The Beer Wench has asked us to write about “Frankenstein Beers” for today’s 44th gathering of The Session. I’ll be brief because I must get back to my research on what the best time to add Rosa Solis to the boil might be. I’d like to maximize the stirring up of lust.
Does a beer brewed with wheat malt, oat malt and beans sound like a Frankenstein beer? How about if once fermentation begins the brewers add the inner rind of a fir tree; fir and birch tree tips; Cnicus benedictus, a bitter herb used to stimulate appetite; flowers of Rosa Solis, an insect-eating bogplant, said to stir up lust; elder flowers; betony; wild thyme; cardamom; and pennyroyal (which turns out to be dangerously poisonous).
According to Martyn Cornell’s Amber, Gold & Black: The Story of Britain’s Great Beers that that wouldn’t be at all new. It’s a seventeenth century recipe for Mum from one of those boring old British brewers, a beer that apparently took inspiration from something an equally staid German brewer invented in 1492 and called Mumme. A poem written in about 1725 described Mum as “bitter as gall/And as strong as six horses/Coach and all.”
“There’s very little that’s new in the world,” Ron Pattinson, groundkeeper at Shut up about Barclay Perkins, answered via email when I asked him about this for an article that appeared in American Brewer. “It’s indicative of the poor grasp of beer history that modern brewers believe they are breaking new ground when, in reality, they’re following a well-trodden path. High OG, heavy hopping, long barrel-aging; all of these were commonplace 150 or 250 years ago.”
When I asked him to pick the “original” extreme beer he wrote, “Well Danziger Joppenbier is hard to beat. It was around since at least the 1700s. It was like Mumme, but even weirder.” Curiously, although the beer was brewed in Danzig most of its sales were in Britain, where it was spelled Jopenbier.
Randy Mosher, author of Radical Brewing and Tasting Beer, came up with the exact same answer. “The weirdest one I’ve run across is Danziger (Gdansk) Jopenbier, a . . . beer that started as a malt syrup at over 50 °Plato (not a typo, fifty), fermented spontaneously with a variety of oxidative yeasts and possessing a lot of sherrylike qualities,” he replied.
So Danziger Joppenbier, with flowers of Rosa Solis. I’d love to provide some tasting notes. As soon as somebody brews it.