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You are here: Home --> Forum Home --> Brewing Forum --> Brewing Discussion --> A Kentucky Common?

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chino_brews
Charter Member
Eden Prairie, MN
301 Posts


@uberg33k: yeah, I have read W&H and that what I was trying to say -- it's like an American mild ale. 

@ingoogni: it was almost certainly 6-row. 




Posted 34 days ago.

chino_brews
Charter Member
Eden Prairie, MN
301 Posts


@homebrewdad: so why do so many recipes have rye? Because 'Mericans ain't so good at history, and falsely romanticize the past. People who made up recipes for Kentucky Common without doing any primary research just falsely assumed that whiskey distillers ran off wort from their sour mash and fermented it to make beer. The truth is very far from that. Whiskey distillers and beer brewers were different, from different countries, with different training. In fact, rye was not even used by most distillers in Kentucky (that was for crappy Eastern whisky). 

Kentucky Common is a historical style, so it should be brewer to style. 

But this is home brewing so make the beer you want, but please don't muddy the waters more by passing it as an authentic Kentucky Common -- "inspired by" seems right, as you suggest.




Posted 34 days ago.

homebrewdad
Charter Member
Birmingham, AL
2480 Posts


To be fair, I don't try to pass off my English brown or English IPA as authentic, my Belgian blonde as authentic, or even my American IPA as authentic. I'm brewing beer at home, impacting at most a few people who I give beer to.




Posted 34 days ago.

KidMoxie
Charter Member
San Elijo Hills, CA
405 Posts


Homebrew Dad authentic.





Posted 34 days ago.

homebrewdad
Charter Member
Birmingham, AL
2480 Posts


Amen to that. Complete with branches and/or leaves in the wort, mis-timings in the boil, forgotten steps... you name it!

Like those clothes with labels that tell you that any inconsistencies are not actual flaws, but part of the hand-made process.




Posted 34 days ago.

KidMoxie
Charter Member
San Elijo Hills, CA
405 Posts


You're artisinal.





Posted 34 days ago.

homebrewdad
Charter Member
Birmingham, AL
2480 Posts


Artisinal. I like it.

So much nicer than "brewed by a bona fide hack."




Posted 34 days ago.

uberg33k
Charter Member
The Internet
314 Posts


@homebrewdad - that's cool then.  As long as you're not bound to history and you just want to make something interesting and tasty, then you're on track.

@ingoogni - this is interesting.  Common was started before saladin boxes were used, so you'd get some variation in every batch of malt.  If you sort of reason by subtraction, you'll note in the ads for "fine cream ale" they say they use only the finest pale malts from the malting process.  Since Common is the "dark cream ale" and the cheap beer, it stands to reason that the not so good, not so pale malts were used that were rejected for cream ale production.  I did see another reference in another document that said high malts were used in table beers around this time.  High malt basically means anything more than pale and less than brown malt, so that kind of fits here.  Any mix of pale, Munich, and even amber would probably be acceptable.  Later on, I'm sure it would have biased more towards all pale malt, with all  the color coming from sugar and specialty malt.

@chino - here's the real interesting thing about calling it "American Mild".  Look where it falls in American Handy Book.  The previous section discusses American Weiss beer that "Wheat malt is sometimes, but not generally, used. Instead, grits are employed o the amount of about 30 per cent, together with pale malt".  Interesting, so they used corn instead of wheat.  The next section after Common talks about German beers specifically Berliner.  So that's curious, right?  What happens if you take Common and sub the corn for wheat?  It suddenly reads a whole lot like something else.  Take  into consideration that almost all the breweries in that area are being run by Germans and I'd be willing to bet it's really the American Dunkelweiss, not the Mild.  I'd even go so far as to say you might want to roll with Wyeast3068 or WLP036 to be more "authentic".

Another thing that's interesting to note is something else  I read.  I wish I could find the source for this, but the basic premise is there are two general methods for making mash for distilling; straight and sour.  Straight means the wort is run off as a beer would be and then fermented before distillation.  Sour  mash involves fermenting the whole mash and allowing the bacteria to continue breaking down the starch a la sake or makgeolli.  Sometimes in straight whiskey production, distillers would take the weak runnings or even an additional rinsing of the grains and use it in the next mash to add more amylase in for conversion.  The enzymes are still active since they don't  mash out, so why not, right?  There was a throw away line in there that said sometimes these runnings were even sold to breweries to help convert high adjunct beers.  So if you're making a high adjunct beer with cheap high malt, there is the possibility you used some of these runnings to help improve your conversion.  That may be where some of the myth about Common comes from.  They weren't doing it for flavor or to mimic whiskey mash, they were buying liquid amylase.




Posted 34 days ago.
Edited 34 days ago by uberg33k

homebrewdad
Charter Member
Birmingham, AL
2480 Posts


Uberg, this is all super interesting stuff. This is why I love reading your blog.

Yeah, I'm happy with this being "inspired by a historical beer", not an attempt to authentically recreate one.




Posted 34 days ago.

ingoogni
nl
314 Posts


6-row is not available here, nor the MFB Special Aromatic, the first thing I think of for high malt. An over modified under kilned version of muenchner.

Weiss is white and historically has nothing to do with wheat/weizen. This association is fairly recent. White malt is probably comparable with what we now know as pilsner/pale or even wind blown malt. Wheat was way more expensive and way less used than we think it was. Off coarse the noble and wealthy had their wheat beers and those were also described, but the common beers? Why waste paper on what the common man did.

Regarding similarities in beer(styles). Mankind travels, travels a lot and takes the basics with them, how to make bread (sourdough mother) and how to brew beer (yeast). Now the Weizen yeast is something special, it kind of survived the Reinheitsgebot, most other German top fermenting yeast are long gone. The Reinheitsgebot and lager yeasts go hand in hand. The Reinheitsgebot is used in Germany for barely 100 years, so before that there was a much wider spectrum in top fermenting yeasts available and I would count on settlers bringing those along and not the very specific Weizen yeast.




Posted 34 days ago.

homebrewdad
Charter Member
Birmingham, AL
2480 Posts


/u/vinpaysdoc has ruined my day with awesomeness, as he mentioned that he could maybe pick up some locally grown/malted grains for me from North Carolina.

They have a local barley - which, while 2 row, seems amazing. An a local heirloom rye variety.

Historically inspired AND locally sourced? Aaargh, that sounds amazingQ




Posted 34 days ago.

chino_brews
Charter Member
Eden Prairie, MN
301 Posts


@uberg33k: that is super interesting. Unfortunately, none of the surviving brewing records from Louisville that the BJCP was able to track down mentioned using thin wort from whiskey producers. If they did, I am sure it would be mentioned. The log books are detailed. Looking at other log books of English brewers excerpted by Ron Pattinson shows that the English brewers always made some notation when yeast or other materials came from other breweries. It is an interesting story, but I'm a little skeptical, as amylase will naturally denature in a few hours (you don't need to mash out for them to denature). On my 12-hour mashes, I am convinced that I could not add non-diastatic malt at hour 5 or 6 and expect it to convert.

Incidentally, I was reading something somewhere that said Americans were gaga for wheat beer in the 1800s. I can't remember where I read that.





Posted 34 days ago.

uberg33k
Charter Member
The Internet
314 Posts


@ingoogni - I don't know what to say man.  There are clear records of wheat beers and "almost" wheat beers being made by German immigrants for the immigrant community.  I don't know if they were ever popular outside those communities though.  I think it was sort of the "lager effect" on the larger population.  The immigrants knew "that's what rich people drink".  They come to a new country with lots of wheat and no restrictions on production of wheat beer.  Why not live it up and make some for ourselves?  So, they certainly did carry weizen strains over.  If they used in in Common or not, who knows.  That's why I tossed out Alt as another possible strain.  Maybe they were using some kind of local yeast to do things on the cheap, but knowing Germans, they were using something that was a known value that they brought with them.  As for cost, a ton of barley cost the same as a ton of wheat in 1850 in Wisconsin, so cost wasn't a factor.  Heck, by 1860, 4x as much wheat was being produced in the US as barley, buckwheat, rye, and rice combined.



Posted 34 days ago.

uberg33k
Charter Member
The Internet
314 Posts


@chino - There's not a whole lot of written records about Common, mostly for the reasons ingoogni points out.  It was the cheap stuff for poor people, so who cares to write things down.  It does seem oddly un-German though. I think there must have been records lost during Prohibition.  If this stuff was regional, the breweries went out of business, and no one cared to keep up with it, why would they hang on to these records.  That was the stuff filthy immigrants and poor people drank with their un-Christian like ways getting all drunk and having a good time.  How dare they.  

And amylase will last for a few days if you don't push it.  If it didn't, sour mash whiskey wouldn't exist.  Now, when the runoff was re-utilized and to what extent brewers actually reused it, that's an excellent question.  I'm not sure there would ever be a good answer to any of this unless some serious time was spent in the archives of Midwestern towns and even then, it might be lost to the ages.




Posted 34 days ago.

Necropaw
Charter Member
Central WI
608 Posts


That was the stuff filthy immigrants and poor people drank with their un-Christian like ways getting all drunk and having a good time.

Pft, WI is plenty Christian.

We just love beer, too.




Posted 34 days ago.

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