#triple threads

Finding the right ingredients is problem number one. The barley grown today is a completely different species from the grains grown in 1800, and modern maltsters aim for maximum efficiency. Frank Clark tells a story on the Colonial Williamsburg Past & Present podcast about an early test brew that finished at fourteen percent alcohol, way too strong for daily drinking in the Virginia sunshine.

The second issue is modern brewing technique. In the eighteenth century America, brewing was household chore. A brewster would make small batches for family and friends using cast iron pots and pans over a wood burning stove. Scaling up an ancient homebrew recipe to a modern brewhouse all trial and error.

But the Williamsburg Historic Foodways team persisted, and with the help of Alewerks Brewing recreated these colonial beers. We sampled a few at Josiah Chowning’s Tavern on Duke of Gloucester street, where the beer is served from a conventional keg -- not my first choice for historical accuracy -- in cute earthenware mugs.

The first was a historical brown ale called Old Stitch. Brewing a brown ale can be difficult, because most modern porters and stouts are brewed with pale malt and only enough dark malt for color and roast flavor. Historically dark beer was made with all brown malt. What was that malt like? Hell if I know. It was brown and probably dried over charcoal fires.

Old Stitch started from a few offhand references in old brewing manuals. There was no recipe available. So Clark, as described in another podcast, did some detective work. It was listed as a table beer, so he was able to guess at it’s relative strength, probably around five percent alcohol. Then they tackled the question of malt, looking for something that looked like the descriptions in the old manuals, even if they couldn’t specify exact kiln temperatures.

The Old Stitch brewed at Alewerks definitely tastes like a precursor to a modern porter, toasty, balanced. I only had the six ounces, but it didn’t taste all that historical to me. It tasted pretty plain to be honest, and drawn from a keg, it lacked the historical flatness I was expecting. But historical beer nerd beggars can’t be historical beer nerd choosers.

Next they tackled the obscure, extinct style known as Mum or Mumme. Mum seems to be one of those beer styles, like milk stout, that was marketed as a health tonic. Old recipes are chockful of herbs and spices. The historical product had a ridiculously low attenuation and intense herb flavors. Mum was probably a very bitter, very sweet beer.

Dear Old Mum, the Williamsburg version, is a spiced ale brewed with coriander and grains of paradise on a base of wheat and oats. It tastes a bit like a Belgian-y wit without the yeast character. It’s spicy and sweet, like hot apple cider with ginger. Not exactly the weird beer I was promised, but interesting in its own right.

The final beer in my tasting was Wetherburn’s Tavern Bristol Ale, which is toted as a precursor to modern India Pale Ale. Of course, the menu is lacking in any actual history. The best I can get from the Alewerks website the simple fact Bristol was a major port shipping supplies to the American colonies. That’s true. But Clark and others repeat the old saw about export ales being both hoppier and stronger to survive the journey. It’s a story repeated endlessly, without much actual evidence. British brewers exported everything. If it fit in a ship, it found it’s way throughout the empire.

But Alewerks and company fail to specify what sort of beer Wetherburn’s is supposed to emulate. I’ve never come across any references to “Bristol Ale.” There are plenty of proto-IPAs out there. There’s strong October beer, which brewed with the freshest harvest of hops. There’s the famous Burton ale, brewed in Burton upon Trent and famous for its bitterness. The point is, the label “forerunner to the modern India Pale Ale” is a lot to lay on a single pint.

But why does Wetherburn’s taste like coffee? The brownish ale is toasty, with a bitterness more akin to black coffee than hops. I thought it was just a fluke. I was almost convinced I had the wrong beer. On our way home, I insisted we stop in one of the many small shoppes lining Duke of Gloucester Street so I could take another look. Still tastes like coffee, but it tastes stronger, more alcoholic.

Of course, I couldn’t grab just one bottle, or just one beer, so I grabbed a couple of Toby’s Triple Threads Porter while I was at it. This too was a difficult beer to recreate due to the burnt sugar in the recipe. What do you mean a modern brewery isn’t equipped to deal with boiling sugar set on fire?

Triple Threads is not a recreation of a classic London Porter, which legally could never include licorice, molasses, or burnt sugar. In those days taxes were paid on the malt that made the beer, not the final product. The taxmen were wary of anything that went into the brew kettle that hadn’t been properly assessed. Toby’s Triple Threads is said to be based on a colonial recipe. The colonies were the wild frontier. Anarchy in the brewhouse. 

Those little additions really give Toby’s Triple Threads it’s flavor. Of course, the roasted malt adds the most flavor, but it’s helped along by the molasses and licorice. There’s just a hint of acidity in there, too. It’s just a whisper of something fruity.

The name Triple Threads comes from an old myth that Porter evolved from the practice of drawing beer from multiple kegs into a single tankard. The most popular was a blend of sweet ale, hoppy beer, and ‘twopenny’ strong ale. Brewers tried to recreate that flavor in a single cask, or butt, and called it “entire butt” beer. The story goes that that “entire” morphed into Porter. The story though, seems too good to be true. 

But that’s is really the problem with recreating these historical beers. The stories we tell are so compelling, and the history is so muddy. Tracking down reliable information is hard. And, like all things, beer changes over time.

Porter has gone through so many different phases. At one point it was a strong ale brewed with brown malt which was heated until it cracked and popped like popcorn. At the start of the 19th century, porter was aged in huge wooden vats for up to two years, where it most definitely went through a round of secondary fermentation with wild Brettanomyces. But by the mid 19th century, Porter was served mild, or fresh. At the same time in Ireland Porter was being brewed with black patent malts and efficient pale malt, the formula that eventually led to classic Guinness and the modern Porter we are familiar with today.

If pick a single point between 1750 and 2017 you are liable to stumble across a beer called Porter, but you’ll likely never taste the same thing twice. One porter will be sour and vinous. The will be sweet and smokey. A third might be nine percent alcohol, while the others are closer to three percent. 

There are a million fascinating stories you can tell with these beers, stories of changing tastes and changing technology. But Frank Clark and his team seem less interested in telling the story than making a decent beer. Nowhere online or off did I see an explanation of Mum or the story of Porter. I was given a single sentence description of each beer and told to enjoy.

For an organization ostensibly meant to educate the masses on life in the American colonies, Historical Williamsburg seems more interested in selling a passable product than explaining what it is and how it’s made and why. The barmaid simply makes a joke about the water being unsafe and plugs your order into a concealed computer terminal. There’s a veil of authenticity -- they make reference to old brewing logs, they mention archaeological evidence -- but the details are glossed over in favor of play acting and expensive facsimiles.

I have no problem with anyone making a buck off of history, I just want to see the homework finished before you go play pirates.