Divine Proof

Benjamin Franklin, one of my favourite historical figures, is often credited with saying “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” While I am more than willing to play along, as I love beer and enjoy the thought that Ben did as well, if I am to be totally honest I have to tell you that in all of the volumes of writing he produced, this quote does not exist. Still, he is know to have taken great pleasure in beer and may have proclaimed his belief in ale’s celestial connections oft enough that it became common knowledge. We’ll never know for sure.

While in France, as American Ambassador from 1776-1785, he wrote down his recipe for beer, which he brewed and drank himself:

“A Way of Making Beer with Essence of Spruce:

For a Cask containing 80 bottles, take one pot of Essence and 13 Pounds of Molasses - or the same amount of unrefined Loaf Sugar; mix them well together in 20 pints of hot Water: Stir together until they make a Foam, then pour it into the Cask you will then fill with Water: add a Pint of Yeast, stir it well together and let it stand 2 or 3 Days to ferment, after which close the Cask, and after a few days it will be to be put into Bottles, that must be tightly corked. Leave them 10 or 12 Days in a cool Cellar, after which the Beer will be good to drink.”

I thought I’d give it a shot. First I had to translate the recipe into modern measurements, which presented two major problems. I know how much a pint is, and a pound is still a pound, but some of the other measurements are meaningless. To start, how large is a cask? Or a bottle in Franklin’s time? And what does a “pot” of spruce essence look like? The strength and flavour of a beer depend completely on the ratio of ingredients to the amount of water, so the information is essential.

I tried to research the size of casks in the 18th century and discovered quickly that they ranged so greatly in volume that I would never know if I had the right one. I had a bit more luck with the bottle size – turns out 32 ounce bottles have been around for a long time. And, 80 of them make a 20-gallon cask. That’s a lot of beer.

As means of crosschecking that I had the right volume of cask I read up on the strength of homebrews in the 1700’s and discovered that they were often brewed weak. Beers now usually have an alcohol content of about 4.5%. Homemade beers of Franklin’s time usually had an alcohol content of 3% - 4%. The reason for this is that beer, with its bacteria-killing alcohol, was considered safer to drink than water. These “Small Beers,” as they were called, were intended for everyday consumption with most meals (even breakfast), not for getting drunk.

It is possible to calculate the approximate final alcohol content of a beer based on the ingredients. I will spare you the boring math bits. In the case of Ben’s recipe it turns out 20 gallons of water and 13 lbs of molasses yield an alcohol content of 3.7%. Perfect.

As for determining the quantities of a pot of Spruce Essence, I got nowhere. In the end I finally decided to buy some essence and follow the suggestions on the bottle as to how much I should use per gallon of beer.

Scaling Franklin’s recipe down a bit, here is what I came up with.

2 k molasses
5 L water
20 ml spruce essence
10 g brewer’s yeast

Boil the molasses and water. Cool. When room temperature, add the spruce essence. Bring the final volume to 15 L. Sprinkle yeast over the top. Ferment. Bottle.

(I’m leaving out some of the fine details of brewing; write me if you are really interested in trying this at home.)

The original recipe suggested fermenting for a few days before bottling, but I found that it took much longer to ferment, a couple of weeks (probably due to the low temperature I at which I was brewing) and, as it is dangerous to bottle beer before it has finished fermenting (boom), I waited. When I finally bottled it, the mix smelled awful, like sugar burning in pine sap, but I have read that brewing with molasses produces strange flavours that disappear over time. To be safe, I decided to wait about 12 weeks before trying one.

So, months later I’m ready to taste some liquid proof.



I think I made God angry somewhere along the line. This shit is unpalatable. It pours like thin soda and doesn’t hold a head at all. The burnt flavour has not so much subsided as been slightly masked by a new and even more offensive sour-rubbing-alcohol aroma which oozes from the glass like some pure, primordial evil. My one taste was quickly returned and left me looking for something I might use to violently remove the top layers of my tongue.

I think we might call this a failure.

I can admit, I may have got it wrong. Too much or too little spruce. Over fermented. Any number of other missteps. I suspect, rather, that Mr. Franklin had a different idea of what God’s love might taste like.

Despite the, admittedly, discouraging outcome, I might try this recipe one more time, just to be sure.