Brewing Beer and Sharing Knowledge from England

Food historian Marc Meltonville brewed a batch of pale ale with our Historic Foodways staff in February.

English food and brewing historian Marc Meltonville visited Colonial Williamsburg in 2020. He has been researching and interpreting food history for 20 years. He has worked at the Royal Palace of Henry VIII and the Kew Gardens of King George III. Recently, Meltonville worked on a project of recreating Stone Age foods and drinks using the archeological evidence discovered at Stonehenge.

While here in the states, Meltonville was also brewing over two hundred gallons of beer at a mill in Delaware. What about a six-gallon brew like the 18th-century Virginia housewives would have made?

Brewing a Pale Ale

The process starts with the brewer bringing four and a half buckets of water to a boil and then running it through the wooden tubs and strainer. The mash tub is then filled with lightly crushed malted barley, and the hot water is ladled over the grain and stirred with the mash rake.

The process can be repeated up to three times, and each batch can be boiled separately to create three batches of different strength beers, or as professional English brewers did, they can be combined and boiled as one beer.

This greatly reduces the time the brewer spends and is necessary for us to fit the program into a modern museum setting. After all the mash is separated, the hops are added, and the liquid, now called wort, is brought to a boil.

After boiling for over an hour, the hops are removed, and the liquid is cooled so the yeast can be added to begin fermentation.