Research and Recipe Build: 1670 Tansy/Mugwort Oat Ale

Close of of the Tansy flower used to bitter this recipe.

So this is something new for my blog.  I wanted to capture the research process that goes into some of these beers since they take weeks to complete and finalize. Everything from researching similar homebrew recipes to reading pages and pages on wiki.

This particular beer has a great back story.  Typically my recipe builds go something like this:

1. Taste a beer.
2. Say "Wow this is good. Wonder if I could brew something similiar
3. Look for similar styled recipes online and then recreate based on my preference.

This Tansy/Mugwort Oat ale is a completely different path.  It looks something more like this:

1. Friend traces his roots back to Walsall, England in 1671. That's in the West Midlands.
2. Friend reaches out to local homebrew club in Walsall, England and asks them if they would know of a "house beer" recipe that would of been brewed in Walsall during the 1670's.
3. The homebrew club then reaches out to a beer historian who then contacts my friend and provides an oat ale recipe brewed with tansy - also known as mugwort.
4. Friend brings the recipe and idea into work and we start the process of building our version of the recipe.

Here is where I enter the picture.  My friend Mike is an extract brewer and this particular beer can not be made with extract.  That is because it has a very high proportion of oats.  Since I have been doing all grain brewing I was able to help build and finalize the recipe based on my set up and equipment.

Grain Bill:
At first glance the recipe seems near impossible.  Its a simple recipe.  75% oats and 25% pilsner malt brewed with Tansy instead of hops.  I initially thought there is no way to brew a 75% oat beer and not have it take all day due to a stuck sparge. In my mind I am thinking that the oats would all be flaked oats. This is because I did not know about malted oats.  I never knew these existed.  This is where the door opened and I was able to find some similar homebrew recipes that used malted oat in higher concentrations that you would typically use - for say a stout.

After some reading it seemed that you can use malted oats just as you would pilsner malt.  Some even said, since the husks are bigger on the malted oats it provides a good filtration for the mash and sparge.

After getting comfortable with the idea of malted oats we decided on the following recipe:

70% malted oats
5% flaked oats
25% marris otter pilsner malt

Illustration of Tansy plant.

Herb/Hops:
We knew our beer was going to have the tansy flower used in place of hops in at least a portion of our beer.  We also knew we were going to split the batch and test some different yeast strains and herb vs hops.  So the biggest question was how much tansy do we add in our batch.  This required a lot of reading on the internet to determine what is a safe level to use.  Tansy can be toxic in higher concentration.  Just check out the wiki page and all of the uses or home remedies it has been associated with:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tansy

Two of my favorites are - it "has has been prescribed by herbalists to expel worms" from the digestive system and during the "middle ages and later, high doses were used to induce abortions."

Nothing to mess around with so we needed to make sure we were not using it in high enough concentration to cause any issues.  We found with doctor websites that had tansy tea and herb shops that sold tansy teas for its "medicinal" benefits.  After some back and forth Mike landed on 0.5 ounces per 5 gallons.  This is where Mike had some back and forth with the folks from England and we got the amount "approved" by Dr. Ray.

Now we just had to source it.  Strangely enough we bought it from an online witch doctor type of site.

Yeast:
Our final step was to determine the yeast. This was one of the more simple steps.  We decided on three different yeast combinations.  Here is a break down with the reason why we selected it.

1. Burton Ale Yeast - Simple.  Burton Ale is from Burton upon Trent England.  Google maps tells us its a 40 minute car ride from Burton to Wassail.  After doing this same task for all of hte English yeast strains we found this to be the closets.  This is of course using very basic information provided and Google maps alone.
2. Brettanomyces Bruxellensis - This was another easy one for me.  I love using Brett.  I remember reading in the Wild Brews book that they first "discovered" this strain of Brett on the inside of barrels in England.  This is a yeast strain that lives in the wood of the barrels.  We are guessing that barrels were used in 1660 to store beer.  It made sense to us to try one of our batches with Brett and hope to get an authentic oat ale from the 1660's.  It will also have a small amount of Burton to help fermentation along quicker.
3. American Farmhouse - Oats.  Lots of oats.  This says farm to us.  I also read on another blog that the flavor of a high oat beer is very grassy or barn-yard like.  To me this screams farmhouse/saison.  We both wanted to try this yeast on other projects but never got around to it so this was our chance.

So that's it.  This is how we got to our recipe and why we selected what we selected.  This is by no means scientific.  We are making decisions based solely on the information we could find online and with the help of our new friends across the pond. The beauty of this beer is that we have never tasted a commercial version of an oat ale with tansy.  So in reality, there were no rules. When you don't have rules or expectations it can be a very exciting journey.  - OK so there was one rule.  We needed to keep the tansy levels safe.

 Special Thanks:

This beer could not of happened without the help from our friends from across the pond:

The organization we reached out to is the Midlands Craft Brewers
Dr. Ray Carson and Alan Gayton were the contacts at this organization.

Clive La Pesee is the name of the author and historian who Dr. Ray Carson and Alan Gayton directed us to.  He helped us put together the historical recipe. His website  has historical brewing books to buy and also free to download.  Really interesting stuff.  Go check it out.

Finally, the tansy came from The Iron Cauldron on Etsy. . Maintained by a nice lady named "Raven".

A brew day posting will be put up shortly... Until then - cheers.