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

Green for thee

Thank you, dear!

We had the 16th Century Yarrow and Chamomile Ale last night again. It was finally completely done fermenting. Had a wonderful calming effect. Mr. Archimedes loved it. He said it was different than any store-bought beer he's had in the after effects. Said one beer made him totally unwind. :-D
So YAAAAY!

So, the third yeast had turned to vinegar. A very delicious vinegar - but still a vinegar - so I won't be brewing with it. I may try to brew a bucket malt vinegar with it though, so I didn't toss it.

For the next Beer, I ended up using the wild yarrow yeast (same as for the Blue Spruce Beer) again for a third batch of brew.

This time I was liberal with the yarrow and chamomile both, because I'd like to see just how psychotropic yarrow actually is.

So:

1 lb fresh yarrow (leaves, stems and flowers)
1 lb fresh chamomile (leaves, stems and flowers)
1 fistful hops (dried)
6 lbs brown sugar
5 gallons water
1 pint of wild yarrow yeast
skin from 1/2 papaya pureed with 1/2 cup raisins (yeast nutrient and enzymes)
Juice from 1 lemon (citric acid)

It's been bubbling since 8/5/22


The Blue Spruce Beer is going to be a favorite. It has a hearty stout palate and the molasses overtones make it seem Christmasy. It still bubbles about twice a minute, so I have not yet bottled. Pretty sure this one is going to disappear too quickly, and I am hoping to bottle some as Christmas presents. So, I'll be doing another batch of this as well.


Cheers!

Last Edited by ArchimedesGirl on 08/10/2022 12:16 PM

Hey, pretty cool OP!

I'm partial to wheat beer.

Fell in love with the stuff visiting an Austrian Bier Hall back in the 90's.

Golden color and just incredible.

Look for a book by Wagner!

His recipe is spot on for a good Weizzen Bier!

Watch out though, it'll made you fat!

Might have to visit my local brew shop, schoon!

OP have you pondered using heather instead of hops? The tale as far as I recall (I may be wrong) is that heater ales were stopped due to the Bavarian Purity act. BUt who knows, that's a long time ago. But since you really seem to enjoy modifying brews...

QUOTE
History: Heather Ale is believed to have been drunk since around 2000 BC and is reputed to be one of the oldest styles of ales in the world. Folklore tales attribute the original recipe for Heather Ale to have gone to the grave of a Pictish elder, at the hand of the Scots around the 4th century AD. The Scot Kenneth MacAlpine resolved to exterminate the Pict people of Caledonia (Scotland) sparing the lives of all but two…an aged father and son. As brewsters, both possessed the recipe of brewing the valued heather beer. Their lives were promised to be spared if they divulged the secret recipe. The father asked for his life to be spared in exchange for his son’s death…the father then said…“now I’m satisfied…my son might have taught you the art, I never will…!”

The original neolithic versions have been lost, but based on archaeo-botanical and molecular archaeological research they were likely robust sweet malt beverages, fortified with significant amounts of honey, and with the taste of peat smoked barley and notes of heather, meadowsweet, royal fern and/or bog myrtle/sweet gale. That said, It is a style that continued to exist and evolve throughout much of Scottish history, and starting in the early 1500s, accounts of making ale with heather began to surface again. Even though heather ale was all but reduced to legend following the Act of Union in 1707 (an Act was passed which prevented brewers using any ingredients other than hops and malt), the later versions produced up until that time, and the heather ales that continued to be produced in the Highlands and Western Isles until at least as late as 1809, would have evolved in their formulation under the influence of then current Scottish brewing practices and available ingredients.

In 1986 a Gaelic-speaking Islander translated an old family recipe for "Leann fraoich" to Bruce Williams, a homebrew shop owner. He then began the crusade to revive Scotland's brewing heritage by trying different varieties and quantities of heather flowers, making up batches and testing them on his customers. When the formula was perfected he began selling the brew as "Fraoch Leann" (heather ale). By 1992 the first twenty thousand pints were produced at a small West Highland Brewery in Argyll. In 1993, an agreement was reached with Scotland's oldest family brewers, Maclay & Co. at the Thistle Brewery in Alloa which allowed Bruce Williams to brew larger quantities during the heather season (July to September). Every batch was inspected and recorded for the Scottish Brewing Archive in Glasgow. Under supervision of The 'Scottish Office' in Edinburgh, the tradition and custom of brewing with heather is protected, and Heather Ale receives a "Certificate of Specific Character".

END QUOTE

It's supposedly more of a stimulant then a soporific like hops. Hence, pub and pipe drinking songs all night long!?

[link to www.homebrewersassociation.org (secure)]

Hey, nice! I looked up weizzen beir and found this: [link to draftmag.com (secure)] Is this what you are talking about?

Thanks for the tip.

YES! I'd love to try some heather. The book, Sacred Herbal Healing Beers, has a generous section on heather and the dwarvish Picts who made it famous. There is a natural wild yeast on the heather too, which is quite psychotropic.

Heather doesn't grow near me though. I may eventually order distant ingredients, but my current goal is to discover what I have on hand or easily accessible to brew with. I can grow hops in my greenhouse... maybe heather??? Wheat naturally grows here, and buckwheat, which I can malt and grind - so that is in the future of my brewing experiment too.

Thanks for the encouragement though. I'd absolutely love to try heather!

8/17/22

Spiced Ginger Beer

Using the Yarrow Mead Yeast, I brewed a five gallon batch of ginger beer which is fermenting up nicely. I will bottle it early and we'll drink it while still a little sweet.


6 oz ginger root sliced
6 lbs cane sugar
5 gallons of water
1 tsp nutmeg, cracked
8 cloves
4 cardamom pods crushed

boil for 40 minutes.

Remove from heat and add puree of two pineapples, 1 teaspoon of cream of tartar.

Cool to room temp, strain into primary. Add 2 pints of "smiling" yeast (the ancient recipes call active yeast "smiling") and pour wort back and forth from pot to bucket 3 times to oxygenate.

Place lid and airlock. Keep at 75ish degrees to ferment.

Smells amazing!!!!

The flocculation in this new Yarrow brew is fascinating. The yeast is so busy, rushing upward (for oxygen?) and then back downward to the bottom where the yeast is deepening into a cake of lees at the bottom. It has been constantly moving like this for nearly two weeks now. It's like having an aquarium of beer and yeast fish to watch. lol!

Found this ancient quote by Linneaus (1700's Swedish botanist) about Yarrow and thought it might interest someone else:
pg 183 of Sacred Herbal Healing Beers by Stephen Harrod Buhner

Used by the people of Lima in Dalecarnia instead of hops when they brewed for weddings: "... so that the guests would become crazy." Linnaeus called the plant galentara "causing madness", and this plant "which the people of Lima sometimes use in their ale stirs up the blood and makes one lose one's balance."... Yarrow is in no way innocent when mixed with ale. It has a strong odour and flavour and well deserves the name Linnaeus gave it, to indicate the frenzy that was said to result from it...Thus yarrow must contain substances which increase the effect of the alcohol, and bring about special sensations and feelings when added to ale. According to Linnaeus, it is significant that was used to arrive at a state of complete and immediate intoxication.
--Odd Nordland, 1969

So, yeah - it will be interesting to see how strong this ale might be when it's finished. Maybe it should be kept as a limited-use sleeping tonic!

Cool.

My wife can do that without the berries

Update: 8/23/22 on the 2nd Yarrow and Chamomile Ale/OP Recipe altered (this time made with brown sugar instead of malt and with the wild Yarrow yeast instead of the Juniper yeast.)

I bottled this ale yesterday. It was the best smelling brew I've ever bottled. My husband and son came into the room at different times and both exclaimed "man, that one smells really good!"

It has an odor like honey in the comb and chamomile. Needs a couple weeks to finish now. Highly recommend this recipe!

Last Edited by ArchimedesGirl on 08/24/2022 01:46 PM

I also bottled this brew, after one week in the primary. It is wonderfully spicy - with a nice kick. It will make great Christmas gifts and was fast and easy. I think you could use bread yeast to make this (it's so similar to Joe's Ancient Orange Spice Mead.) I'll try to get some pictures when we try these, so you all can see the foam head - which is HUGE on the ginger beer.

That was me ^

Also, if anyone knows a good cheap source for kegs or beer bottles, I'm looking...

Just wanted to share a photo of the Ginger Beer. It is very spicy, but we love it. It's about 2.5% alcohol and still a little sweet. Could probably ferment longer for 3% and dryer finish.

It is GREAT for digestion and delicious.

https://imgur.com/lngh5DB

Bump for Brews

When I retire in years I'm gonna do all this cool GLP stuff.....Whelp maybe

i'm making a mead with bread yeast, it's all i had. anyone ever had a good result with commercial bread yeast?

Thread: 5,000 year old beer recipe, signed by Kushim, oldest known human signature

Yes, I made a great Orange Spice Mead with bread yeast. It's one of the easiest good tasting brews out there. A good place to start. All you need is one carboy and one airlock, plus ingredients.

Here's the recipe:

[link to www.almostoffgrid.com (secure)]

Good luck and I hope your brew turns out wonderful!

Very cool!

I just poured up 4 gallons of kombucha in bottles. That is a pretty old brew as well and great for cleansing the liver.

Good Fermentology playlist here from the NCSU Applied Ecology team, for those interested in learning some of the science behind the fermented products you can create in your own lab, er kitchen...

[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

Last Edited by James-XF on 11/17/2022 06:34 PM

Hey, thanks for this! I'll definitely check that out. I love fermentation.


Coming up next... some Cranberry Claret...

So, I was given 3 gallons of over-the-hill fresh cranberries after Thanksgiving. I washed them, picked through them and tried to get any berry out that looked sus to me.

Put them through the blender "chop" mode and into my 5 gallon brew pot.

https://imgur.com/pRqBJrT

Next I grated the zest of two oranges and squeezed 5 oranges and added all that to the pot.

https://imgur.com/cARoTnK

9 Lbs of Cane Sugar,
4 Gallons of Water
3 cups Orange Juice
Zest of Two Oranges
10 oz of raisins

Simmer for 20 minutes.

https://imgur.com/c0M13bn

Cool down by placing the pot in a tub of cold water.

When the brew is around 100 degrees, pour through a strainer into a sterilized bucket. Then, using a funnel, pour the brew into a sterilized carboy.

Attach airlock. (I didn't have another, so did the plastic wrap and rubber-band method.)

Add: Juice of 3 pomegranates,
one more quart of FRESH cranberries, chopped (for enzymes)
Yeast (I used the wild yeast I caught and wrote about on page one of this thread.)
And about 1 more quart of water to bring the level up to what you see in the photo below.

https://imgur.com/paBew2L

Last Edited by ArchimedesGirl on 11/30/2022 07:51 PM

The leftover strained-out cranberry pulp was sweet and tart and very delicious. The orange zest gave it a holiday-flavor. I decided to make cinnamon roll dough, and spread butter and the cranberry pulp as filling.

Rolled it up, let it rise, and - YUM! With a little powder-sugar glaze, these rolls were SO good and quickly devoured. No waste!

I think any kind of berry preserves would be good, but the cranberry-and-orange filling was very pretty and delicious with coffee.

https://imgur.com/dYDX6K4

https://imgur.com/C8rSVZo

For anyone interested in making Cranberry Claret, typically you would use Montrachet wine yeast, which you can buy online. I used Montrachet for years to make many different types of fruit wines.

Since catching my own local wild yeast this last summer, I decided to try making this Claret (def: clear and red) with my wild yeast. We'll see how it turns out!

So far, this yeast has made a nice Pale Ale, wonderful Ginger Beer, and a sweet Stout, all detailed in this thread previously. It will be several months, if not a full year, before the Cranberry Claret is ready to try, but I'm already in love with the color and the scent.

Wishing you an early, happy, creative retirement!

Poured up some Apple Scrap Vinegar yesterday. The "mother" is the white pancake thing on the top of the photo. I am removing the spent apple chunks from the vinegar, and then will pour it up.

We use a lot of this vinegar for things like: hair rinse, cleaning, using to ferment grain for chickens, ducks, and cows (greatly improves nutritional quality) and cooking.

https://imgur.com/a/99BElZo

Today I siphoned the Cranberry Claret for the second time. It is clarifying and tastes like it will be a good one. It is still bubbling about once every 12 seconds, so I'm happy my wild yeast was strong enough to keep fermenting to higher alcohol levels.

I'm also making another batch of Spicy Ginger Beer today. It turns out to be one of the more popular brews - especially at cook outs, over ice. It's just really a nice balance of little-bit of fermentation in a fizzy soda-pop drink everyone can enjoy. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm told a splash of vodka in a spicy ginger beer is amazing.

But I'm making vanilla extract with my vodka. LOL.

Elsewhere on the fermentation front, I'm in the midst of making 6 sourdough loaves!

Anybody else out there fermenting something right now?