Beer with Green, Red & Purple Grapes
I have come to the conclusion that France and the Frenchman do not know what good beer really is; certainly, they do not make the heavier beers as we know them here. If they do, I have been unlucky for I have never found what I would myself call really good beer.
But I suppose if they wanted beers as we drink them they could make them easily enough. Beers in France are more like thin lager and I have a suspicion – probably false – that some of them are produced from remnants of the grape crops. This suspicion was strengthened last summer while drinking in the shadow of the Arc de ‘Triomphe, someone remarked that the beer was like thin aerated grape wine and pretty weak stuff at that. He even suggested the grapes might be the small green ones from a certain area. Knowing wines as I do, I suggested that perhaps batches of poor grapes might be used as a basic material or even that wine from a poor season might be diluted and then re-fermented with just enough malt and hops to make the beer that is quite popular over there.
All this set me thinking, and when I think something usually comes out of it – if only a headache. Anyway, I set out to make beers as I found them over there because I discovered that similar beers are now becoming popular here, especially with the ladies whom I am particularly anxious to please.
Following the continental seems the vogue, but I am not jumping on their wagon for the sake of fashion. I believe that if we can all gain from copying, or attempting to produce a product popular elsewhere, it is a good thing.
One practice I hope will not catch on over here is that of wiping the head off freshly poured beer with, above all things, a lolly stick. In Paris, Lyons, Dijon, Marseilles, Toulon – everywhere we went the barkeeper dutifully performed this deplorable act. My French being better than my Russian it needed only half an hour of gesticulating to make clear that the English do not like their beers guillotined.
Back to the idea. I did not get precisely what I was after, but I did get close to it. As any winemaker knows, four pounds of grapes makes a very poor wine, but four pounds of grapes added to a wort at the stage where the yeast is to be added makes a vast improvement to the lighter ales and lager type beers. Not everybody will like this, so experiment only with a small batch where, if you are not pleased with the result, it will not be a calamity. A friend, with whom I work in almost everything I do in this line, made an excellent lager type beer. I lb. of pale malt extract, I oz. hops, 1 lb. sugar, 2 lb. of small outdoor ripened green grapes, one gallon of water, yeast and nutrient was all he used. He reached the stage where the yeast is added using the same method as that described in the chapter calling for the use of malt extracts and added the crushed grapes. These he strained out after five days, and allowed fermentation to go on until the hydrometer recorded 1.005. He then bottled the lager and kept it for three months. Not being fond of lager of any sort, I was not a judge of the final product, but others were quite thrilled with it. No acid was added because the grapes added enough.
My own efforts have pleased others more than me – but only because I am not fond of lager types. ‘Vine makers are bound to ask, would concentrated grape juice be suitable for such an experiment? I have used a white concentrate – one pint to the four gallon batch of a light ale and lager recipe with some success. Oh, I can hear the die-hard wine lovers accusing me of trying to make winey beer or beery wine and wondering why I cannot stick to one or the other. But if the end product is a pleasure to a number of people the wrath of the few will lie lightly upon my shoulders. I like beer – very much. I also like wines – very much. Anything midway between the two would not, I am sure, be pleasant. These lager types made with a few added grapes are not midway between wine and beer; they are something quite unique.
If you try something of this sort, use only the juice of black grapes otherwise you will have a pink lager owing to the color coming from the grape skins. Pink Lager – well, why not? The die-hards will be at my throat for this one!
Other trials I carried out – readers of my various wine books will know I’m a devil for experimenting – was that of adding half a pound of ripe sloes to a two gallon brew. These were crushed and added just before the yeast was put in. Another was adding a little concentrated Vermouth flavoring.
All these ideas gave varied results; some people liked one while others liked another. Some people didn’t like any of them, but on the whole the results were quite popular. Whatever you do, do not tryout these ideas with your first efforts at beer making. Wait until you have a good deal of experience so that you are able to judge whether you would like the results of such experiments.
If you decide to add fruits to a wort ready for the yeast, do sterilize the fruit first in the following manner. This is necessary because of the yeast and bacteria on the fruit. If these are not destroyed, the chances are that they will set up undesirable ferments as they do in wines made by old-fashioned methods. Sterilizing by boiling will give the wrong kind of flavor and will produce a cloudiness difficult to remove. The simplest method is to use Campden fruit preserving tablets. See the chapter on cider making for more information about these.
Crush the fruit to be added to the wort and judge roughly how much there is and to each half-gallon (there will probably be less than this amount), add half a crushed Campden tablet dissolved in about an egg-cupful of warm water. Stir this into the fruit and leave for about an hour. Then give a vigorous stirring and pour into the wort. Strain out the fruit after four or five days, and ferment on as you would if you had not used fruit at all.
I mention all these experiments to put ideas into your heads so that you will not be afraid to try almost anything once you have been making real and ordinary beers for some time.
Go ahead, experiment – it can be great fun.
Some years ago in the National Press there appeared a recipe for ginger beer made up by means of starting off a ‘ginger beer plant’. Unfortunately, and quite by accident, my name became mixed up with it and I was inundated with requests for details for weeks afterwards. The general direction – not mine, of course – was to put a couple of ounces of yeast in a cup with warm water and some ginger until it began to ferment, or rather erupt like a volcano which it invariably did, spreading its yeasty lava over everything. The direction went on to explain that half of this was then made up to one gallon with sugar and water and the other half given away. This part of it seemed to be a sinister secret; if you did not give half away the rest would die – it would, naturally through lack of sugar or other yeast food. There still persists a rumor that this makes a drinkable drink – it doesn’t. 
The recipes in this short chapter make what are popularly called ‘mock beers’, and that is precisely what they are. The fact that they are called beers at all is probably because they are too low in alcohol to be called wines and that where one recipe calls for the use of hops another needs some malt. In some recipes both malt and hops are used in smaller amounts than those used for true beers.
