The Time Traveling Brewer Has Some Advice

Thanks for the fun question, John! I am pretty sure whatever I suggest will be impossible to verify, so let’s go back to the year 1569, 400 years before my birth year, somewhere in the vicinity of Bamberg, Germany. There were plenty of breweries in that part of the world brewing with ingredients that will hopefully be familiar once I exit my time machine.

The first task on my hypothetical to-do list is to find a local watering hole, preferably one with a great beer list, to wet my whistle and to shine some light on how beer back then actually tasted. Best plan is to stroll the streets smelling for signs of a brewery . . . wort, spent grains, and that great smell of open fermentation will hopefully lead my nose to brewing. I will need to determine how many of my modern assumptions about beer from 1569 are accurate. My top three assumptions are:

• All beers will likely taste contaminated to my modern palate.
• All beers are likely to contain very little dissolved carbon dioxide and will be perceived as flat by modern standards.
• All beers will be much darker than the modern norm and will probably have a smoky flavor associated with what was used to dry the malt.

I like your rules because I have to use their ingredients and brewing equipment. Otherwise it would be too tempting to consider introducing modern knowledge related to raw materials and the brewing process, and that process is not the fastest route to a winning beer. So here is how I would address the assumptions above almost immediately.

My most important tool is myself: Eyes, nose, and mouth. Let’s just assume that I determine, after a careful evaluation of at least 20 different beers, that contamination is rampant, beers are generally flat, and all of the beers I have tasted seem to be some sort of brown beer that has an obvious, but not objectionable, smoky character. On a positive note, I assume beers from the past must have tasted decent enough to drink because beer was pretty darn popular and the alcohol content was probably high enough that folks were not drinking foul-tasting beer. My strategy is to befriend one of the better brewers in the area, and avoid being killed by not talking about really weird things like yeast, bacteria, stainless steel, process control, cans, and fruited Russian imperial stouts.

As far as the brewing challenge, I will certainly take advantage of my knowledge of sterilization using hot water. Although I have no idea of how wort and beer were moved around in 1569, sterilizing something is probably going to get me closer to my goal of brewing great beer. I figure I can sneak this modern knowledge in the brewery under the guise of some regional practice from my town without breaking the news about yeast being the invisible life force that converts wort into beer.

I’m also going to add some bubbles to my brew by accidentally adding honey to the beer when filling into the barrel. Scheisse! I cannot use honey because of the Reinheitsgebot. No worries, I will accidentally add a bit of fermenting beer to the barrel and hope the braumeister doesn’t fire me before I can taste some of my awesome beer. Definitely should hide this barrel somewhere in a dark corner of the cellar and only share with vagabonds and heretics. 

One thing to know about barrels is that they have been used for thousands of years and probably were not too shabby in 1569. But even today, no sane brewer is going to fully carbonate beer in any old wooden barrel. My plan is to use my modern knowledge of cask/bottle conditioning to add just a bit of carbon dioxide. For this project, I will use a small barrel and pour the beer using a wooden tap. If this sounds like British cask ale, that’s exactly what I am thinking, complete with tight fitting bungs, shives, and hard and soft spiles. Hydrometers don’t exist in 1569 and I plan on using my knowledge of water density to estimate wort original gravity (OG) using a balance. Trust me, I got this! Knowing wort OG allows me to estimate the volume of priming wort to add to the cask.

The last hurdle is going to be finding a yeast that’s up for the task. I may be wrong about this part, but I am going to assume that there must be some brewer in the area who has a decent yeast stored on a magic stick that I can use. Another assumption is that the magic stick may also contain some level of spoilage critters. My plan is to sour my beer using malt as the source of lactic acid bacteria. We know in the modern world that malt is a good source of Lactobacillus brevis; things were probably not
so different 452 years ago. Sour wort has a low enough pH to keep many spoilage bugs at bay and I am hoping this works to help produce a cleaner flavor.

Breweries of this time did boil wort, so I think I am going to do a kettle sour by starting a brew on Friday that somehow gets delayed and ends up sitting in the kettle over the weekend. I’ll need a ruse. Maybe plan this while the braumeister is away for a big beer fest over in Nuremberg. This will take a little planning. After the kettle sour is complete, boiling is finished, and wort is cooled, I will use the magic stick to inoculate the low pH wort with yeast along with some funk that I am hoping will be stymied by the low pH environment.

I’m not looking to rock the world here as some sort of time traveler from a Hollywood brewery. I just want to sneak in a couple modern tricks under the cloak of being a clumsy new brewer and hope to open some eyes.

Now that my short and imaginary journey is complete, I am wondering if this information has any use to our BYO readership. And I think it does. When in doubt, always remember that hot water is a super-effective sanitizer. Just exercise caution when using it. Bottle conditioning is a great method to boost beer carbonation, is simple, and the beer math is easy (not covered in my revery). One volume of carbonation is equal to 2 grams of carbon dioxide per liter of beer, and 4 grams of sugar yields right about 2 grams of carbon dioxide when fermented. Knowing your beer volume and how to ballpark brewing calculations is brewing gold. Once basic beer math is learned, a brewer does not forget. And finally, wort pH can be effectively used to weed out beer spoilers. Those are my basic tools and I am sticking to them, in 1569 or now! 

Response by Ashton Lewis.