LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Can you taste history? What about drink it? Two of our NPR colleagues were invited to the New York Public Library to find out. NPR’s Jennifer Vanasco has more.
JENNIFER VANASCO, BYLINE: It’s 9 a.m. on a weekday morning, and producer Janet Woojeong Lee and I are standing outside the main library in Manhattan getting ready for a beer.
JANET WOOJEONG LEE, BYLINE: I don’t know the last time I drink this early or that I woke up to drink.
VANASCO: But we’re not here to drink just any beer. We’re headed inside to taste a beer brewed from George Washington’s 1757 recipe, which he wrote in a notebook during the French and Indian War.
JULIE GOLIA: He was a young colonel in the Virginia militia making something called small beer.
VANASCO: Curator and historian Julie Golia directs the New York Public Library’s 42nd Street research library. She says small beer was called that because of the low alcohol content, about 1% to 3%. People drank it because of a lack of clean drinking water.
GOLIA: If everybody in your army got dysentery, you were in big trouble. Small beer to the rescue.
VANASCO: She says everyone drank small beer, men, women and kids. In honor of America 250, the library asked local brewery Talea to brew a couple hundred original bottles for the library’s use. It won’t be sold commercially. A more contemporary version will be sold at Talea’s taprooms in New York.
I’m excited. OK, should we try?
LEE: Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEER OPENING)
VANASCO: Talea brewmaster Eric Brown opens a bottle with their version of the original brew.
ERIC BROWN: We took the recipe from the notebook, kind of followed it as closely as possible.
VANASCO: The ingredients are pretty simple, water, hops, yeast and a lot of molasses.
LEE: Whoa (laughter). I don’t know what I was expecting, but it kind of tastes, like, woody.
VANASCO: It’s almost like a little, like, burnt sugar feeling at the end, I feel like.
BROWN: Yeah. But it still has that kind of, like, characteristic cookie kind of spice, little bit of minerality from the molasses.
VANASCO: It’s a dark amber, the color of an Irish red ale. And it’s cloudy, not filtered. The flavor is complex. It shifts in your mouth, more like wine. And it was served at room temperature.
LEE: Folks who like, like, amber lagers, you know, even, like, whiskey, like, dark…
BROWN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
LEE: …Liquor drinkers would really like this. Wow. I’m into it.
VANASCO: Then we try the new version, called Liberty Lager. Brown says they wanted it to be reminiscent of Washington’s beer without being too literal, meaning no molasses.
LEE: Definitely a little more drinkable and lighter. And I can see that.
BROWN: Yeah.
LEE: But I’m kind of enjoying how funky the first one is, the OG recipe (laughter).
VANASCO: If you want to try that OG recipe, you can brew it at home. It’s in the New York Public Library’s collection and on their website. But Brown has a couple tips. Use baking molasses, go to a brewery supply store for a pure line of yeast and keep everything very clean. Cheers.
Jennifer Vanasco, NPR News, New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE HONEY DEWDROPS’ “REMINGTON”)
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