>I will be brewing with a wood fire and no modern tools such as the >thermometer. > < snip > >Each day I will brew a different style of beer, one day a gruit, one day >a spruce beer with braches of blue spruce to represent the colonial >period of Qu=E9bec when spruce beer was very common, and I thought I would >make a period porter with brewing licorice and possibly cardamon. Uhm...what's 'brewing licorice'? I've never heard of this. Is it the same as whole licorice root ? For OG I'd personally aim somewhere between 1040-60. Sadly enough my copy of 'porter' from the Classic Beer Style Series is presently about 70 miles away from me =(. When it comes to historic porter not much is known in terms of OG, FG mash temps etc. What I remember from the book is that Mr Noonan suggested the colour to be lighter and/or more transparent than for most present day porters. Smoked malt seems like a nice touch. Just out of curiousity, do you smoke it yourself or buy it smoked and ready to go? >>> > Go for it, gal!! Sounds great! > I know two methods of reaching mashing temperature without a thermometer= >: the 3-for-1 method and the 4-oz >ladle method. Sometimes I use one, sometimes the other. OUCH! The heat capacity of various malts is something I've planned to investigate for quite some time but never gotten around to. I know that the heat capacity is about the same for malt & water but I don't know how much they differ. IIRC 1 l of water brought to a boil mixed with 1 kg malt at room temp (20 C) will give you a mash of approx 68C. I'm not 100% certain when it comes to this so a caveat for the final temp, it might go as high as 72C. Good luck with your brewing and please keep us posted. /Angus MacIomhair == There comes a time in every man's life when he must feel tempted to spit in his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats. --H.L. Mencken _____________________________________________________________ Get your own mando cool and totally free email@iamawitch.com address at http://freemail.iamawitch.com today! ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send email to majordomo@pbm.com containing the words "unsubscribe hist-brewing" (or unsubscribe hist-brewing-digest, if you get the digest.) To contact a human about problems, send mail to owner-hist-brewing@pbm.com