Harvest Beer recipe 1946

Enid Porter’s Cambridgeshire Customs and Folklore mentions a Harvest Beer recipe brewed in Weston Colville, a village about 13 miles west of Cambridge, at the brewhouse for the last time in 1946.

6 gallons of water, 2 bushels of malt, 2 lb of hops. The water was boiled in a large copper then transferred to the mash tub and left to cool for one hour. The malt was then added and the mixture closely covered so that it retained its heat for seven hours, after which it was strained and returned to the copper to be boiled, with the hops, for three hours. The liquid was then strained off and, after yeast, previously mixed with a little warm milk, had been added, was left for three days before being placed into casks. These ingredients made 36 gallons of beer

Simple. Except I can’t work out how 6 gallons of water would produce 36 gallons of beer?

Here’s an earlier Harvest Beer recipe from 1883

Harvest Beer recipe 1883

I found this in the October 1952 edition of East Anglian magazine, picked up from an antiques store in Suffolk.

Mrs. Goodman’s receipt 1883

Boil 1/2 pt. hops in 1 gallon of water for two hours. Strain and sweeten. Pour into earthenware vessel, float a slice of toast on top with a spoonful of brewers’ yeast on it. Cover and leave all night. Next day, remove toast, skim top and it is ready to go to the harvest field. This does not keep well: fresh supplies must be made daily

So if you put toast on beer, you can put beer on toast?

This is the 2009 limited edition Marmite, made with yeast used in the process of brewing Marston’s Pedigree. It didn’t taste particularly different to normal Marmite to me, and was sadly alcohol free, but then all Marmite is made with excess yeast from brewers. Some of the yeast extract comes from the Bass brewery in Burton on Trent and other breweries in the vicinity. Molson Coors say ‘about 90 per cent of the excess yeast the brewery produces is used to make Marmite‘