While he was serving as Commander of the Continental Army, George Washington is said to have ensured that every soldier would receive a quart of beer as part of his daily rations. He was a beer lover, and by all accounts, he was particularly fond of a good porter. Fond to the point of going through 200 gallons of his homebrew variant of the stuff … a month.

I like beer. Arguably not as much as Washington seems have have liked beer, but I like it. Unfortunately, I’m trying to minimize the amount of it I drink, and have come to suspect that it doesn’t really agree with me. Brewing up a “small beer” based on molasses rather than barley malt and with a low alcohol content hovering around the 3.5% range seemed like a good idea. (Note: I’d originally estimated the alcohol content at 2%, but it seems that 3.5% is more accurate). There was a time when people - even the children - drank this stuff like water. Actually, they drank it instead of water. Small beer was preserved by fermentation and the inclusion of hops. It was often just safer to drink than untreated water.

The hops in the recipe are important. Hops give beer that “beeryness” that the modern palate associates with the brew. I searched for a smaller batch recipe for a molasses based small beer that made use of hops, and to my good fortune, stumbled across an excellent article by James Brownlow that chronicled his experience reproducing a small beer recipe left by the late John Gaylord II. Brownlow had some ideas about how to improve the recipe, but to the best of my knowledge, never followed up to let us know how those ideas turned out. I decided to incorporate some of those ideas (reduction in the amount of cream of tartar, types of hops to use) and try it out for myself.

Here is George Washington’s small beer recipe from his personal notebook:

George Washington's Smallbeer Notebook Entry
George Washington Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division of The New York Public Library

To make Small Beer -
Take a large Sifter full of Bran Hops to your Taste — Boil these 3 hours. Then strain out 30 Gall. into a Cooler put in 3 Gallons Molasses while the Beer is scalding hot or rather drain the molasses into the Cooler. Strain the Beer on it while boiling hot let this stand til it is little more than Blood warm. Then put in a quart of Yeast if the weather is very cold cover it over with a Blanket. Let it work in the Cooler 24 hours then put it into the Cask. leave the Bung open til it is almost done working — Bottle it that day Week it was Brewed.
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