Fuggled Beers of the Year: BOAB

Audience meet BOAB, BOAB meet audience. If it is your first time meeting BOAB, you might just need to know that it is Fuggled-speak for beers that are "between orange and brown", so anything from Vienna lagers to brown ale and everything in between, erm obviously as that is in the name. Onwards ho!

Virginia

• Tavern Brown Ale - Alewerks Brewing, Williamsburg
• Beech Blanket - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville
• Loden Vienna Lager - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville

Honorable mentions: Threadenator; Houndstooth - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville; Fritz - SuperFly Brewing, Charlottesville; Wolf Gang Vienna Lager - Buffalo Mountain Brewing, Floyd.

Let's just get one thing out of the way Selvedge are going to dominate the Virginia lists for these reviews for the very simple reason I drink far more of their beer than any other brewery in Virginia. As I mentioned in a Vinepair article last year, they are knocking it out of the park, and if anything they are only getting better as Josh and gang get a full grip on their new brewing system.It may come as a surprise to some though that my Virginia BOAB beer of the year is not the magnificent Loden, but rather their rauchbier, Beech Blanket. I love rauchbier, to the extent that I am not interested in these silly little "hint of bacon" beers, hit me with lots of smoke! Beech Blanket is much more in the Spezial realm than Schlenkerla, and is absolutely redolent with pungent beech smoke, coupled though with a smooth drinkability that has made it a regular beer throughout this year. Also, fun fact, it makes a fantastic addition to many of Josh's pale lagers just to mix things up a bit.

Rest of the USA

• Altbier - Bierkeller Brewing, Columbia, SC
• Copper - Olde Mecklenburg Brewing, Charlotte, NC
• Munzler's Vienna Lager - Olde Mecklenburg Brewing, Charlotte, NC

Honorable mention: Little Nator - Tröeg's Brewing, Hershey, PA

It's pretty slim pickings in the rest of the USA section this year, largely because Mrs V and I haven't really got out and about the country much. Even with that said, the 3 selections here are all fantastic beers, but I have to choose just one, and that one is an example of one of my favourite styles, but first a story. The first time I had an example of this particular style from the place it originated, I was in Berlin, it was 2008 and Mrs V and I had gone to hang out with a friend. Wandering round that day we stumbled upon an art festival, and in the middle of festival was a mobile bar for Brauerei Schumacher in Düsseldorf. I was as giddy as a schoolboy to have my first real altbier actually from Düsseldorf as up to that point I had only had a version at Pivovar u Bulovky in Prague. Anyway, I fell in love with the style immediately, and it is still a bucket list item to drink Schumacher at source. The winner here though I drank in rather different circumstances, the kids were in bed, it was hot as hell in Florida, and so I went out to the balcony of the place we stay in and opened a one litre growler to Bierkeller Brewing's Altbier, and it was sublime. So good, I went and got my other growler of it, just to keep on drinking it. When we headed back north to Virginia, with a quick stop on Columbia, I stocked up. 

Rest of the World

• Pilsner Urquell - Plzeňský Prazdroj, Plzeň, CZ
• Oktober-Fest Märzen - Privatbrauerei Ayinger, Aying, DE
• Nut Brown Ale - Samuel Smiths Brewery, Tadcaster, UK

Again with the slim pickings, a combination of drinking mostly locally brewed beers and having really upped my homebrew game the last couple of years. The international BOAB beer of the year though is one whose arrival in the stores signifies the end of summer and the beginning of autumn, which by itself gives the game away. Ayinger are such a solid choice for German beer, though I wish I understood their production codes to work out the age of some of their beers, when it comes to seasonals though I worry less. I realise Oktober-Fest is not an official beer for the festival itself, but in my mind it captures the essence of a great festbier, hefty but not cloying, distinctive but not wacky, I relish every bottle I get my hands on.

Ah....decisions, decisions. Three great beers, three fantastic styles. Ultimately though, I have had a long affair with the winning style, ever since trying it for the first time in Prague (the suspense must be erm, well, suspenseful given I had all three styles for the first time in Prague)...but the winner is the style that won my heart ultimately in a park in Berlin. Yeah, altbier is just something I love and lament in almost equal measure given the scarcity of the style in the US. So, the BOAB beer of 2025 is the superb example of the style from Columbia's Bierkeller, a brewery that I recently highlighted in an article for Vinepair as one of the best in the US.

Fuggled Beers of the Year: Pale

It's that time of the year, the Winter Solstice is upon us, and what better to do than to review a year's worth of drinking? As has become my own tradition, I will break this down into multiple posts, one for pale beer, one for BOAB ("between orange and brown", and dark, and then an overall beer of the year, as well as one for Virginia cider of the year.

As I have done for several years now, I will highlight beers from Virginia, the rest of the US, and the rest of the world before crowning each category winner, so on with the show...

Virginia

• Spoolboy 10° Czech pale lager - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville
• Chain Stitch Helles - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville
• Coat Czech 12° Czech pale lager - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville

Honorable mentions: Ten - Sojourn Fermentory, Suffolk; Pylon Pilsner - Patch Brewing, Gordonsville; Voda Czech style Pilsner - Caboose Brewing, Vienna; Vested Interest - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville.

A clean sweep for the brewery I visit far more than any other, but in my defense, Josh makes beers that are simply delightful and would grace any kneipe, keller, hospoda, or hostinec throughout Central Europe. I didn't write my annual Top 10 Virginian Beers this summer, but it would have been overwhelmingly Selvedge Brewing products. All that said, even choosing one from the three mentioned is a monumentally difficult task as on any given time I am at Selvedge at the moment it is pretty much a given that I will be rotating through the three of them. Even so...I can only choose one, and that is the one that both Mrs V and I pretty much immediately order when we sit down, the one that both of us have raved about to friends, acquaintances, and anyone within earshot willing to listen, the one that takes both of us back to our spiritual home in Czechia. Spoolboy, the most perfect desítka imaginable, and one that I wish I could sit and drink with Evan, Max, and co back in Prague.

Rest of the USA

• Notch Pils - Notch Brewing, Salem, MA
• Gold - Live Oak Brewing, Austin, TX
• Urhell - Bierkeller Brewing, Columbia, SC

Honorable mentions: Bavarian Pilsner - Von Trapp Brewing, Stowe, VT; Pilsner - New Belgium Brewing, Fort Collins, CO; Captain Jack Pilsner - Olde Mecklenburg Brewing, Charlotte, NC; Pilz - Live Oak Brewing, Austin, TX; Kirkland Lager - Deschutes Brewing, OR

Despite being an abysmal beer tourist, as I have mentioned many a time in the past, when I do get to travel for work, I always make sure to find some time to unwind in a local brewery with a decent lager selection. I am sorry folks, but if you haven't worked out that pale lagers are my go-to beer style, and have been for many years, you simply haven't been paying attention. Probably my favourite annual trip to to a conference in Austin, Texas, that gives me the opportunity to get to Live Oak Brewing. So it was this spring, myself and colleagues rolled up and spent an excellent few hours in the tap room enjoying the many fine beers on offer. It was much to my delight that they had just tapped this year's batch of Gold, a Bavarian style pilsner that is, in my as ever unhumble opinion, the best pilsner that Live Oak brews. Yes I love Pilz, but Gold is just a nose ahead in my mind, and so I enjoyed plenty of it.

Rest of the World

• La Fin du Monde - Unibroue, Canada
• Jura - Pivovar Chroust, Czechia
• Tannenzäpfle - Badische Staatsbrauerei Rothaus, Germany

Sadly no foreign trips this year for me, so my international drinking has been limited to whatever I could find in the store, or in the case of the winner, something new and exciting that I hadn't expected to see at ChurchKey on a business trip to DC. Also, a fun fact, the beer in question comes from a part of Prague that many, many moons ago, I actually very close to, as in just one metro stop away. Obviously then the international pale beer of the year is Jura from Pivovar Chroust in Prague. As I say, I was sitting in ChurchKey, perusing the beer list and my eyes were drawn to the word "Jura" partly because I had just bought a couple of bottles of Jura whisky and was surprised to see that collection of letters in a beer list. What followed was a fantastically bracing, bitter 12° Czech pale lager that was an exceedingly happy surprise.

Three fantastic examples of Central European pale lagers in the Plzeň tradition, but obviously I can choose but one. That one will come as no surprise to anyone that knows me, or follows my Instagram, it is the one that come the end of this week I will be drinking having finished work for the year. Yes, then the Fuggled Pale Beer of 2025, a prize still unencumbered with the grubbiness of filthy lucre and commercial considerations is Selvedge's magnificent Spoolboy 10° Czech Pale Lager, a beer I will miss deeply when this batch is gone, and then I will begin my campaign to bring it back as soon as possible.

Morana: Tmave's Birthday in America

This Thursday is the 15th anniversary of the day I spent at Devils Backbone Basecamp brewing the first ever batch of Morana, a Czech style dark lager that I designed for them. I had spent the previous months diving into archives, emailing with multiple brewers, and beer experts, in various languages - English, German, Czech, and Slovak - to learn everything I could about a family of beers that at the time only consisted of about 5% of Czech beer production. Obviously, having only fairly recently decamped from Prague to Virginia, I was also relying on my own remembrances of beers that I had got a taste for in the last couple of years there, when I moved beyond the realms of Gambrinus, Staropramen, and Velkopopovivký Kozel.

My go-to dark lagers at the time were brewed by Kout na Šumavě and available at the fantastic U Slovanské lipy, but it was the 14° version that I was using as my model for Morana. They also had an 18° that as a 0.3l malé pivo made for a wonderful nightcap.

Back in 2010, Czech style dark lager wasn't an accepted "style" on sites that advocated for the rating of beer and it didn't exist in the BJCP style guidelines until 2015. Fun fact, there is a post in BeerAdvocate in which I pointed out that tmavé is different from both schwarzbier and dunkel and thus deserved it's own category, a point met with howls of "too many styles" already, meanwhile black IPA had a moment in the sun and immediately got recognition from the gatekeeping banshees mods.

From my research and deep diving since, I am convinced that Morana was in fact the first authentic Czech style dark lager brewed in the modern American craft brewing industry. By "authentic" here I mean using appropriate ingredients and methods, so yes it has always been double decocted, as well as giving it the time to lager extensively. When it was first released, I was transported, Anton Ego style, back to the pubs of Žižkov, Nusle, and Karlín. It has since been brewed about half a dozen times, and as Jason and co have invested in open fermenters, horizontal lagering tanks, and the like, it has got better and better with every brewing.

All of this came rushing back to me this last weekend, as I was lazily scrolling through the Memories feature on Facebook and saw something mentioned about looking forward to being at the brewery to help make the first batch. With that in mind, I changed my homebrew plans for this weekend, out went my next batch of Vienna lager, and in came a 15th anniversary brew of Černý Lev, my homebrew version of Morana.

Previous batches have used the traditional German malts from Weyermann, but as you may know if you've been following my social media for a while, I am committed to using my local malting company, Murphy & Rude, for all my malt needs. As such, a slight redesign was required. My grist for this weekend then is:

• 75% Virginia Pils
• 10% CaraMel Light (similar to CaraVienne)
• 10% Munich 9
• 5% Cimmerian Black (similar to Carafa III Special)

For the hopping, I am of course using Saaz for flavour and aroma, but going with Sterling for bittering:

• 16 IBU Sterling for 60 minutes
• 9 IBU Saaz for 30 minutes
• 6 IBU Saaz for 15 minutes

For the yeast, good old W34/70 is getting to chew through the planned 14° wort to hopefully give me an ABV of around 5.6%. Brewfather says that 34/70 has an apparent attention of 81%, but going through my notes on previous brews, I average about 75% so I am not too worried about drying it out.

One major change from the last time I brewed this recipe is that I will be doing a decoction mash, in this case a double decoction, as I outlined in this post last year.

Once the yeast has done it's thing, it will get 42 days at near zero before being tapped in my kitchen as the first homebrew beer of 2026, on February 1st. The last 14 days of that will be gently, and slowly, carbing in the kegerator - though I am toying with the idea of getting a spunding valve and letting it carbonate naturally...

If this batch turns out like previous batches of Černý Lev, I will be very happy.

Old Friends: Unibroue La Fin du Monde

Let me take you back in time. It is late December 2008 (yeah, I know, it seems like entire lifetimes ago), Mrs V and I have yet to leave Prague for the United States - in fact, at this point we didn't really know where in the US we would be moving to, given Mrs V hadn't found a job. At that time, my parents lived in an impossibly gorgeous hamlet in the Haute Vienne region of France, in an old farmhouse that still had a couple of acres of land attached. They had a small orchard, a pond, and green fields as far as the eye could see in every direction. Around 5pm every afternoon, the neighbours ran their herd of cattle, and the ground would gently tremor at the stampede. With Christmas just a week or so away, Mrs V and I flew to Paris Orly at some ridiculous time of the morning, to catch the train from Gare d'Austerlitz to La Souterraine, where my parents would pick us up and head to their hamlet.

That particular winter I had ordered a load of beer from the UK, since my parents were visiting my eldest brother, who lived in Kent at the time, so that was waiting for me when we arrived. However, I wanted to try local French beer, such as the La Lémovice I found at Limoges market (fun fact, they are sitll in business and now have a website), as well as some thoroughly disgusting shite being made by an English bloke, for which we drove an hour or so for a night time market - oh well, at least the market was delightful. As was traditional with our trips to the French countryside, a jaunt to the nearest sizeable town, the aforementioned La Souterraine, and a supermarket revealed new horizons. Unrelated to this post, but I love French supermarkets, in this case it was an E.Leclerc. It was at this E.Leclerc that I discovered that it was possible to get Orval for an insanely reasonable €1.30, as well as picking up today's Old Friend beer, Unibroue's La Fin du Monde, for the first time, along with a couple of other Unibroue beers.

Back to the present and having spent Sunday morning in the garden, moving raised bed frames, pruning blackberries, and cleaning up in preparation for winter, I sat on my front porch with the 750ml bottle to dive on in and revisit a beer I hadn't had since before the twins were born, which is 8 years ago now!

I have to admit I was a little surprised by just how hazy this one poured, though it had been in a pretty cold beer fridge for a while, so some of it is likely chill haze. Goodness me though, look at that glorious, dense, cloud of foam sitting there atop the orange beer. It was at this point I took a moment to read the back of the bottle and that Unibroue market this beer as a tripel, not a style I drink very often to be honest. That foam though, it lingered, slowly collapsing in on itself until about a half a centimetre remained, and stayed around until I refreshed the glass - yeah I kept this all to myself, Mrs V was off playing fiddle, in my defense.

Sitting on my deck, the kids playing whatever games they were, I stuck my nose as close to the foam as I dare, and was regaled with a notable graininess, subtly backed with a spiciness like coriander and ginger, and some light citrus that reminded me a lemon zest. Swimming around in the mix was also a gentle sweetness, like light honey or simple sugar syrup. As I mentioned, tripel is not a style I readily gravitate to, but the aroma was doing a number on my senses and I just wanted to dive on in to the taste, so I did.

That sweet syrup thing I had been smelling was definitely not a figment of the imagination, it was there in the flavour, though perhaps with hints more of very light caramel, to be honest it floated between that and honey. Beneath the honey was a biscuity thing that made me wish there were a middle ground between the venerable digestive and a more savory water biscuit - I have a digestive recipe in one of my cook books, perhaps a project to make a less sweet variant is in order? The citrus thing from the aroma decided to join the party too, this time as a marmalade character, but not traditional orange marmalade, rather lemon marmalade - not sure if that is still a thing back in the UK, but I had a moment of thinking about how much I liked lemon marmalade on my toast as a kid. 

Did I mention yet that tripel is not really a style I am regular drinker of? Well, that might have to be caveated with "unless it is La Fin du Monde". So many tripels that get made in my neck of the woods tend to be cloyingly sweet and almost sickly, so much so that I wonder if they are being brewed as a distinctly untraditional all malt beer? By comparison, this had quite a dry finish that, when coupled with the aroma and flavor notes, made me think it may actually use a decent amount of sugar. There is just enough bitterness as well to offset the sweetness, and at 9% abv the absence of an alcohol hit was much appreciated. Thinking back on that foam, yay for bottle conditioning and the carbonation being noticeable but not spikey, as some highly forced carbonated beers are.

Yeah, I'll be buying this again, and not leaving it for goodness knows how many years.

Old Friends: Boddingtons Pub Ale

I am starting to think that my eldest brother has an awful lot to answer for, and not just the horse racing I mentioned in the last post. Fun fact, when my younger brother and I were around 11/12 years old, the eldest, then about 19 I think, came home to stay for a while, and so naturally he taught us how to read the form for the horse racing. 

We loved having our big brother at home, he was our hero and we thought him the very epitome of cool, every Saturday morning we would head up to the local shop, at the time we lived in a place called Sebastopol, not in Crimea, but just outside Cwmbran in Wales, and buy the paper. We would then sit and go through the races for that day, and my brother would give us both a quid to put on any horse we wanted, when the National came round he bumped it to a fiver. It was he that told us to always keep an eye out for a horse that has come fourth in both its previous outings, the frequency with which they win is interesting. Anyway, said brother, the one with an awful lot of answer for, is who I think of whenever I think of Boddingtons, which we called "Bod", it was one of his tipples, along with Guinness.

Apparently Boddingtons is undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment back in the UK, with it being brewed under license by J.W. Lees and available on cask in the pubs of Manchester - not going to lie, I'd be a pig in clover if casks of that found its way to Virginia, but alas it is unlikely. I was blissfully unaware of these developments when I was picking cans and bottles of stuff I hadn't drunk in ages from the shelves of my local Wegman's, including a can of today's friend for a revisit...

It may well be heresy to pour a Lancashire beer into a Yorkshire pint glass, the nonic didn't feel appropriate, nor yet the dimpled mug, and of my British glasses that would have left another Yorkshire glass anyway, so the Sam Smith's tulip it was. Little side story, I was once sat in a diner in Charlottesville when the folks in the booth behind Mrs V and I asked the waitress "what kind of beer is Boddingtons", to whuch she replied "it's kind of like Guinness", I almost spat coffee all over the diner. I guess she was referring to the nitro nature of Bod, but that light copper is as far from Guinness black as you could imagine (artistic license there, yes I know there are paler beers). Still, topped with a healthy amount of firm nitro white cream and strikingly clear, it was a beautiful looking almost pint of beer.

When I drank Boddingtons as a student I wasn't paying much attention to the aromas and all that jazz, seriously did any of us? We were more consumed with whether the drink in our hands conveyed any sense of cool to those around us, though being more of a Guinness/Murphy's/Caffrey's drinker at the time, the only cool I could muster was likely the cold shoulder of hoping nobody would speak to my shy arse, whilst desperately wanting someone to talk to me - ah the joys of youthful insecurity coupled with crushing shyness and the need for Dutch courage. So, having given up ambitions to coolness, I stick my nose on in the glass and came back with...well, not much really (yay nitro beer head that blocks anything interesting). There was a slight sweetness that reminded me of golden syrup, maybe a little earthiness, some fruity notes, like blackcurrants that made me wonder if Bramling Cross hops are in the mix somewhere. That sweetness thing was present in the tasting as well, though more in the realm of Hobnobs than specifically golden syrup, think gentle biscuit and you are there. Alongside the biscuit was an orange marmalade thing that made me think East Kent Goldings, but the kind of marmalade with finely shredded zest in it, including a little pith to just add a whisper of bitterness.

So there you have it, Boddingtons from a nitro can, in my notes I have the phrase "non-descript" and that's really not very fair as that term has become short hand for "boring" or "bad" but Bod ain't bad, and it certainly isn't boring, it's just kind of there, perfectly inoffensive, technically accomplished, and something I'll be happy enough to drink from time to time. It's kind of like coming back to where you grew up and everyone except yourself has stayed at home and is still living like it's 1995, no alarm, no surprises, no changes, no growth. Fine to come home to, but you'll be on your way again soon enough.

Old Friends: Leffe Blonde

Dipping into some of the dimmest and most distant of crevices in my drinking memories today for this resurrection of my Old Friends series. Back in the days when I was a college student in Birmingham, I got the train from New Street early one Saturday morning to go to Esher in Surrey. The main purpose for the trip was to spend the day at the Sandown races with my eldest brother, who lived down that way back then. Having spent the day frittering money away on thoroughbreds of varying uselessness, we headed into central London for dinner at a non-descript curry house, non-descript in the sense that I don't have the foggiest as to what I ate, but weirdly 2 beers are lodged in my memory, the Żywiec I was drinking and the Leffe Blonde that was my brother's choice that night.

Being a good younger brother, by 8 years, I was suitably in awe of his sophistication and worldly wiseness, and so at some point back in Brum I made a point of trying Leffe, in the comfort of the All Bar One. Given that I studied theology at Bible college, I was definitely not supposed to be there as we were supposed to not partake in the demon drink and all that jazz - I wonder if the college authorities knew that plenty of the married students kept a stash of booze in their flats that the singles among us would take advantage of from time to time, or that I would disappear for a few pints of Caffrey's at a pub called The Trees most afternoons?

Anyway, I developed a liking for Leffe Blonde, and so in the shop the other week, seeing it available as a single bottle in a build your own six pack, I thought, what the heck, and on one of the rare occasions the house was empty, I cracked it open to head down memory lane...

Wracking the old grey matter for hints of what lay ahead of me, I had a notion that what I was going to find would be distinctly sweet, even slick and syrupy, with a nose full of sugar. Still, it looked grand going into my one and only vaguely appropriate glass for a Belgian abbey ale.

It certainly poured the colour I vaguely recalled, a beautifully rich, deep, golden with superb clarity - I assume it is filtered. The head was a half inch of white foam, with some large bubbles that soon popped as it dissipated to a thin schmeer. I don't recall if my urbane brother sniffed his beer that night in London, but I certainly did here in Central Virginia, and prominent was a spicy character that made me think of ginger and cloves, not quite Christmas gingerbread from a European Yuletide market, but subtly lingering there, along with traces of golden syrup and marmelade.

Ok, just drink the damned beer already...cloves again - the thing with that clove thing is that it really is like the dark side of the Force, once you head down that way "forever will it dominate your destiny", there is no escaping it, even if it is a yeast derived ester. In the mix though was also dark honey, a trace of oakiness, and dried fruits, almost a rich spiced fruit cake, but with a light pithy bitterness in the background to keep it interesting.

So that sweet attack that my memory had me expecting didn't happen, don't get me wrong, it is sweet, just not syrupy and overwhelmingly cloying. I was actually pleasantly surprised and while it is hardly the most characterful abbey ale in the world, he says as if he drinks them regularly, it was decidedly drinkable and might have to make more regular appearances in the beer fridge, especially for soaking the currants, raisins, and co for my annual Yule cake.

Homebrew - Victorian Style

There is something delightfully pompous, perhaps a little insane, about book titles in the Victorian era that always reminds me of the "Connections" TV series presented by James Burke. In episode 2 there is a segment about Victorian weather science in the Highlands, that describes the effect of science on the people of Victorian Britain, in that it:

"made them all lunatic in the same way".

An example of a daft book title is this magnificent tome from 1852...

Can you get much more condescending than the head chef to the Royal Family should advise the working classes on how to cook? Admittedly I bought the book precisely for the title and out of curiosity about what the servants of the upper echelons though regular folks should, could, or even would be willing and able to cook. Francatelli even gives a list of equipment that said "working classes" require for the recipes and techniques in his book, which would cost £6 12s 4d in pre-decimal currency, that's about £700/$930/€800 today, and includes such things as a potato steamer for 2 Shillings, a 2 quart tin saucepan for 1s 6d, and a 12 gallon copper "for washing or brewing" to be had at the princely sum of £1 10s or £160/$213/€185 in today's money.

A 12 gallon copper for brewing you say, don't forget that in 1852 the Imperial gallon had been standardised for nearly 30 years as being 4.6(ish) litres, as opposed to the old gallons being 3.8 litres, and still in use in the USA. A 12 gallon copper would hold 54.5 litres. Also included in the list of essentials is a "mash-tub" for another 10 Shillings (£50/$66/€60) and two "cooling tubs" again for 10 Shillings, though Franctelli does allow the downtrodden masses to use "an old wine or beer cask, cut in halves" as this "would be cheaper, and answer the same purpose". Seemingly used casks were to be had for a mere 6 Shillings (£32/$42/€37).

All of this detail would suggest then that the book has a recipe for brewing your own beer, and thankfully it does not disappoint, as number 130 is handily titled "How to Brew Your Own Beer", though confusingly our chef friend recommends a 30 gallon copper and a we actually have a size for the mash tub, 54 gallons, which is 245.5 litres. The other equipment recommended is:

"another tub of smaller size, called an underback; a bucket or pail, a wooden hand-bowl, a large wooden funnel, a mash-stirrer, four scraped long stoutsticks, a good-sized loose-wrought wicker basket for straining the beer, and another small bowl-shaped wicker basket, called a tapwaist, to fasten inside the mash-tub".

A recipe though, a recipe? I hear you cry as you so dearly want to go and make some Victorian style homebrew. Hold your drays sunshine, first things first, water. In a world without universal in home plumbing, what is a homebrewer to do? Well, apparently not to use spring water for a start as "its hardness...is unfit for brewing", remember that at this time geology was very much in its infancy. Ok then, no spring water. Rain water perhaps? Sure, if it is collected in clean vessels, but Francatelli recommends "water fetched from a brook or river" being "free from all calcareous admixture", basically water lacking in calcium carbonate, because the "consequent softness gives them the greater power to extract all the goodness and strength from the malt and hops". Ok, soft water it is then, though if you are an industrial labourer in the cities of Britain leading the Industrial Revolution, I am not convinced you'd be dipping into the Thames, the Trent, or the Clyde for your brewing water.

Eventually, we do get to a recipe, of sorts.

"In order to ensure having good wholesome beer, it is necessary to calculate your brewing at the rate of two bushels of malt and two pounds of hops to fifty-four gallons of water".

More maths...an Imperial bushel is 36.4 litres, a litre is a kilogram, therefore an Imperial bushel is about 36.4kgs, or 80.2lbs, we need two of those for making 54 Imperial gallons, so 160.4lbs of malt and 2 pounds of hops, whole leaf of course, since T-90 pellets weren't a thing yet. After a lot of head scratching and double checking my work, I think this means we would be looking at a starting gravity of about 1.067, and potentially an ABV of 6.4% - assuming the use of pale malt.

What about the hopping? Well for a start, no named variety is mentioned in the book, and if I understand the process correctly, the Victorian homebrewer would have practiced "first wort hopping" as we call it today, viz:

"put your hops into the underback tub, and let the wort run out upon them".

The first mash lasted three hours, and while the runnings were in the underback with the hops, a second mash of 2 hours took place. Eventually giving the brewer sufficient wort to require 2 boils, with the hops split between them. The boil lasts for 90 minutes, and again assuming my numbers are correct we would end up with about 35 IBUs - making the assumption that something like Fuggles were used at about 4% alpha acids.

According to Francatelli, this will eventually "produce three kilderkins of good beer".

Now, I have yet to try and make a beer based on this text, but I do intend to try at some point, though sourcing period appropriate ingredients may be a stumbling block, especially as Francatelli doesn't say what kind of malt his working class readers should use - my hunch is that given diastatic brown malt was still a thing, it might have been that given that Francatelli doesn't mention starting gravities or alcohol content at all, but elsewhere is focused on price of ingredients, and brown malt was cheaper than pale from a monetary stand point.

If I ever figure this out, it would be fun to try and create a recipe and maybe brew it with one of my local breweries...all that is for another day though.