Take six pounds of ground malt, and three gallons of boiling water, mash them together well, cover the mixture, and let it stand three hours, then draw off the liquor, and put two pounds of brown sugar to each gallon, stirring it well till the sugar is dissolved, then put it in a cask just large enough to contain it, covering the bung hole with brown paper; keep this cask in a temperature of ninety-eight degrees. Prepare the same quantity of malt and boiling water as before, but without sugar, then mix all together, and add one quart of yest; let your cask stand open for forty-eight hours, and it will be fit for use. The quart of yest should not be added to these two extracts at a higher heat than eighty degrees.
[ Another method to make twenty-six gallons of the substitute. ]
Put twenty-six ounces of hops to as many gallons of water, boil it for two hours, or until you reduce the liquor to sixteen gallons; add malt and sugar in the proportion before mentioned, and mash your malt at the heat of one hundred and ninety degrees; let it stand two hours and a half, then strain it off, and add to the malt ten gallons more of water at the same degree of heat, and mash a second time; let it stand two hours, then strain it off as before; when your first mash is blood heat, or ninety-eight, put to it one gallon of the preceding substitute, mix it well, and let it stand ten hours; then take the produce of the second mash, and add it, at ninety-eight, to the rest, mix it well, and let it stand six hours, it will be then fit for use in the same manner, and for the same purposes as brewer's yest is applied; the advantages alleged in favour of this method are, that it will keep sweet and good longer than brewer's yest, and in any reason or temperature be fit for use.
May be generated in the following way: Take one pound of leaven, made with wheaten flour, such as the French generally use to raise their bread, dilute the pound of leaven with water or wort, the latter to choose at ninety degrees of heat, add it to your wort at the heat of sixty-five, supposing your barrel to be filled with wort at this heat; then add your leaven, diluted as mentioned, until your cask be full; to effect which, with less waste and more certainty, it may be better to put into your barrel the diluted leaven first, then fill up with wort at the temperature mentioned; after a day or two the beer will begin to work out yest, and will serve as a ferment for another brewing; thus, after three or four brewings, your yest will become so improved that it will be nearly equal to any brewer's yest, and the experiment in certain situations is well worth trying, when a proper ferment is wanted and cannot be otherwise procured.
Claret wine, before the French revolution, was the staple article of export from the great commercial City of Bordeaux, to every part of Europe. And, it may be presumed, will soon again reassume its wanted importance. The vintage generally begins, for making this sort of wine, about the middle or latter end of September, and is generally finished in all the month of October. The mode by which the juice is expressed from the grape, is by the workmen trampling them with their bare feet in a large reservoir or cooler, (not the cleanest operation in the world,) which has an inclination to the point where the spout or spouts are placed for taking off the expressed juice, which is conveyed to large open vats, that are thus filled with this juice to within ten or twelve inches of the upper edge; this space is left to make room for the fermentation, which spontaneously takes place in this liquor. After the first fermentation is over, and the wine begins to purify itself, which is ascertained by means of a small cock placed in the side of the vat, and takes place generally by the middle of February, or beginning of March, in the following year; it is then racked off into hogsheads, carefully cleansed, and a match of sulphur burned in each cask before filling; when thus racked off, it is bunged up, and immediately bought up by brokers for the Bordeaux merchants, and here it is made to undergo the second or finishing fermentation, in the following manner: It may be proper here to remark, that claret wine is generally divided into three growths, first, second, and third; the first growths, namely, Latour, Lafeet, and Chateaux Margo, are uniformly rented for a term of years, at a given price, to English merchants, through whom, or their agents only is there a possibility of procuring any portion of this wine. The second growths are shipped to the different markets of Europe, North and South America; and the third growth principally to Holland and Hamburgh. In order to strengthen the natural body of claret wine, and to render it capable of bearing the transition of the sea, the first and second growths are allowed from ten to fifteen gallons of good Alicant wine to every hogshead, with one quart of stum.[8] ] The casks are then filled up and bunged down. They are then ranged three tier high from one end of the cellar to the other, each tier about eighteen inches, with two stanchions of stout pine plank, firmly placed between the heads of each hogshead, from one end of the cellar to the other, until they have reached, and are supported by, the end walls of the building. This precaution is necessary to guard against the force of fermentation, which is often so strong as to burst out the heads of the hogsheads, notwithstanding the precautions taken to secure them in the situation during the summer heats. The wine cooper, who has the charge of these wines, regularly visits them twice a day, morning and evening, in order to see the condition of the casks, and when he finds the fermentation too strong, he gives vent, and thus prevents the bursting of the casks. The third, or inferior growth, is exactly treated in same way, with the single exception of having Benicarlo wine substituted for Alicant in preparing them for their second fermentation, as cheaper and better suited to their quality; both these wines are of Spanish growth, and brought to Bordeaux by the canal of Languedoc: they are naturally of a much stronger body than native claret. Thus mixed and fermented, the claret becomes fortified, and rendered capable of bearing the transition of seas and climates. About the latter end of September, or beginning of October, the fermentation of these wines begins to slacken, and they gradually become fine; in this state they are racked off into fresh hogsheads carefully cleansed, and a match of sulphur burned in each before filling. After this operation, they are suffered to remain undisturbed (save that they are occasionally ullaged,) till about to be shipped, when they are racked off a second time, and fined down with the white of ten eggs to each hogshead; these whites are well beat up together with a small handful of white salt; after this fining, when rested, the hogsheads are filled up again with pure wine, and then carefully bunged down with wooden bungs, surrounded with clean linen to prevent leaking; in this state the wines are immediately shipped. Here it may be proper to state, that the lees that remain on the different hogsheads that have been racked off, are collected and put into pipes of one hundred and forty, or one hundred and fifty gallons each, and this lee wine, as it is termed, is fined down again with a proportionate number of eggs and salt. After which, it is generally shipped off as third growth, or used at table mixed with water. If at any time hereafter the method herein given of making and preparing claret wine for shipping, as practised in Bordeaux and its neighbourhood, should be applied to the red wines of this country, particularly those of Kaskaskias; it may be proper here to give a description of the mode in which these wines are racked, which will be found simple, effectual, and expeditious; I mean for the lower or ground tiers. The upper, or more elevated ones, rack themselves, without coercion of any kind. When you are about to rack a hogshead of wine upon the ground tier, you place your empty hogshead close to the full one, in which you then put your brass racking cock; on the nozzle of which cock you tie on a leather hose, which is generally from three to four feet long; on the other end of this hose is a brass pipe, the size of the tap hole, with a projecting shoulder towards the hose to facilitate knocking in this pipe into the empty hogshead, which is then removed a sufficient distance from the full hogshead in order to stretch the hose, now communicating with both. The cock is then turned, and the wine soon finds its level in the empty hogshead; then a large sized bellows, with an angular nozzle, and sharp iron feet towards the handle, which feet are forced down into the hoops of the cask on which it rests, in order to keep this bellows stationary, whilst the nozzle is hammered in tight at the bung hole of the racking hogshead; the bellows is then worked by one man, and in about five minutes the racking of the hogshead is completed. The pressure of the air introduced into the hogshead, by the bellows, acts so forcibly on the surface of the liquor, that it requires but a few minutes to finish the operation; when the cock is stopped, the hose taken off, and a new operation commences. This mode may possibly, in some cases, be advantageously applied to racking off beer, ale, and cider.