Englisch-Köstritzer

Beer Recipes
1

(I wasn’t sure where to post this. I don’t see a historic beers category anymore.)

Randy Mosher had an article in the September/October 2000 issue of Zymurgy on weird old German ale styles, like Gose and Grätzer (Grodziskie). One he described that hasn’t generated much interest was Englisch-Köstritzer. I found a copy of the 19th century book that describes it, and wrote up the book’s recipe, including a translation, and some of my experiences making it: https://acornbeeretc.blogspot.com/2016/01/wagners-recipe-for-englischer-kostritzer.html

Cheers!
Clay

2

pretty interesting, losses due to trub/etc sound insane, basically 1/3rd of the beer. lol

im guessing the “english” is a joking euphemism indicating some kind of odd or inverted quality about the beer. like “dutch” is used in english sometimes. or maybe just to make it sound exotic so it sells?

re: oak flavour. from what i’ve read about historic beer storage in oak barrels, they were generally pitched or whatever to reduce the impact of oaking. but who knows in every case

sounds good. probably a bunch of these cloudy, wheat, coriander/bitter orange ales across the north of europe for a long time. i wont call it a wit of course, but it sounds good

3

Huh, it hadn’t occurred to me before reading your post that maybe the beer really was cloudy. It’s a shame that Wágner has almost no description of the beer beyond the procedure. He says nearly nothing about the appearance or any other sensory quality. The strong beer is sweet, the lower-strength beer has fine color. Not much else.

4

i assumed some cloudiness from adding malt or flour directly to the fermenting wort/beer, or i guess it just sounded in line with the whole thing.

also, i skimmed it but didn’t udnerstand why he said it was “sweet”, i didn’t see him state an FG

5

No, no FG. No OG for that matter. And no mash rest times or temperatures. That part is pretty frustrating. As I point out, the quantities he gave for malt and water don’t add up to a strong beer, but he emphasizes how high it is in sugar in a few places, and the effects this has on production. I suspect there are errors in Wágner’s numbers.

6

there was a 3rd page where he ad a recipe with an OG and some stuff

7

Sorry, I should have mentioned there are four pages. The fourth is scans of the 1884 book and a translation.

8

Also, I should have thought thought that you might have been referring to the batch I made. I wrote that the OG was 1.072, but I didn’t give the FG, which was around 1.015 to 16.