[tonyp]

The Universal thread reminded me of a trip my wife and I took to Colonial Williamsburg years ago. We ate at Shield's Tavern and I remember we had a really nice ale with dinner. The waiter presented it as an original recipe from the 1700's. It was fantastic, and was one of the reasons i started getting into brewing in the first place.

I don't remember the name of it but looking at the current menu I think it was Old Stitch. If anyone has the chance to visit I highly recommend it for not just for the beer but for the history.

Cheers!
Tony

[tonyp]

One other thing. We stopped at the print shop and during the printer's lecture he asked if anyone knew what a font was and a few hands were raised. I was standing in the front and he pointed to me and asked "Can you name 3 fonts?" I replied "I can name 25." He called my bluff and much to his surprise I easily did it bringing a huge smile to his face.

When we were leaving he asked me to stay and he hand-printed his whole typeface catalog for me, including some really cool old documents and a copy of the declaration of independence. It was awesome watching the process. I still have them in storage. All in all, a good day.

[thomasbarnes]

I don't remember the name of it but looking at the current menu I think it was Old Stitch. If anyone has the chance to visit I highly recommend it for not just for the beer but for the history.

Old Stitch was one of the numerous 18th century slang terms for strong beer, along with names like Stingo and Dragons Milk. If they brewed the beer you had to anything to an 18th century recipe, it probably was a stock ale (a historical half-step between an IPA and an Imperial IPA, with a certain amount of overlap with modern old ales and the weaker English barleywines).

If you're still interested in historical beer recipes, a few years ago there was a rather nice historical porter recipe derived from Ben Franklin's porter recipe brewed in honor of his 300th birthday.

  http://www.benfranklin300.org/etc_article_ale.htm

There are also scads of 18th and 19th century brewing manuals online using Google books search, as well as blogs devoted to historical beer research (e.g., http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/).

[tonyp]

Old Stitch was one of the numerous 18th century slang terms for strong beer, along with names like Stingo and Dragons Milk. If they brewed the beer you had to anything to an 18th century recipe, it probably was a stock ale (a historical half-step between an IPA and an Imperial IPA, with a certain amount of overlap with modern old ales and the weaker English barleywines).

very cool, I didn't know that. It tasted slightly similar to sam adams but much much better. Funnily enough whenever we talk about that trip my wife always says "remember that really good beer we had?"

I can't seem to find the link at the moment but I downloaded an archive of public domain beer and brewing books, close to 100 different texts from the 1700-1800's. fascinating stuff, but alittle hard to read.

thanks for the info!