Weekend Brewing

In preparation for WAC 6 in UCD next week we’ve brewed up a fresh brew of our Ale for general sampling and consumption on the day. Our brand new, watertight (ish), portable (ish) Fulacht held out after application of a good coat of (non toxic) bitumen paint externally. Our original fulacht, an old cattle trough, is now enjoying it’s retirement as a plant bed in Billy’s yard.

In the original experiment last year, the fact that our fulacht wasn’t completely watertight didn’t really matter – we simply flooded the entire pit and were able to successfully recover sufficient liquid to make large volumes of beer – but given the fact that this fulacht has to travel we had to ensure that it will function anywhere. Last weekends brew came out very clean. We decided to build a little dam of hot stones in the fulacht and covered it with a sheet of muslin as a preliminary filter. The resulting wort was very clean and appears to have a lot less sediment than our earlier brews. We overfilled the fulacht a little with water so it’s probable we’ll have a slightly weaker brew this time round. Rather than complicate the taste, we decided that we’d only add bog myrtle this time – to balance the sweetness of the wort and produce a very simple plain ale. Hopefully it’ll be palatable, if not tasty. We used a regular bakers yeast this time and it took very quickly, all bubbling happily away in the sheds, busy fermenting what will hopefully be our cleanest, tastiest ale to date.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 3:55 pm. It is filed under About the Beer and tagged with About Archaeology, archaeological consultants galway, brewing, bronze age beer, encient beer, experimental archaeology, WAC, WAC 6. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.