The Session: Colonial Uprising

This month's Session is being hosted by my mate Reuben over at The Tale of the Ale, who I am looking forward to showing the delights of the Central VA booze scene in a few weeks. His theme is as follows:

If you have a local beer style that died out and is starting to appear again then please let the world know. Not everyone will so just write about any that you have experienced. Some of the recent style resurrections I have come across in Ireland are Kentucky Common, Grodziskie, Gose and some others. Perhaps it's a beer you have only come across in homebrew circles and is not even made commercially.

There are no restrictions other than the beer being an obscure style you don't find in very many places. The format, I leave up to individuals. It could be a historical analysis or just a simple beer review.

If you've been reading Fuggled for a while you will know that history is something I am generally very interested in. The history of beer is of course very interesting, and far better served by the likes of Martyn Cornell and Ron Pattinson than I. Each year since I moved to the US I have organised the International Homebrew Project, which seeks to rebrew historic recipes based on Ron's research. You could say then that I enjoy reviving lost, forgotten, or misunderstood beer styles.

Living in an area of Virginia steeped with Colonial and Revolutionary era history, I am finding myself more and more interested in the lives of the people that left everything they knew back in Europe to come to the New World, including what they drank. It would seem from my reading that malted barley was something of a luxury item, and so beers from those eras were laden with ingredients that would make a Reinheitsgebot purist freak out.

Thomas Jefferson for example sought out 'The New American Brewer and Tanner' by Joseph Coppinger because it contained a method for 'malting Indian Corn'. Coppinger though mentions that it is 'peculiarly adapted to the brewing of porter' which makes me wonder if the pale beers on the market claiming to be based on Jefferson's 'recipe' (which he himself claimed was impossible to write down) are missing the mark by not using corn in a porter.

However, I digress. This year I am doing a homebrew project to recreate a drink that dates from the early 18th century, and is attested to as being brewed in southern Virginia in the run up to the American Revolution. Said drink is called 'pumperkin', and is described thus:

Let the Pompion be beaten in a Trough and pressed as Apples. The expressed juice is to be boiled in a copper a considerable time and carefully skimmed that there may be no remains of the fibrous part of the pulp. After that intention is answered let the liquid be hopped culled fermented & casked as malt beer.

Thus it is that I have 16 pumpkin plants in grow bags in a part of my garden where hopefully the deer will not discover them. I want this project to be as faithful as possible to what would have been produced at that time, so I am growing a heritage cultivar of pumpkins dating back to the 17th century. When the time comes to brew the beer sometime in the autumn, I will likely use Cluster hops, or alternatively East Kent Goldings, rather than a modern American hop strain.

I have no idea what to expect from the beer in terms of flavour, strength, drinkability, or even how much I will have of the stuff - that all depends on the pumpkins themselves. All I know at this point is that it is exciting to think about being engaged in experimental beer archaeology.