Beer, it turns out, was important to early American armies. So important that George Washington scrawled a recipe for “small beer” in a notebook in 1757, when he was a colonel in the Virginia militia during the French and Indian War.
“Today we think about beer as something to get at the barbecue, but in the past, it actually was a way of getting potable drinking water — because water was not clean,” said Julie Golia, who directs the New York Public Library’s 42nd Street research library. “And if everybody in your army got dysentery, you were in big trouble — so, small beer to the rescue!”
As part of its celebration of America 250, the library asked New York-based Talea Beer Co. to brew a couple hundred bottles of Washington’s original recipe that they could share internally. Talea also used the recipe as inspiration for a more contemporary version, which they call “Liberty Lager.” It’s sold in their taprooms in New York.
“Small beer” is called that because of its low alcohol content, about 1 to 3 percent. Washington’s recipe, which is in the NYPL’s collection, combines hops, yeast, water and a lot of molasses. It’s the molasses that makes it very different from the beer we’re accustomed to — it’s sweeter and a little tart, with a “baking sugar, cookie kind of spice, a little bit of minerality,” said Eric Brown, Talea’s brewmaster.
Washington’s brew is a dark amber, the color of an Irish-red ale. And it’s cloudy — not filtered like most contemporary beer. The flavor is more like wine, complex and shifting in your mouth.
All that complexity is a surprise, given that small beer was supposed to refresh people while giving a bit of a sugar boost. Another surprise — it would have been served at room temperature.
“They would have drank it at likely whatever the temperature was in the environment in which they were marching,” Golia said. “If it was the winter, it would have been cold. If it was in the summer, it would have been warm.”
If you want to try out Washington’s small beer yourself, you can. The recipe is transcribed on the library’s website. Brown suggests using baking molasses, keeping everything very clean, and getting a pure line of yeast from a homebrew supply shop.
He said, “making the fermentable solution will take a couple hours, and then it’ll ferment about a week.”
Cheers!
Edited for broadcast and digital by Luis Clemens. Audio mixed by Chloee Weiner. Additional assistance by Janet W. Lee
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