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Comment by Neliquat | Hacker News Reader

As a home brewer, any of these styles, even 10% or higher is easily accomplished by any seasoned brewmaster. And for the quantity of beer brewed, and number of breweries, there must have been many. I must say that I cannot agree with the authors conclusion surrounding strong beer, as I have one in my fridge, made with barley and rye in the old way at 10.7 as determened by hydrometer. It kicks like a mule but is very drinkable.

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10% is easy with modern equipment and yeast, but remember that pure yeast strains didn't exist until Emil Hansen isolated one at the Carlsberg Laboratory in 1883 [1]. In Early Modern times people used whatever yeast happened to grow locally, saved between batches as "barm" (flocculated yeast). Selection pressure with this propagation technique is primarily for flocculation ability, and it produces strains much more flocculant than wild strains. These strains have lower attenuation because they drop out of suspension before all the sugar is fermented. Try reaching 10% ABV with a traditional English strain like Fermentis Safale S-04 - it's pretty much impossible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Christian_Hansen

Despite what Fermentis claims, I don't think S-04 is that "traditional." It's a beast of a yeast and it will keep going and going. 10% is pushing the upper end of its range, but more because of the limited alcohol tolerance of the yeast than because of anything else.

It makes sense if you consider where it came from-- it was supposedly used in the tower fermenters of the old Whitbread brewery. Where the most important thing was a cockaroach-like ability to survive and keep fermenting no matter what, as new wort was fed into one end of the system and fermented beer came out the other end.

I don't like s-04 because it throws lactic acid, which tastes like someone squeezed a lemon into the beer. Not what I want in an English ale.

If you want traditional, go with something like Danstar Winsor. But be warned, the yeast can't ferment maltotriose, and it struggles with gravities above 1.040.

As to what early moderns did-- well, they could have just put sugar in the wort if they wanted to push up the ABV. I guess that wouldn't apply back in the middle ages though (not sure what you are considering early modern).

I was told by a biologist that old houses were full of airborne yeast (saccarome cervisirae) which origins where the «Chaumes» roof. [confirmed by a link in the paperspace]

https://books.google.fr/books?id=GcqQCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT68&lpg=PT...

made with barley and rye in the old way

I'm assuming you're adding brewers yeast as well. My understanding is that beers made in this period where brewed purely with natural fermentation, making it much harder to reach these higher strength.

It really depends. For example, take lambic beer production. This is a spontaneously fermented beer from Pajottenland, near Brussels. You can easily hit 8-9% alcohol.

The key is that the microflora that innoculates the wort was living in the barrels. When you had a "good" barrel, you would keep brewing in it. When the barrel went "bad" you would destroy it and burn it. The entire brewery would be a source of yeast and in some breweries it was considered very bad form to clean. Even today, there are some Belgian breweries where you can get fired if you kill a spider (the spiders catch fruit flies that can bring in wort spoiling bacteria). Once you had a good, stable population of yeast/bacteria you could maintain it simply by overwhelming other beasties. When I first started homebrewing, I didn't know that much and I must have gone nearly 10 years without ever disinfecting anything. I had a definite "house flavour" in my beer, but it was far from bad.

Anyway, these days, in order to get up to 10% (or higher) alcohol level, you will go with a single strain with high alcohol tolerance. But there are several traditional multi-strain cultures that do a very good job and have a very interesting flavour profile. Quite frequently you'll have one strain that ferments quickly and drops out fast with a second one that is "powdery" and hangs in suspension for months. Finally you will have a "chaining" yeast that will drag the "powdery" yeast out of suspension. You end up with having most of the flavour profile of the first yeast, while the powdery yeast will bring the terminal gravity down and the last yeast will brighten the beer. Some really famous yeast cultures (like Worthington Whiteshield) are composed of 5 or more strains working in concert. It is truly amazing what people accomplished just with selective techniques.

Having said that, some styles that are currently quite high alcohol were traditionally much sweeter. Bock styles were drunk by monks during lent. These beers had to be sweet enough to sustain them, because they ate nothing else during that period. A friend of mine who did quite a lot of research in the area (because he wanted to do the same thing... :-P) reckoned that historical bocks were probably only 3-4% alcohol.

It's not even this hard to make high APV beer. Make 5% APV. Feeze it and remove half the water. Blameo, 10% APV.

That is a fair point. In the United States, people used to make "apple jack" out of apple cider that way. It's essentially freeze distillation.

But be warned! Don't do this, because it concentrates the methanol and other conjoiners. Remember, distillation bad, brewing good... unless you really know what you're doing and are legally allowed to do it...

Yep. There's a traditional style of beer called eisbock: http://brewwiki.com/index.php/Eisbock

Freezing things wasn't that easy either until recently.

You leave it out in the snow.

Kind of. All our cultured yeasts were once wild. Brewers cultivate their own yeast or use others. The most common way is to keep some after an especially good batch, and use it until it 'ages' and enough generations of yeast have passed to change the flavor. I actually brewed my second beer this way, saving the yeast from a bottle fermented chimay.

While I agree with you, people would often water down their beer and liquor, so the brewed strength is not necessarily what people drank.

True, but not likely with beer except in the case of rations from what I understand. Its not quite like watering down wine or rum.

Supposedly in the old British Royal Navy, watering down the daily rum ration was a common punishment for minor infractions. The offending sailor still received the same quantity of rum, just with twice as much water added. I can't imagine what the captains thought they were accomplishing.

Well, the quality of the water (as well as provisions) on a ship starts declining drastically once you're at sea for an extended period. I can't imagine any sailor actually wanting to drink the water, except out of pure necessity.

Watering it down as a punishment doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. I have read that the rum ration was mixed with fruit juice both to extend the drink and likely to attempt to combat scurvy. This is where 'grog' comes from, which is rum mixed with fruit juice.

(Second reply of mine, sorry).

Apparently one reason high ABV alcohol was hard was because yeast started dying off after 7%. A better source than I can be: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14fvf8/comme...

While I can't vouch for the comment itself, I can vouch for the availability of people on that subreddit to ask similar questions and demand sourced answers.

The higher the abv, the higher the pressure on yeast, yes. But from what I can tell, at least by the time brewers were recording their recipes using hydrometers, beers up to around 10% were very possible.

For instance, Brew Your Own references some strong stout beers made in 1868 (recorded by a "G. Amsinck") here. (http://byo.com/bock/item/1623-when-stout-was-stout)

I plugged the OG (original specific gravity) and FG (final specific gravity) into a specific gravity to alcohol calculator, these are the results:

Dublin Stout: OG: 1.092, FG: 1.019 (ABV: 9.6%) Treble Stout: OG: 1.096, FG: 1.031 (ABV: 8.0%)

This is not typical -- the Dublin stout is more like a strong export style. Ray Daniels in "Designing Great Beers" provides both more references from G. Amsinck as well as a table derived from "The American Handy-Book of the Brewing Malting and Auxillary Trades" (1908). For more common "porter", the ranges was more typically, say OG: 1.06 FG: 1.02 (about 5% roughly).

Ray Daniels' book likewise references historical Scotch ales similarly. At the high end, massive Scotch ales were present in the nineteenth century (with OG in the 1.120 range, FG in the 1.050 range, and an ABV of 9%). Also more common Scotch ale too.

It is true that by modern standards many of these beers would be relatively sweet, not as fermented.

I personally would guess that even without pure cultures, if you used a fairly simple and probably even known technique back then -- make a big beer, and put that big beer on top of the yeast cake of a finished small beer -- 10% is pretty doable. (The 20+% some craft brewers can go for, however, is probably not. :) )

Hmm, I think time frame is at play here--I had forgotten the early modern constraint! Nonetheless this is a great resource for more reading--cheers!

Yeah... it's a pity (an understandable one in way) that I couldn't find more older more technical brewing books scanned online for quick reference. But at least some resources quote them. There's definitely a fair bit of older brewing books sitting in dusty corners of certain libraries that would be interesting to read. :)

This modern printing of a book from 1785 (https://www.amazon.com/Hydrometrical-observations-experiment...) for instance would've been interesting to view to get a perspective from a century earlier (at least for British porter). Unfortunately I can't find a digitized version online, but querying on that book led to this link, (https://books.google.com/books?id=GSTnBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT24&lpg=P...) does quote a 1784 porter at OG 1.071 FG 1.018 (about 7%). The full reference would probably be more helpful to determine a better picture of the historical range back then.

I believe the hydrometer only came into use in brewing science in the mid to late 1700s; before then, data definitely would've been a lot sketchier.

The author should try going to Belgium. In our recent trip to Brugge it was hard to find a beer under 10% and ones above that were common.

belgium is special. prohibition came to belgium in the form of a ban against hard liquor. strong beers came to fill the niche.

Plenty of Lambic family styles in Belgium that are under 10%, too. Just have to like sour beer :)

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