By Ben Swenson
You probably expect that drinking a bottle or two of beer will change your outlook on the world for a while, but you may not know that certain libations can also carry you back in time.
In Virginia’s colonial capital, it’s possible to get a true flavor for old drinks that warmed bellies long ago.
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Eighteenth-century Americans loved beer. Aside from being an affordable alternative to potentially dangerous water, beer was a tasty way to get nutrients—along with the added benefit, for some folks, of softening life’s rough edges.
As part of Colonial Williamsburg’s mission to preserve and interpret the past, Frank Clark, supervisor of Historic Foodways, began efforts in 2007 to re-create beers that would have been familiar to people in the 18th century.
Foodways interpreters have been conducting brewing demonstrations for years, but until recently, they lacked the means to make their product available to the public. For that, Colonial Williamsburg partnered with AleWerks Brewing Company, a Williamsburg micro-brewery.
Concocting old beers was challenging from the beginning. Barley, hops, yeast and water—beer’s essential ingredients—have all undergone natural and scientific changes over the past two centuries.
What’s more, 18th-century drinkers were used to batches of beer that tasted different from barrel to barrel and they were less discriminating about flavors that might be considered off-putting today.
“Modern drinkers of a particular brand want a clean, infection-free beer that is the same every time,” says Clark. “That wasn’t the case in the 18th century.”
Still, Clark felt he could come close to 18th-century beer if he found the right recipe. So he combed through contemporary sources until he found something both he and AleWerks Brewing’s head brewer Geoff Logan could work with.
A 1737 manual from London gave instructions for “brewing strong brown ale called stitch,” and that served as an inspiration for the first recipe Clark created. A few test batches and adjustments later, Old Stitch rolled off production lines.
The malty backbone takes center stage with Old Stitch, providing drinkers with the flavors imparted when barley is roasted a dark brown: bread, nuts, coffee. For a beer so rich in flavor and deep in color, the body is surprisingly light.
Hops, the flower that is the standard spice of beer, is there in each sip of Old Stitch, but barely—just as it would have been in the 18th century. Clark explains he was aiming for a profile where malt was the driver because beers weren’t heavily hopped until the latter half of the century.
Some English brown ales and porters available at retailers today approach the profile of Old Stitch, but too often modern ingredients and practices add dimensions that would have been foreign to the beers from long ago.
Not only has Clark created a beverage that comes about as close as possible to those enjoyed daily in the 18th century, but he has created a winner by modern standards, too. Old Stitch was recently named best brown ale in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast by the United States Beer Tasting Championship (an award that Clark elaborates on in this Past & Present podcast).
Clark’s other creation, Dear Old Mum, is modeled on a style of beer that originated in Brunswick, Germany. Compared to Old Stitch, the maltiness is less robust, as is the amber color. True to its medieval heritage, Dear Old Mum features a complement of pungent spices including coriander, cardamom, long pepper and grains of paradise. The result: A beer that might fall near the category of a Belgian witbier—or white beer—but the cascade of spices sets this historic brew apart from any others now found on store shelves.
As with Old Stitch, Clark tweaked 18th-century recipes to offer modern drinkers genuine but less eccentric flavors. “Some of the spices that were originally used in various Mums are either unavailable or medicinal and not that good,” Clark said. “I also left out another ingredient that every existing recipe called for: 12 newly laid eggs.”
Two more historic beers are on tap in the coming years. First will be a sort of forerunner to the hop-heavy India pale ale called Bristol ale. Following that, a beer that closely resembles 18th-century porters that were aged for long periods in barrels and blended with other styles.
Come by the Revolutionary City to try Old Stitch and Dear Old Mum for yourself. You can find them on tap at any of the Colonial Williamsburg taverns and at retailers in and around the Historic Area, including Williamsburg Revolutions, Tarpley, Thompson & Company, John Greenhow Store and at the Williamsburg Inn and Williamsburg Lodge gift shops. Select stores in Merchants Square also carry the beers.
As descendants of a well-lubricated lot of Americans, it behooves us—purely in the interest of historical appreciation, of course—to raise a couple tankards in their honor. Happy New Year to all!
As for the Old Stitch - it’s basically the same if not “the same” as Alewerks Tavern Ale (which is their brown ale). I doubt that there is molasses in the recipe which is what would have commonly be used during this time frame vs roasted barleys…etc. which became more commonly used in the late 1790s into the 1800s. Hops were not easily available in the early 1700s either and they used pine, spruce tips or yarrow.
While I love the taste of Old Stich, it is a modern brown ale. It doesn’t taste like a brown ale would taste back then and definitely not brewed that way.
I hope CW isn’t trying to piggy back on the craft brew movement. If that’s the case, then why not have a working brewery at CW - since practically every town had one back during those times.
My name is Frank Clark and I am the Master of historic foodways at Colonial Williamsburg. I am the one who created the recipe for old stitch. First let me assure you that the recipe is not the same as Aleworks tavern ale. I created the recipe in our brewing program at Colonial Williamsburg and tinkered with it for many years. I created the recipe based on recipes I found in “The London and Country Brewer” by William Ellis and my interpretation of the descriptions of malt in Micheal Combrune’s “Theory and Practice of Brewing.” I gave this 10-gallon recipe to Geoff Logan, the brewer at Aleworks, and we used computer software to scale it up to the quantities for 25 barrels.
You gave an excellent description of the ingredients often used by colonial brewers who frequently had to make do with substitutes to create their beers. I hope someday that we will be able to make a Virginia-style small beer with Aleworks that would include molasses and possibly spruce. (Although here in the Tidewater, we do not have many spruce trees. We seemed to have lots of hops. In fact, we have record of the governor buying 40 pounds of hops from Carters Grove for brewing at the Palace.)
So I want to emphasize that Old Stitch was never intended to be a representation of a colonial beer. It is a English brown ale. It was taken directly from brewing manuals written in 18th-century England and represents the type of beer found here in Virginia as an export.
I do have to agree that it is not completely authentic. In fact, I would argue that there is no way for modern brewers to be completely authentic in replicating early styles of beer. We have altered the plants hops and barley so much in the last 200 years that we cannot exactly replicate them with modern ingredients.
We have also created a sterile and temperature-controlled environment for fermenting, storing and serving beer that they would not have had. We have achieved control over yeast strains on a genetic level when they didn’t even know the basic science of yeast handling.
In short, the modern brewer has the ability to use technology to control the process to the point where we can duplicate the exact beer from batch to batch. This was not possible for our 18th-century counterparts. Every batch they brewed was different from the last one sometimes wildly so. Most of the time these differences would be viewed by modern consumers as flaws.
So if we can agree that being completely authentic is impossible, how can we claim to be making an historic beer? Well, there are some things we can do that make our beers more like the brews of the past. I assure you that we have made a big effort to do what we can to be authentic.
We have done this in a number of ways:
1. Ingredients, We have tried to select ingredients that are the closest we can get to the hops and barley of the past. Our primary hops are the East Kent Golding. This is the oldest English hop commercially available today ( 1790s). We use a traditional variety of barley called Maris Otter and a floor malted brown malt for the Old Stitch. We do have some darker malts in this beer, as well, but they were selected from the modern malts available to us based on a description in “The Theory and Practice of Brewing,” where he describes malts kilned to 162 degrees as high brown speckled with black; 167 as blackish brown with black specks; !71 degrees as coffee color; and 176 as black. We use a strain of yeast from an English brewery that was in operation in the 18th century and they have used this strain with one small change since the 1870s.
2. The brewing process, There are also ways to alter the process of brewing to make a beer more historically correct. One of these is to practice what modern brewers call first wort hopping. Today’s beers are made by adding hops in at different times in the boil to give the bitterness flavor and aroma. This was not done by 18th-century brewers. They would take all the hops and put them in a sack and then run the wort from the mash tun through them. The sack was then put in the wort to boil. Geoff follows this process at Aleworks when making these beers for us.
3. There are some things we chose not to do even though they would make the beer more accurate. We have decided not use some ingredients like “salt of steel” (bitter bean and yarrow) in our beers because they may not be good for your health or meet FDA approval. We made a deliberate decision not to try to replicate the unsanitary conditions of the past by introducing brewers “bugs ” into the process. This would probably be more accurate historically but was not practical from an operational standpoint. This is something we are reconsidering for the last beer — a porter — we hope to make with Aleworks. The porter will hopefully be the most authentic beer yet. We will use real liquorish root and a secret ingredient made from burnt sugar and molasses. The brewery has expanded and may now be able to have separate area for sour beers. Our hope is to age some of the porter in oak casks made by the Colonial Williamsburg coopers and infected with Brett, and then blend it in with fresh porter before bottling. The original porters were blended at the brewery using a mix of porter aged up to two years in large tuns and freshly fermented porter much like some Belgian brewers do to create Lambic beer.
Thanks for your comments and I hope someday we can rebuild a brewery here for our guests to see and to use to make more accurate beers I hope you can see that we are serious about making the best tasting and most accurate beers we can.
Frank Clark.