, and sow great quantities of wheat, which is brought to Albany : and from thence they send many yachts laden with flour to New York. The wheat flour from Albany is reckoned the best in all North America, except that from Sopus or Kingston, a place between Albany and New York. All the bread in Albany is made of wheat. At New York they pay the Albany flour with several shillings more per hundred weight, than that from other places. Rye is likewise sown here, but not so generally as wheat. They do not sow much barley here, because they do not reckon the profits very great. Wheat is so plentiful that they make malt of it. In the neighborhood of New York, I saw great fields sown with barley. They do not sow more oats than are necessary for their horses.
This passage was referenced in an earlier quotation I included in an Albany ale post back in April and cropped in June but it has me thinking. If they aren’t even growing barley and are malting wheat in 1749, then it is likely the strong ale that Sir William Johnson of the Mohawk Valley, west of Albany, was drinking from 1750 maybe to his death in 1774 was a wheat beer. But by 1835, the brewers of the area responding to a set of questions posed by the New York State Senate all respond by saying that they use pure ingredients including barley malt. I don’t catch any reference to wheat malt. The use of barley by this point is corroborated by this quotation from 1827.
So – am I slowly, clumsily chasing two Albany Ales? A strong wheat ale made by the Dutch up to the latter 1700s and then a strong barley ale in the early 1800s?
