[Bradlinc]

I think this is a worthy try but I am skeptical if it tastes anything like medieval beer. I imagine the malt is significantly different. Are we still using the same barley varieties as we did hundreds of years ago? Were they able to malt as efficiently? I also think the yeast would have been very different. Which he touches on. Even if you had the exact yeast you would need to know pitching rates. That said, what he created most likely tastes a lot better than what they had in the 1300s.

[TrueSlacker0]

Using commercially malted barley was the first huge red flag in the article. I would expect Malting the barley would be hugely different from place to place with such limited options. I didn't see the article mention it at all.

Pitching rates don't effect the final flavor all that much. Pitching too little is a problem as it will take longer to ferment, giving wild yeast more time to sour/ruin the beer. But pitching too much yeast would not really result in much change in flavor in this case.

[jojobas]

Malting is harnessing natural enzymes produced in germination, better malting is a side effect of faster sprouting (something they'd plausibly breed it for). Wild barley is still around, one could hybridize as early a variety as he wishes. Lambic beers are still produced on wild yeast too.

It would be hard to match an exact beer as a particular early brewer made, but seemingly easy to cover the entire spectrum of beers plausibly open to them. Then again, I have doubts they were consistent and reproducible with the kind of instruments they had.

[KineticLensman]

I’d guess that individual brewers with years of experience could have produced remarkably consistent results and their apprentices would have picked up the skills. But every brewer would have produced different flavours. The weather conditions would have led to variations.

[jojobas]

Not from what I understood from working at a brewery. They would have to eyeball the brewing temperatures and fermentation temperatures would not be constant either, so both sugar initial wort sugar content and yeast-defived flavours would be all over the place.

[jaredhallen]

The malt definitely had less diastatic power, which is its ability to convert the starches to sugars during mash. They may have had some tricks of the trade, or they may have just ended up with less conversion. If it was the latter, you could manipulate your mash to emulate, but without knowing the goal you'd just be guessing. And the yeast, you're absolutely correct. And that's one of the biggest contributing factors in the finished product, especially with no hops involved.

[sciurus]

My take away from https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sr7zk5/has_t... is that even very well-intentioned, well-researched attempts at recreating historical recipes and being techniques are unlikely to yield historically accurate results.

[anon84873628]

Yeah. The author is careful to note the difference in yeast strains, equipment, water hardness, etc, but doesn't talk about the grain itself.

The main conclusion is how much more grain was used and how inefficient the procedure is compared to modern practices. Is it plausible that the grains of the time were just less starchy?

[MarkMarine]

They didn’t have pitching rates, because they didn’t know what yeast was or have any idea of microbes. It was just the “essence” left over from beer making, and if they didn’t move it into the next barrel it didn’t work.