Beer on Pesach?
Post date: Mar 21, 2016 12:13:02 PM
19th Century Marginalia in the Chicago Haggadah
The Bible forbids the use of all leavened bread and fermented grains on Pesach. Religious Jews keep this rule stringently and even replace all their cutlery and cooking utensils, used throughout the year for preparing food, with special Pesach plates, pots and pans in order not to transgress the commandment that "chometz/ chametz" may not be eaten. Bread is obviously forbidden and Matza is eaten instead but also fermented drinks such as beer and whiskey are not consumed and may not even be kept in the home during the eight days of Pesach.
Beer-loving religious Jews would therefore need to find a "kosher for Pesach beer" with some kind of grain replacement. At least one late 19th century American housewife seemed to have found a solution based on the recipe for wine and "mead" she scribbled in her Haggadah. Mead is an alcoholic beverage created from fermented honey and water with hops added to produce a bitter beer-like flavor.
I found this recipe written on the bottom-half of the last page, page 93, of a Haggadah scanned by "HebrewBooks", a wonderful non-profit project by the Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books which, among its amazing collection, has an impressive list of scanned Haggadot. I stumbled upon it while digitizing Haggadot for my research. It can be found in a Haggadah edited by Chicago Rev. H. Liberman (at the time rabbis were called reverends) and published by the New York-based Hebrew bookseller Kantrowitz in 1879 (Yudlov #1530).
The earliest date of the recipe is therefore 1879 but this marginalia could have been added any time after that. What we do know is that marginalia (scribbling in the margins of a book) was a very common custom in the 18th and 19th century and has actually a rich literary tradition as can be seen in this blogpost. The assumption that the housewife was American is based on the obvious fact that the book was published there but also on her spelling using the American "color" as opposed to the British "colour". The late 19th century is, by the way, the time when this American spelling became more popular than the British spelling as can be seen from the following Google n-gram:
Source: Google n-grams
It was not easy to decipher the recipe but it seems the following is a fair rendering:
For wine
1 lb raisins to 1 quart water. Chop the raisins
and soak 3 days. Add a little sugar to
keep from souring. Add hops to suit the taste.
For Mead -
1 lb sugar to 2 quarts water. boil away
1 quart. Then pour in yeast from the
wine to ferment it. Strain and color
light burnt sugar. Pour in hops while
boiling.
Home brewers I contacted had the following to say about the above instructions:
"There is some good stuff and bad stuff on those recipes. never tried adding hops but it will probably make it a little foam-ish. The reason why they are having you soak the raisins is to re hydrate them, but without cooking them you might accidentally re-activate the natural yeast in the raisins.
With the "1 lb sugar to 2 quarts water" for the mead they are trying to make honey but ultimately are just making a simple syrup. I have tried this and it turns out tasting like old fashion cough-syrup. Not a very good idea. I would advise using honey instead.
"pour in yeast from the wine to ferment it" - What they are trying to do here is retrieve the yeast that should still be in that wine to reactivate or come out of hibernation. But then your mead will taste different EVERY time. - not very reliable. I would say this is mostly an out dated recipe for amateur home brewing. I advise using Red Star yeast. You can get it on Ebay
Hope this helps, Tyler Ray Moore"
The 19th century Jewish housewife probably neither had certified Kosher for Passover honey/yeast (did not exist at the time) nor access to Ebay and therefore had to prepare her own. Nowadays there is no problem buying kosher honey and Tyler's suggestion to use Red Star yeast is actually echoed by another blogger who happens to create his own Pesach mead using honey and kosher for Pesach Red Star yeast.
Picture of Red Star yeast with "kosher for Pesach" logo from: http://www.chowhound.com/post/kosher-passover-yeast-384032?page=2
The above does show that kosher for Passover beer has been around for quite some time contrarily to the claims of Danny Scott, the owner of a bar in Suffern, N.Y. In 2004, when the Ramapo Valley Brewery started its new line of Passover beer in an attempt to expand its market to the religious buyers, Scott claimed that "the brewery is making the first batch of kosher-for-Passover beer that the world has seen in about 2,000 years".
Cheers!
