Cliff wrote:crawfow wrote: How could one come up with a recipe to replicate this historical brew?
Easy. Just get yourself some acorns, toast 'em in the oven, grind them into a grainy flour and mix that into your Tun with the malt.
Then starch test test for conversion.
Ya might do a test run with some cheap 2 row just to see if the enzymes will convert the chestnut starches.
You might want to experiment with protein rests too because they are so very dense with protein.
The "beer" they brewed may not have been beer at all though.
The word beer gets used for pretty much any alcoholic drink that can't be labeled wine because of some effete sensibility about what wine is - or isn't.
It might have been like prison hooch or potato booze or whatever. They might have used a baker's yeast to ferment for the alcohol and then just strained it.
I tend to agree with the last part more. If you wanted to brew an authentic, historic example, I think you would have to lose the malt. They didn't have it and that's why they turned to acorns. That's why they used pumpkins. That's why the native Americans used corn.
