Makeing and Keging beer

[Woods Dweller]

There are references to cask or wooden keg beers becoming infected, such terms as "rope beer" and "the fox", in almost every text of colonial brewing I have read.
My question is how do you sanitize your wooden keg?

Boiling water,&juice of 1 or 2 lemons. Now I store a bottle of a cheap whiskey in the wood Barrel. This is what I read in the book I posted in another post. I have 2 other Wood kegs on the way to try wine and new batch of beer.

 

[coloradoclyde]

The boiling water will remove the wax or pitch lining so relining will likely be necessary.

You got me interested so I pulled my old keg out of storage and started soaking it. The darn thing had so many leaks a hose would not overflow it. last time I soaked a keg it took two weeks to seal up.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

I sure would like that reference, for there are plenty of period references to importation of hop vines by the first colonists....odd that the stuff was already here but they had to import to plant.....I think that what botanists have identified as "North American wild" strains are actually cross bred European strains which are mixes of the imported varieties...that got away (birds eat then poop) after European introduction...just as when honey bees were imported and some queens escaped to form "wild" hives, and many assume, even today, that the honey bee has always been in the Americas.

I'd like to know when the botanists "identified" and named the three "American" varieties....I suspect it was well after the introduction of the European plants...and I will bet they assumed the plants were always there...

LD

 

[coloradoclyde]

Easy to verify continent of origin by examining the genetic profiles. genetic information found in American hops would not be present in European varieties.

 

[coloradoclyde]

Here are some hop links.
http://www.ars-grin.gov/cor/humulus/huminfo.html#history4

Also:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20616876

 

[Loyalist Dave]

They might be different...they might not when it comes to DNA. Plant diversification does not necessarily produce wide variables, except when there is a large separation of a vast amount of time, plus a stressor. For example the Elm Tree in Europe and North America equally are susceptible to Dutch Elm fungus, while Asian varieties have some notable resistance...elms appeared in the Miocene, 23 million years ago...yet with at least 30 varieties, no pressure to mutate except when exposed to the fungus.

On the other hand maybe the Vikings or the Irish introduced Hops to the Americas prior to Columbus contact :shocked2:

LD

 

[coloradoclyde]

On the other hand maybe the Vikings or the Irish introduced Hops to the Americas prior to Columbus contact

Or maybe the Egyptians, space aliens or by something divine....Maybe they have been here since the continents were connected?

Perhaps Ninkasi herself planted them. :idunno:

 

[Claude Mathis]

You owe me a beer.
I remember reading a text that stated early brewers used the wild hops but demand soon outpaced wild hop production.

Also see...

Hops is indigenous to much of the Northern Hemisphere, being traditionally found in Northern Europe, North America, and West Central Asia.

In North America hops was much used in native medicines, particularly by the Cherokee who used it as a anti-rheumatic, anti-inflammatory, analgesic, sedative, gynecological aid for breast and womb problems, and kidney and urinary aid for "gravel" and inflamed kidneys.
http://www.vortexhealth.net/hops.html[/quote]

Hop is native to North America and Europe.
http://hops.msu.edu/uploads/files/ipm_academy_2014_intro_to_hops.pdf[/quote]

 

[coloradoclyde]

Historical and scientific references are endless but some relish the argument.

Maybe we could all agree on Dandelions being imported. :grin:

 

[Woods Dweller]

With all this beer talk, I got ta open me a pint.

 

[coloradoclyde]

If you read through this (which is very interesting on it's own)
Hops growing wild are mentioned on several occasions. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28323/28323-h/28323-h.htm

 

[coloradoclyde]

I found an interesting article that gives us a view into what civil war era beer might have been like. http://beerandbrewing.com/VRCJ8ikAAHkq_V01/article/19th-century-beer-in-a-21st-century-world