Indiana University scientists have created a 1776-inspired beer to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary.
Yeast is typically used to study cellular growth of cancers over time, and to make bread and kombucha. For this project, Matthew Bochman, assistant professor of molecular and cellular biochemistry at IU, is using it to produce a British beer that colonists could’ve been drinking in 1776.
Bochman, along with a few graduate students, collaborated with local breweries the past few months to create a beer called “Declaration of Fermentation” based around an English mild ale. They used simple ingredients available at the time, such as yeast from tree bark, which created a banana clove flavor.
“You couldn't get everything in America that you could get in Europe,” he said. “So, for instance, lots of the sugar you would get from barley and malted barley was replaced with molasses, and so we based it on quasi historical recipes.”
He said it was typical for the alcohol content level to be around five percent, similar to today’s mass-produced beer.
“Beer and alcohol and things like that were (from) clean water, and so people drank what were known as small beers, which were very low alcohol,” he said. “This was everybody, children to the elderly. It was just a way to basically keep hydrated and have clean drinking water.”
One of the project’s graduate students, Spencer Gray, collected yeast from trees in the Hoosier National Forest and on IU’s campus. To stay true to the history, he collected some yeast from trees that were about 250 years old, such as a big Burr Oak tree on campus by the Indiana Memorial Union.
“Finding old enough trees that would have been around in the founding times here is pretty difficult after the development of the Midwest, and all the agriculture took over,” Gray said. “But making it from yeast that we found on a tree and in the style that they would have fermented with the ingredients that they used, I think, is as close as we can get to kind of the open-air fermentation that they would have enjoyed.”
Gray tried the beer after it fermented for a few weeks.
“It's like an 18th century cream ale, so it's trying to be as historic as possible to the recipe,” he said. “I don't think I've ever quite had anything like it. It's not bitter, it kind of has a smoky aroma, but also a little fruity.”
The beer will be available for the public to purchase at local breweries starting the last week of June. Bochman hopes that when people drink this beer, they think about what it would’ve been like to live during the colonial era.
“You couldn't go to the grocery store and grab a six pack of Upland's Dragonfly,” he said. “Lots of people were home brewing themselves. I mean, Martha Washington was a home brewer, George Washington was a home brewer, and so everybody sort of had their own little local flavor, and that's really what this is. This is ultra local.”
