Brewday : Townhouse Ale

After reading Country Wines by Mary Aylett (published 1953) that I received as a gift from my Amazon Wish list. I just had to give this simple beer recipe a go. I've called it Townhouse ale due to the fact that in the book it describes how malted barley was unavailable to town dweller, but they could get hold of pure extract of malt from a well-known (at the time) chemists, where it was sold strictly as a health food.

The recipe in the book is as follows:

For two gallons, take two pounds of malt, three handfuls of hops, or less if the beer is wanted mild, and one pound of sugar.

Bring one gallon of water to a temperature of about 60 deg. Fahrenheit and dissolve in it the malt. When it is well mixed put into it the sugar and stir the mixture until all is melted together, and pour the brew into a two-gallon stone jar. Put the hops into a saucepan with two pints of water and boil for about ten minutes, then strain into the cask. Repeat this twice more, using the same hops each time, to extract from them their full flavour. Make up the amount in the cask with cold water. When the wort is at the usual blood-heat add a teaspoonful of brewer's yeast, cover closely and stand in a warm kitchen. Fermentation will begin almost at once and the beer will be drinkable in forty-eight hours. In a week the beer will have a fine "head" and will be quite clear.

If it is necessary to keep the beer, it can be bottled off into ordinary beer bottles and the corks well screwed down. If a pound of honey is added to the wort the finished article will resemble strong ale.

I have tried to keep as true to the the text as possible by sourcing the malt extract from a health-food shop. However I do not own a two-gallon stone jar, so my plastic fermenting bin has taken it's place. The sugar used is Billington's Light Brown soft. Only because that is what I had in the cupboard at the time.

For the hops I should have used a traditional English hop like Fuggles or Goldings, but I have used Chinnook 12.5% AA only because I have loads of 2011 season leaf hops that need to be used in the bottom of the freezer, as they are quite high in Alpha Acid I used two large handfuls.

As the recipe states, if I add a pound of honey to the wort then I'd get a strong Ale so that's what I have done, just using a normal jar of supermarket honey.

For the yeast. I don't know how or where the brewers yeast would have been acquired. So I've used a Ale yeast that I had at hand. Mauribrew 514 Ale Yeast and used only half of the packet sprinkled direct onto the top of the wort. Not the yeast that is in the picture, that one's a Youngs Ale yeast.

The Gravity of this brew is starting out at 1064 and looks as though it'll make around about 18 x 500ml bottles worth and the yeast has already set to work, fizzing away lovely.