Thirty-seven years ago a man named Jack McAuliffe had a vision: he loved the beer that he had experienced in the small pubs of the British Isles and wanted to drink it when he returned home to the United States. There was one problem, that beer just didn’t exist here. The beer made in America at the time was watery; it was made in huge quantities by huge corporations, and there was almost no way to change that. Jack was a home brewer which was a sort of fringe hobby at the time. It wasn’t federally legal until 1978, so that means a lot of people were making their own beer, but they weren’t advertising that fact. Jack was also an engineer, so he wasn’t your average backwoods moonshiner. With the help of a college professor and a wealth of brewing knowledge he built his own gravity-fed brewing system out of 55-gallon Coca Cola drums. At its peak, the brewery produced 7.5 barrels of beer a week. They offered three varieties of bottle-conditioned beer: a stout, a porter, and a pale ale. It was small, by today’s standards, but it was the first microbrewery of the late twentieth century.
If you’re at all involved in the online home brewing community, or if you read any brewing periodicals, you’ve most likely heard about this small brewery that started it all. New Albion Brewing Company didn’t last every long—only six years—it couldn’t keep up with demand, but also couldn’t get the funding to expand. However, many of the craft brewers that would go on to great success credit the brewery as their first experience with real beer, it inspired a movement, and it even gave many future brewers hands-on experience, as employees or interns, that helped them in their own endeavors.
A weekly home brewing podcast/video series that I follow, called Basic Brewing, has been talking about Jack McAuliffe and New Albion Brewery quite a bit over the last year. It turns out that they live in the same neighborhood as Jack and have gotten to know him after meeting him at a local bar. They’ve even done a few shows that attempt to recreate the beers that he brewed there, which I think is pretty neat. Last August, Jim Koch, of Samuel Adams Brewery, released a recreation of the New Albion Pale Ale recipe which should be available nationally this winter—albeit in limited amounts.
I’ve decided I’m going to try to make these beers, as well. Looking at the recipes I’ve found online, the beers look very basic. Perhaps they would be considered bland and run-of-the-mill by today’s standards and expectations for big, bold beers, but at the time they were revolutionary. This first recipe, a pale ale, is made with a single malt and a single hop. This is pretty unusual, although not unheard of; the Town Hall Brewery of Minneapolis, MN has an IPA made with just a single malt that is pretty good. Sometimes it’s just better to keep it simple, and using a single ingredient helps you better understand that ingredient. Many of the recipes I’ve made have four or five malts and three to six different hops. I would be very hard-pressed to pick out each of those flavors in the finished product.
Some specifics: The beer has an original gravity of 1055 and the single malt is two row malted barley, I used Rahr Two Row. The mash temp is 148 degrees Fahrenheit for sixty minutes. The bitterness to shoot for is in the mid-thirties IBU and the single hop is Cascade, I used my homegrown hops from last summer. There are three boil additions, the hops are split evenly by weight and added at sixty, thirty, and fifteen minutes. The original yeast that they used was a proprietary London Ale strain. I decided to divide my ten gallon batch into two fermentation carboys and inoculated one with a London Ale yeast and one with an American Ale yeast. I like to do experiments like that to try and learn what qualities a particular yeast might impart to a beer. I’m fermenting these beers at room temperature, which, in my house, in the winter, is around 62-63 degrees Fahrenheit.
I’m excited to see how these beers turn out. Not just for the beer-nerd clout or historical significance, I’ve been looking for a basic pale ale to have on tap. This new beer needs to be simple, refreshing, and not too intense. I want something that I can pour for the occasional uninitiated house guest who might not like having their tongue destroyed by one of my Imperial Hopbombs. I need a gateway beer: a beer that can open a closed mind and lead it down the path to greatness.
Researching and making this beer reminds me of the first India Pale Ale I can recall ever drinking, which was in the brewpub of Union Station in Bemidji, MN. That place was sort of a New Albion for the north woods of Minnesota. It was ahead of its time, an inspiration to many home brewers (certainly me), and also not very financially sustainable. That might be an interesting project for the future: find out who the head brewer was and see if I can get a lead on the recipes he used there. I’m going to guess that the IPA was a pretty basic beer, probably not too dissimilar from this pale ale, but with a few more hops. It may not have been the best thing ever, but it got me started down this path. And, I’ve got to be thankful for that.
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