Small Beer: Quench Your Thirst with this Forgotten Energy Drink!

If you brew your own beer like I do here, you should give this a try. You’ll get more out of your grains and follow what was once a very common tradition amongst our ancestors. Here is my personal take on this ancient beverage, using spent beer malt and Norwegian kveik yeast.

What is it?

In German it is known as Dünnbier. Literally, it means “thin beer“. In Swedish it is svagdricka or “weak drink“. Myself, I’ll call it tafelbier or “table beer”.

What exactly is it? Quite simply, it is a light, low-alcohol beer–only about between 0.5- 3% ABV. Why would you want a light, low-alcohol beer, you may ask? Well, keep reading, why don’t you, eh?

They drank beer instead of water??

You read that working folk in the Middle Ages–from farmers to monks, had a daily ration of beer. Seemingly, they quaffed their thirst with beer in lieu of water during the work day. To the modern mind this comes across as a bit of a culture shock.

From Jeffrey L. Singman, Daily Life in Medieval Europe, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999, P. 54 – 55.

A prosperous English peasant in the 14th century would probably consume 2 – 3 pounds of bread, 8 ounces of meat or fish or other protein and 2 -3 pints of ale per day.

People commonly believe that one reason for this was because the water was unsafe to drink. In some places this could be the case, such as in urban areas or places where the water source was tainted from livestock use. Consuming a thin beer or wine would indeed be a safe and smart beverage. The brewing process would kill off any tiny evil beasties living in the water and the alcohol content was low enough to avoid intoxication.

Here, I can’t help myself in voicing my opinion on this. I think that the hypothesis that “no one drank water back then” is a gross over-simplification. Indeed, we of the present age have a nasty habit of over-generalizing how things were done in the “olden days”. Without getting too deep into the subject, there is a host of evidence to support that people drank plain water aplenty. Amongst many other primary sources, St. Hildegard von Bingen in her work Physica Sacra recommended water instead of wine in order to quench thirst.

A Sustaining Drink

Rather, folk of ages past were quite similar to people now: They would commonly opt to drink something with flavor and with an added energy boost. For a hardy folk used to active physical labor this would make just plain sense. For the same reason would guys on the construction site rather drink gatorade or soda on hot summer days.

Our ancestors have been cultivating grains since the Neolithic age (starting around 4500 BC in Northern Europe). As far as the archaeological record is concerned, beer-making has been around as long as bread-making. It’s actually hard to prove which came first–beer or bread! And it’s true–processing grain into beer is actually a great way to capture the valuable calories locked in the kernels.

Getting the most out of your grain:

When you make beer, you run hot water through the malted grains in order to capture the sugars that will then be fermented into beer. After this liquid (called wort) is collected, there is still a lot of residual sugars left over in the grains.  Just taste if for yourself–you’ll see what I mean. Now, most modern home brewing methods discard the grain after this.  This has always chafed me, because it felt like a lot of goodness was being thrown out.  Turns out, it would chafe the ancients too; for they would normally continue to add water to the malt in order to pour off several batches of weaker “small beer.”

Think of small beer as your “workday beer” and the normal strong beer that we are more familiar with, as your “evening beer”. You would drink your small beer during the day for its sustenance. And then when the labour is done for the day, you would partake in the stronger evening beer (in German: Feierabend machen, or literally, “celebrate the evening”).

How do you make Dünnbier/Small beer?

You need spent grains from home-brewing beer. If you don’t brew beer yourself, there is a good chance you know someone who does. And chances are, they are just throwing out all those valuable spent grains! If this is the case, have them save you five or so pounds in some freezer bags. You can then just pop them in your freezer till you are ready for them!

There is no solid recipe for small beer. So I’ll take you through my own personal process. As with all brewing, make sure your jugs and bottles are squeaky clean! This will avoid things from going sour on you.

What you need:

Materials:

1. 2.5-3 (7.5 L) gallons of hot water
2. At least 4 lbs (1.8 kg) of spent malted grains
3. 1 oz (28 g) of dried hops (or one heaping handful)
4. About 1 tsp (5.7 g) Norwegian kveik yeast which you can purchase here. You can also save the dregs of kveik from your last batch of ale. I keep it in a mason jar in my fridge.
5. 1 Tbsp (14 g) of table sugar

Equipment:

1. Pot that holds at least two gallons
2. Deep metal pot strainer or cheese cloth
3. Two glass gallon cider jugs
4. two airlocks.
5. sealable bottles (Grolsch or swing tops are great reusable bottles to have)

My Small Beer Brewing Process:

This point will come after you have sparged and drained wort for your strong beer.

1. Now heat some more water and pour it through the grains into a your pot. For an original 10lbs of malted grains that will give you 5 gallons of strong beer, you can expect to get about an additional 2-3 gallons for small beer.

2. Heat up the wort on the stove to a rolling boil.

3. Put about a heaping handful of hops (.8 oz or 23 grams) into a metal strainer or cheese cloth. Next, suspend the strainer in the wort so the hops can steep for about 10 minutes. Then remove the strainer.

4. Remove the wort from the heat and let it cool. You can speed up the cooling process by setting the pot in an ice bath in the sink or the bath tub. Let it cool down to about 100 degrees F ( about 37 C).

5. Move the wort into the glass cider jugs.

6. Pitch in your kveik yeast. The advantage of this unique Norwegian farmhouse yeast is that it ferments your beer in just a fraction of the time compared to other yeasts. To read more about it, head over to my Beer Brewing 101 article.

7. After 24 hours, the fermentation is about done. At this point you have two options:

You can either drink it as it is or bottle it to have some fizz to it. Historically, it would have been drunk flat. It would also need to be drunk within a couple days before it went sour. I keep about half of the batch in the pitcher in the fridge and the rest I bottle.

8. Bottle it: heat up a half cup of water and dissolve the tablespoon of sugar in it. Pour the sugar water into the beer. Then, transfer the beer into sealable bottles.

Let the bottles sit for another day for the carbonation to build up. After that, pop one open and slake thy thirst, O tiller-of-the-earth! ~ Nathanael