Brewing a 16th Century Ale with wild yeast (new: psychotropic effects of Yarrow Ale)

Juniper berry yeast is good stuff, you can make a really decent sourdough starter with it too.

Enjoy!

I began with making a syrup with a malt extract and brown sugar boiled for 30 minutes with yarrow and chamomile from my garden. When it was cooled, I added a tablespoon of juniper berries from a nearby tree. The juniper berries carried the yeast I wanted to culture.

I covered the jar with a coffee filter held with a rubber band.

Actually, I made three jars. One with juniper berries. The other two without. I placed one jar in the yarrow patch, one the chamomile, and the juniper berry jar in a dark warm place indoors.

I learned about catching an ale yeast from these guys: [link to www.homebrewtalk.com (secure)]

https://imgur.com/ywrVVYV

https://imgur.com/MZmrMsr

Hey, thanks! So I've heard. I already have a hearty sourdough starter going, but if it ever dies, I do plan to start over with some juniper berries! It's so cool how the yeasts we need are all around us!

After about a week of shaking the jars occasionally, all three developed good yeasts with different flavors. I decided to use the Juniper Berry yeast first.

The other two jars had holes in the coffee filters from curious birds and they also got rained on one night. I was amazed and delighted to find them still developing a foamy kraussen and a delicious flavor.

https://imgur.com/28Ih7Hv

After a week I added more brown sugar to the juniper berry yeast and shook it up.

Then I worked on making my wort.

Enter the Birch Log.


The book I mentioned above talks about how alcohol yeasts were kept back in the "dark ages." One of the methods was with a birch log which was tossed into the brew to absorb the yeasts. The sweetness of birch will draw the yeasts deep into the log. After the brewing cycle is done, the birch log can be taken out and dried. The log can be placed into the next brew to reintroduce the yeast.

Since birch doesn't grow where I am at, I bought a small log from Hobby Lobby. I lathed off the bark and then let a young friend of mine carve grooves and words on it: "Kveik" is a word that means "renewing the brood" and was used to describe the yeast keeping log.

When I made the sweet wort, I boiled the birch log in the wort to get it saturated and sweet all the way through, since it had long since dried out (but had not been treated.) I hoped the boiling would also sanitize the log.

https://imgur.com/nh3kVQ8

gin beer?

no thanks

The Recipe:

16th Century Yarrow and Chamomile Beer

5 lbs of Barley Malt or Honey or Brown Sugar (golden light liquid Malt Extract from HomeBrew Supply)
5 gallons of water
8 oz fresh Chamomile stems and flowers
4 oz fresh Yarrow flowers and leaves
About 20 oz of yeast starter.
made with juniper berries, yarrow, chamomile and barley malt


Taken from pages 184 and 387 of the Sacred Herbal Healing Beer book and the web page from homebrewtalk.com above.

Yarrow is psychotropic, so I only used half of what was mentioned in the old recipe. It is also very potent anti-viral, anti-fungal, blood purifying, fever lowering, and so on. . . It is VERY GOOD FOR YOU. Yarrow was used like hops to bitter the beer and preserve it before hops took over that role. Yarrow was thought to be "the original hops."

Chamomile is calming to the nervous system and good for digestion.

https://imgur.com/1pXCSpE

https://imgur.com/rJUAslP

The juniper berries are strained out of the yeast starter and no juniper berries are added to the wort. So no - there is no gin flavor in the ale.

GET DOWN!


5*

After the wort cooled down to 70 degrees, I strained the yeast starter and added it to the wort, stirred well and covered the primary.

20 hours later the airlock began to bubble.

3 days later it is apparent that the yeast prefers temperatures between 75 and 85 degrees.

It does not make as robust a kraussen as mead and wine do.

I am wondering if any beer brewers out there can tell me if this is normal. How robust should a yeast be? How much foam should I expect?

https://imgur.com/C8g7QQN

https://imgur.com/e5BAs56

Neeto!

Very cool!

Thanks guys! I will post more later and update my project for anyone interested.

I think I've maxed out my imgur allowance for today - lol.

what is the % alcohol op! IT READS DELICIOUSLY...CAPMAN. UH.

Hey, thanks for the interest! I just realized I've been pinned. Woohoo!

Umm. . . I don't know what the alcohol content will be.

I no longer have all the gadgets I had when I started brewing mead, so I didn't record the S.G.

I waited for 4 years to have the cash to buy a new ale pail, and all ingredients and tools to brew beer.

Then I read the book above and I was like, "screw it - if they could do it back then, I can do it now with what I have on hand."

I made an ale pail out of a food grade tractor supply bucket and plumbing hardware I got at the same store. I had a tamale pot to boil the wort in. I had an old airlock. A friend gave me some barley malt.

I don't know what the alcohol content will be, but I have a few friends who are more familiar with beer and ale than I am and they will taste it when it's finished and let me know what they think.

Junipers have Quinine. Provecho.

True. And Alcohol denatures snake venom. And live cultures protect the G.I tract from poisoning. And Yarrow strengthens the immune system and kills viruses.

And wine cheers the heart of God and man!

It is my hope that my ale story will inspire more people to try brewing. It's fun and easier than I expected!

testing. . . am I banned? I can't seem to post anymore?

Even without an imgur image I can't seem to post content anymore either??? Mods, can you help please?

I am going to edit/add the post that keeps being banned here. . . and see if it makes it:

So today I tested the wort.

It is partly fermented, definitely has an ale flavor, but is still too sweet. I felt like it needed a little more bitterness and maybe some yeast nutrients.


So I boiled 1 lb of brown sugar in water with one handful of hops flowers for 15 minutes. Then I added one lemon, a few grains of epsom salt, 3 crushed dates, and a tiny pinch of biotin.

These things (and more) are usually found in store-bought "yeast nutrient" - which I don't have. (Ancient recipes talk about using raisins, lemons, salt and cream of tartar.)

When this tea was cooled, I strained it and added it to the wort and tested the flavor again. I liked the bitterness the hops added and the wort picked up bubbling within an hour.

It is going steady now at about 78 degrees inside. The primary is sitting right beside me, bubbling merrily... It smells WONDERFUL.

Can't wait to see how this turns out. Wish me luck!

Last Edited by ArchimedesGirl on 07/07/2022 10:12 PM

Anyhoo - if there are any beer/ale brewers here - please, can you let me know how active should an ale yeast be? Like constant non-stop bubbling? A second or two between? How long should this process take? A week? Longer?

Thanks for any advice you can give me.

What do you think the gravity of the ale will be when it's finished?

nectarine, and peach wine is my favorite.

I've never done this before, so I don't really know. The one guy I read who used a wild-caught juniper yeast for an ale similar to mine ended up with 1.012. and began with 1.035.

Edit to add: I believe with the extra lb of brown sugar, my final gravity will be higher than his...? So, about 4 - 5% alcohol.

Last Edited by ArchimedesGirl on 07/07/2022 11:37 PM

Very Cool! Thanks for sharing!

It sounds delicious. Do you make it yourself?

You're welcome!

So, as I noted above, this wild yeast seems to prefer temperatures between 75 and 85 degrees. At night our house cools off to more like 65 degrees and the wort stops bubbling.

So I brought in a red light which I had been using to raise chicks (but they're grown now) and set it up shining on the bucket. So far, it's keeping the wort bubbling consistently.

I'll check on it in a few hours to make sure it's not overheating my brew.

https://imgur.com/fXgS3qU

This fellow
[link to www.stormbrewing.org (secure)]
started a lambic using wild yeast by setting it out in an alley in East Vancouver, right behind a chicken processing plant (for killing them) and it stunk, and was full of floating feathers all the time. A year later I showed up to say hello and Lo! Behold! He was ready to crack the 5 gallons for a 'tester'. It was only he and I. We drank half and I slept on a couch in the brewery and made it to the ferry home later that evening. It was amazing! I tried a can of his latest about a month ago (not as ad hoc) and wasn't keen on it. Three cheers to wild yeats!

DovahToor?

That's a hilarious story. The two of you drank half of 5 gallons? lol! I'm curious - did he sulfite his brew or was it raw? And did you get hung over like you would with a store-bought beer? (Never mind - I see on his site that he doesn't use preservatives.)

I'd be scared of the yeast I'd catch in an alley like that, but it sounds like it was magic anyway.

It makes sense to me that the ideal yeast for any brew would be local - even residential to the ingredients used in the brew.

For this reason I set one jar in the yarrow patch and one in the chamomile patch. Even though they were only 8 feet apart and made of the same ingredients, they caught different yeasts and each has a unique flavor and odor. I love that!

Last Edited by ArchimedesGirl on 07/08/2022 12:00 AM