I am unsure what defines "original" but I can report that the 1853 version was 6% ABV and in contrast the 2025 version is 7.9% ABV. A marked difference right there. Prost!
Was hoping the OP beer was going to be an interpretation of an old English blended porter. Only brewery I recall that made one is New Glarus. Huge bucket beer for me.
FTFY. I kid I kid. As for why some styles faded and died, it’s probably a mixed bag of taste preferences, costs, knowledge, ingredients, yada yada yada. What may have once become unfashionable may come around again. To the original question, yes, being experience motivated, I am interested in trying extinct styles. They interest me even if we can never truly know how closely a modern replication will be to the original, after-all, consider the range within modern styles. As someone who loves Farmhouse styles and rustic life in general, I recommend the book too.
I think I do Jack. And hats off to ya for home brewing and giving these old Historical brews a go! This Friday I will play music in the Biergarten at Waldmann Brewing here in Saint Paul, MN. Talk about history...WOW. To the point, their beers are few and true to "old Germanic beer styles". They don't bother with anything else. When I'm finished with my drumming job there I'll post some pics of Märzen, Festbier, and Pilsner. I'll be there early enuf that I should be able to grab a few crowlers. You'd love the territorial setting, vibe and of course their trad beers.
What information are you basing that on? The attenuation difference is the bigger story. With lower than 50% attenuation, the older beer probably wouldn't be recognizable to today's drinker. I guess people have become so accustomed to craft beer that they can forget how much of the entire movement was a desire to look backwards into history, a revival of dying practices, and a rejection of what beer evolved into. It was a dismissal of "maybe they're not so good tasting and died for a reason."
Agreed. Looking backwards was certainly part of craft. Most of the time, not just for the sake of looking back, but for the sake of gaining a foothold on what beer was before the AAL took over. I think that establishing a good foundation allowed American craft beer to become a thing unto itself, irrespective of the historical underpinnings that it was founded upon.
If you have a time machine you can go into the past and drink a Pretty Little Things version of an 1855 East India Porter: https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/18371/68662/?ba=glib But if you don’t own a time machine, you could homebrew your own 1855 East India Porter. Use the below recipe as a ‘baseline’ but incorporate the ‘tweaks’ provided by Ron in the comments section: https://www.beertools.com/library/recipe.php?view=11551 Cheers!
4 lbs Pearl Pale Ale Malt; Thomas Fawcet 5 lbs Ashburne® Mild Malt; Briess 2.75 lbs Brown Malt; Thomas Fawcett .5 lbs Amber Malt; Thomas Fawcett .125 lbs Roast Barley; Crisp Single infusion mash at 153F for 2 hours 2.5 hour boil with: 3 oz East Kent Goldings - 5.0 AA% pellets; boiled 90 min 2 oz Spalt Spalter - 4.8 AA% pellets; boiled 15 min 1 oz Spalt Spalter - 4.8 AA% pellets; boiled 1 min Wyeast 1098 British Ale™ Shut up about Barclay Perkins: Let's Brew Wednesday - 1840 Truman Export Stout The above is sort of the recipe without the tweaks mentioned. Interesting grain bill. Even without the 1.25% Black Malt and/or all EKG, that Ron mentions. Maybe we could convince someone in the Homebrew Forum to brew it, if you weren't up for it Jack? I'd volunteer, but I no longer have the time to brew and haven't for the past 5 or 6 years, so I'm out of practice.
So, would anyone be in on this little project? Homebrewing a Historical Ale | Community | BeerAdvocate
OK then, what styles, in the modern craft beer world, do you consider to be complex? I'd guess that the most complicated beers to make are the mass-market AALs. To produce them in multiple factories, by many hands, and have them be that consistent, and consistently pleasing to the folks who like them, is a much more complex task than throwing another couple pop-open tubes of cinnamon rolls into a tank of sugary stout.
For accuracy, I meant "beers being produced by today's brewers" not "beers that originated recently". My favorite complex styles would be: Non-BA Imperial Stout/Porter, Non-BA Barleywine/Old Ale, Gueuze, Oud Bruin, Flanders Red, 100% Brettanomyces beers, Abbey style Quad, Tripel, Dubbel, West Coast IPA/DIPA, Bockbier, Weissbier. There are others, but you get my drift. There are A LOT of beers out there that are not Milkshake IPAs, Pastry Stouts, or Smoothie Sours. I would agree on the fact that the consistency that it takes to make these beers is very complex, but I would not describe the end product or the recipe as a complex one. I feel you. My disdain for these types of beers is approaching, if not equal to, yours.
I do fairly regularly homebrew a Porter but it is a ‘modern’ Porter: my version of Hill Farmstead Everett. I was able to obtain a growler of Hill Farmstead Everett back in 2016 and I conducted a side-by-side tasting of my homebrewed version to the commercially brewed version and I got pretty close: “So, it is now time for the big reveal!! My wife informed me that A = my homebrewed Robust Porter and obviously B is the Hill Farmstead Everett. So, I did not 100% replicate Everett but I would suggest that I got 95% ‘there’ which is as good as I am ever likely going to get with cloning a beer. One thing I know with 100% certitude is that I did not brew with the same yeast strain as Shaun Hill since he uses a ‘house’ yeast. Also I know that I did not use the same brewing water. How closely I came to replicating the grain bill….?” https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/new-beer-sunday-week-580.402889/#post-4657907 My last batch of homebrewed Porter was bottled in December 2024 and I still have a half-case of those beers left. Still drinking very nicely with a tiny bit of complexity from extended cellaring. Best of luck with your effort to get somebody in the Homebrewing forum interested in your project. The Homebrewing forum has been quite lackluster these past few years. Maybe your thread will provide some inspiration? Cheers!
I enjoy finding an older style, doing a little research, and trying it. Gruits come to mind. I also enjoy trying modern beers that take a shot at older and/or regional approaches. Spruce tips are very interesting in IPAs
Really enjoy gruit. Especially if they are on the sour/funky side. Just seems like that would be more "traditional". x2 on this. I know Alaskan, Shorts, and either Twisted Pine or Boulder (I believe) have done them. Loved all of them.
In the past I have homebrewed a couple of batches of a Spruce beer, an APA with the freshly picked spruce tips added at the end of boil and an extended steep. I wrote an article about brewing with spruce and a recipe provided for my Spruce Tip APA. An extract from that article with 'speculation' about brewing history: "As the World Turns We have all learned about how Europeans have colonized the New World. We learned the poem of “In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-Two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”. So, the Spanish were the first to colonize the Americas. Next came the French and the English. The first English settlement was Jamestown in 1607 but for us homebrewers the more noteworthy settlement was when the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. They were intending to travel onwards but something ‘bad’ happened: they ran out of beer onboard ship! The infamous quote of: “For we could not now take time for further search our victuals being pretty much spent especially our beer.” – William Bradford. And then the Dutch came and in 1626 they built Fort Amsterdam in present day Manhattan; this was the beginning of the colony of New Netherlands. Who came next? If you guessed the Swedes you win a Gold Star. Sweden in the 1600’s was an expanding empire and part of that empire was present day Finland. One of the things the Swedes/Finns had in common with the English is that they enjoyed drinking beer too. Why not, since beer is good! The colony of New Sweden was started in 1638 and eventually it came to cover portions of modern day Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware along the Delaware River. This was just 18 years after the landing of the Mayflower. The Finns that were part of the New Sweden settlers would be familiar with an ancient beer style called Sahti. Sahti is brewed using Juniper branches with berries. Maybe the Finns viewed the native Spruce trees as another evergreen tree useful for brewing beer?" Cheers!
I love it....as a matter of fact I had a porter from The Kernel this summer that was a recreation of an 1864 recipe.
Given that bacterial contamination was rampant back in the day, especially when brewers were aging a batch of beer(porter for example) then blending it with a batch of fresh beer, that's a good analogy. Sourness was the norm.
