My Idea for a New Brew

It's come to my attention that Beer is a pretty old beverage. What I thought was a maybe 10 or 15 year old libation, is actually actually some 7,000+ years old. It turns out a very large percentage of every beer in the world wasn't made by the evil inBev. Which is great because well inBev is as evil as Monsanto, the Yankees, and of course, Emperor Palpatine. Usually it goes Yankees<Monsanto<Papatine<inBev. But I digress. Anyways, beer has had a very long, intertwined relation to man. Discovery Channel did an entire mini series on "How Booze Built America." Fun fact, it's a great series, and an even greater drinking game. Tangent aside, beer has a great history. But I'm only concerning myself with a small era.

As you may or may not have figured out, I live in Maryland. One of the 13 colonies, and one of the few founded by non puritans, Maryland has a great beer history. And it got me thinking, what would early Marylander drink as beer. Imagine you're a early Maryland in the 1600. The Bay is full of weird looking water spiders things. So you decided what better way to feed your self then to steam them and eat them. Now what yo drink? Natty Boh doesn't exist yet, so you need a special beer. Turns out Baltimore is a great place, it has a large natural harbor, that is bustling with trade. Sugar, Grains, Molasses, and the like flow through the city like no other. So you visit your local granary and pick up some cereal, then some sugar. But alas, hops are hard to find, so American's used lots of different greens. And hence, my problem.

Hops existed, they weren't just very available to most colonists yet. And a couple Baltimore craft breweries have done this idea, but they use some ingredients many people don't like, such a Star Anise, Dandelion, and other esoteric brew ingredients. As one of the Great Trio's has lamented, he drove all the way to St. Mary's City to get an authentic brew, and was put off by its' flavor of Star Anise. So, I decided I am going to make a beer for him (and put a metric long ton of star anise,)

I am currently researching what ingredients I can use. I want to make sure the grains I use existed in the 1600's, the hops are as authentic as possible, and will be using local water (though I will not use bay water, bay water is like a class 1237.1 toxic waste.) Right now I have found:

       -Authentic unrefined sugar stored in Oak Barrels

       -Muscovado which is a very common sugar of the Caribbean 

As you can tell I don't have a lot, but lucky for me, beer doesn't have that many ingredients.I hope to have more on this later, and I will, but I want to blog about this from the very beginning to the very end. I am still researching grains and hops that we would have in Maryland in the 1600's but I promise the beer will be up and running soon!

Slainte!