Ladies and Gents,
I was thinking that for the upcoming July 4th weekday it could be interesting to celebrate the founding our of country in the best way we can, through beer. Given that most of the founding fathers were brewers, I think it would be interesting to try and take one (or more!) of their old recipes and try and brew it. Granted we don't have the wood barrels and equipment they may have used:
but I'm willing to bet we can adapt some of our current newfangled techniques to get close. Anyone else interested in doing some research this week, getting ingredients and trying to make an approximation of a real colonial beer and maybe a cider on Wed. the 4th? We could even make this a mini-event and grill some meat, make some food, and have a chill day brewing outside while trying something a little different. Thoughts?
To help get the mental facilities going, here's a few links I found after having this idea last night.
- http://www.beerhistory.com/library/holdings/washingtonrecipe.shtml (obviously... 30 gallons would be a bit much)
- http://books.google.com/books?id=X2lHAAAAYAAJ&dq=beer%20brewing&pg=PR1#v=onepage&q=beer%20brewing&f=false
- http://www.benfranklin300.org/etc_article_ale.htm
- http://historiccamdencounty.com/ccnews117.shtml
- http://www.byo.com/stories/article/indices/17-brewing-history/482-colonial-ale
- http://wildhighlandersbrewingblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/brewing-american-historically-inspired.html
