Thursday 17 September 2009

Windsor Ale Brewing 19 Quarters

Here's yet another recipe from the handwritten notebook. Windsor Ale this time. Again, it includes some dodgy ingredients.

The question marks represent a symbol I couldn't recognise. Seems to be a measure of some sort. Any suggestions as to its meaning are welcome.


Windsor Ale Brewing 19 Quarters

Malts

19 quarters of white Ware


Hops

170 pound of new pale Kent
Boil the hops in a close nett

Turn over 3 liquors and 2 worts.

First wort boil half an hour.
Second wort boil four hours.
Use in the first wort in the copper @ boiling six pounds of hartshorne shavings, 10 pounds of new honey and one pound of salt.

First liquor over @180 degrees 33 barrels of liquor over.
Second liquor over @196 degrees 28 barrels of liquor over.
Third liquor over @160 degrees 30 barrels of liquor over.

Lett the worts down into the square to ferment @60 degrees with 4 scoopes of yeast.

Scim the head clean of and use in the square ? flour 1 ? salt and 1 ? ground carraway seeds & 1 pound of ground coriander seed well roused.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This man is very insistent upon his Ware malts, isn't he? It might give a clue to who he really was. He could well have been a Ware maltster, even a Ware brewer, who regarded part of his job was to offer advice to start-up or home brewers. Large volumes, though, for either.

Being in the Courage archive, which was in Stains when I visited it, it could originated from any of the acquisitions that formed the Courage empire, which also included malt-houses, from the south coast to Yorkshire.

I will really have to find out what White Ware really was. A visit to either Ware or Hertford library should answer many of my questions. I can't see me coming away from there without learning something.

It will have to be better than our new Wycombe library though, which is a £5,600,000 disgrace. You wouldn't find out much about our local industry, chair-making, unless it happens to be published by Mills and Boon or written by Terry Pratchet.

The mysterious symbols have to be pounds. There is no reason why the quantities should be any different to the 20-quarter recipe you published previously, and the numbers are the same anyway.

Gary Gillman said...

Well, this may assist somewhat, it is an 1808 report on malt manufacture methods in Hertfordshire vs. in the west of England. The comments on flavour of malt are very interesting, as are his comments on "ale". Some ale was not sweet he says because that is what the local citizenry liked. He states there was a range of tastes depending on the locality.

He seems to put pale malt (or "common" he calls it alternatively) at one end of the spectrum and porter malt at the other, with gradations between deriving from two things: the intensity of kilning and its duration. Makes sense.

http://books.google.com/books?id=-fcKAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA229&dq=Hertfordshire+malt&lr=#v=onepage&q=Hertfordshire%20malt&f=false

Gary

Graham said...

Dunno how I got up there as Anonymous, but it was little old me.

Just in case there is any confusion in what I have posted, the original book states 4 squiggles of flour. The 4 has been omitted in the transcript.

I meant that the Courage archive was in Staines, not stains, that's what comes of placing too much trust in spell checkers.

Anonymous said...

Working my way from both ends of the blog, the sign seems to be "pound weight": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign
Just stumbled across that wikipedia entry a couple of months ago. My memory still seems to work every once in a while... Cheers, Sebastian