Recipes for sweet mash and sour mash

Gary,
I read her reference as (Distillers) Beer. I know that it was is the term being used now and I have a recipe from the Taylor Diary from the same era that refers to distillers beer.
Mike Veach

Here's another possibility. The primary benefit of sour mash is to condition the medium so that it is hospitable to the yeast organisms you want and hostile to the yeasts and other microorganisms you don't want. It could be that backset (with no living microorganisms present) was introduced to condition the medium, and nature (i.e., wild yeast) was allowed to do the rest.

Chuck,
I think you may be right. Create the right conditions and let nature do the rest. When you consider that most distillers of the time were using either a wild yeast method or a yeast cultured from a wild yeast, it makes sense.

What do you think of the recipe itself? It looks like a bourbon recipe, but it was interesting that wheat could be used in place of rye.
Mike Veach

Hi Jim, many thanks, much appreciated.

Gary

Well maybe, Mike, but if she had yeast to make distiller's beer, doesn't that beg the question? Unless perhaps she was using someone's else's distiller's beer.. By referring to the bottom, I think she meant the trub (as Jim noted) of a batch of standing or maturing beer. Maybe it doesn't matter, because in either case the beer clearly is yeasty "live" brew..

Gary

You can't help but notice the resemblance.

What's the context of this document? Is there one?

Chuck,
The papers are a collection of correspondence and other papers found in a trunk. This item was a page all to itself so I assume she wrote it down for future reference.
Mike Veach

Moving this forward for Gary and Chuck

Mike Veach

By the way note in her sweet mash recipe the casual way wheat is mentioned as an alternative to rye.

Her mash is a traditional bourbon mash and she indifferently suggests wheat or rye for small grains.

This shows that the use of wheat in this way is very old and, I infer, could not have been invented later in the 1800's or 1900's.

Gary

Gary,
I have seen several early mashbills (late 18th/early19th century) that use rye and wheat as interchangable grains. There was "wheated bourbon" from a very early time. I do think it took Pappy Van Winkle to make it a popular recipe that the public wanted to buy on a regular basis.

Mike Veach