Brewing

Bog Myrtle Ale 
Brewed using wild-caught elderberry yeast, entered in the brewing competition at Ymir, February 2024. Discusses the use of Scanning Electron Microscope images to determine whether grains from the archaeological record have been malted or not.

Iron Age British Bread and Ale,
Using Wild Elderberry Yeast
and Home Malted Grain
Kingdom Arts and Sciences Festival (KASF), March 2024. This describes my process for malting raw whole grain for brewing and baking.

Ales from Three Home-Malted Grains, made using wild elderberry yeast

 Ruby Joust, May 2024

This was a display of ales with no additives, brewed with emmer, spelt, and barley, each of which I malted completely myself. This project was intended to explore the attributes of the different grains, and procedures were kept the same for all three brews. The yeast for all three was taken from an elderberry mead, that was itself fermented using wild-caught yeast from elderberries.

Pennsic Brewing over the fire, braggot with meadowsweet

Pennsic 51, August 2024

This is not documentation, as the brew was not entered in a display or competition, but a picture-diary tells the story.

Hochdorf Braggot - a Brew from Beyond the Grave. Won the Intermediate A&S competition, War of the Wings, October 2024

The recipe for this braggot was based on residues found in the cauldron from the tomb of the Hochdorf Prince, 6th century BCE. This brew was fermented with wild elderberry yeast and had additives of meadowsweet and mint.

Egtved Girl's Brew - lingonberry braggot
Won Kingdom-level Tempore Competition, Prehistory to 1000 CE Atlantia Twelfth Night, January 2025

The recipe for this braggot was based on residue found in a birch bark bucket in the burial of the Egtved Girl in Denmark, whose coffin was dendochronologically dated to the Bronze Age, 1370 BCE.  This brew was made entirely with grain I malted myself, and was fermented with yeast from oak bark. It had additives of meadowsweet, yarrow, and linden.

Please do NOT use the recipe from the above documentation though! Further refinement led to a later, much tastier and more accurate recipe (without yarrow), found here.

This brew also won the Food and Beverage category of the Pennsic A&S War Point competition, August 2025. Documentation for that can be found here.

Spoon Ale - Bog Myrtle Ale fermented with yeast delivered via wooden spoon 

LEAFS event, April 2025

The yeast in this case was delivered ON the spoon, not IN the spoon. This brew used techniques gleaned from descriptions of traditional Nordic farmhouse brewing, which features wooden Yeast Rings. The wood in these rings is permeated with yeast from being soaked in a previous fermenting brew. In this case I used a large wooden spoon, not a yeast ring.

Spoon Beer Photo Journal

Recipe  -  much of this document is  copied from other Bog Myrtle Ale documentation. The only difference  from prior brews was the yeast delivery.