welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen welcome back to sunday morning
and the old
cookbook show today's recipe um
sort of came to me as a bit of a mystery
i started seeing people leaving comments
in my comment section about have you
seen cronk
and i thought what's cronk so i looked
it up and i came across
a twitter find a researcher at the
university of calgary had been looking
through old newspapers
as you do and came across advertisements
for something called cronk
they were just cronk drink crunk crunk
is good
crunk is great no sort of uh information
about what crunk
was power of the internet people start
searching for cronk
and within a very short time period
someone had come up with
a cookbook that featured
dr crunk's sarsaparilla beer and the the
cookbook is called
the handbook of practical receipts or
useful hints in everyday life
and apparently it's a sarsaparilla beer
and uh the information about it is
is pretty hazy there's lots of
advertisements across
canada and the united states turns out
dr crunk sold
the recipe to franchisees essentially so
that they could make it in their town or
city
and the recipe in this book is very
vague so i'm going to do my best
to follow it exactly but some of the
ingredients
aren't you don't really know what they
are
so for the first part of the recipe i'm
going to take chamomile
cinnamon ginger
sassafras
sarsaparilla and
hops now it doesn't tell me which hops
to use it just says
hops so i'm thinking this is 1830s
mid-1800s they would be the classic
european hops
so i'm going to put in a combination or
i put in a combination of
uk fuggle german tetnang and german
hallertau
i think that should give sort of that
classic
european flavor that was probably in
vogue at that time
also tells me to put in sasparilla
extract so i've got some sarsaparilla
extract here this is all from the
root beer this is essentially just a
take on
the root beer recipes that we did in the
sarasperilla recipes that we did
last year kind of mixed with a
bitterness from
the hops that would lend itself more to
beer
and also the ginger which will give it
sort of i'm thinking a ginger ale type
flavor now it says to boil this for two
hours
it doesn't say how much water to put in
so i'm assuming
i need to put in enough water to cover
and enough water
so that it doesn't boil away over the
two hour cook
let's say about that much so that was
just about a liter of water i put in
there
i'm going to bring this up to a boil and
i'm going to let it boil for two
hours
this has boiled for two hours now
and at the end of the first hour so
much water had evaporated because i
hadn't put a lid on it
that i needed to add extra water to it
because it had almost evaporated
completely so i put more water in and
then i put the lid on
you need to boil hops in order to
extract
the acids that contribute the bitterness
and depending on how long you boil them
there's a certain amount of extraction
and blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah that's all beer
making stuff and i don't know
how much of that is important in this
particular instance
but you are looking for a thorough
extraction of
all of the flavors from the barks the
ginger the hops everything that's in
there
so the two hours is good maybe put a
cover on it to limit the
amount of evaporation you have
now i need to strain it and i've got a
big strainer here with a
coffee filter in it and i've wet the
coffee filter down to get it ready
i'm going to filter it first through
another fine mesh strainer so that we
don't
gum up the coffee filter completely
let's see if we can do this without
spilling
i'm going to let this filter through and
cool down to room temperature before we
move on to the next step
i also have some green tea that's
steeping here that's part of the next
step
and i'm going to get ready the fermenter
the water and the molasses and we'll
combine everything with the yeast
final assembly now the original recipe
calls for 100 gallons of
water i'm obviously making a much
smaller amount
i'm all in but i'm not 100 gallons all
in so
molasses is the sugar that drives the
fermentation
this is a fermented drink so i'm going
to put that into the carboy
it's pretty warm here today pours nicely
and i'll give it a shake
to mix it up now there's foam on top of
the water
that is from something called star sand
and star sand is essentially a
disinfectant that you use
in brewing and it foams
and you're not supposed to rinse away
the foam you're just supposed to leave
it
so don't worry about the foam next in
this is the
tissan of all of the parts that we
boiled up earlier
so in that goes and let me tell you it
does not smell
great
a little bit of sludge this is the green
tea
okay and we'll give this a swirl just to
completely mix it up
now i am going to take a reading of the
sugar amount
before i put the yeast in so that at the
end
i can do another test and see how much
alcohol we produced
based on the amount of yeast that they
want me to put in and the amount of
sugar i'm kind of expecting that this
will be
somewhere between four and five percent
alcohol
so i'm just going to take off a little
bit to test
a little taste and the yeast it just
said to put in yeast
to pitch yeast
and i have to imagine that they were
using brewer's yeast
standard probably ale yeast in the 1830s
i don't know which specific type of
yeast they were asking for because it
doesn't say
so i'm going to use sapphile us-05
and this is a yeast that
is something that gives a fairly clean
brew
produces alcohol fairly well and doesn't
add a lot of its own
taste so i'm just going to pitch that on
top
and you can already see it dissolving
into the liquid we should get a pretty
good brew off of this
next i'm going to take a little bit of
sample
and i'm using a digital refractometer to
do this test
and for those of you who brew beer at
home and use an analog refractometer
that you hold up to your eye
this does essentially the same thing
except completely differently
and it's very accurate so while that's
doing the testing
i've got an airlock and i'll put the
airlock on
this will go into the basement probably
around 65 degrees fahrenheit for about a
week
as it ferments
okay so on the nose all i get is
molasses
that molasses will go away during
fermentation as the yeast eats the sugar
i expect some of it to stay but not a
lot
that's quite nice that is quite nice i
think after it's fermented and
carbonated that'll be pretty good
so i'll see you back here in a week okay
here we are eight days later the cronk
has been bubbling away in the basement
in the brewery
the fermentation stopped probably
towards the end of day
five i left it for a few extra days
because
it doesn't hurt just to make sure that
the fermentation was completely done i
wasn't exactly sure where it was going
to end
so i thought let's be safe now i'm going
to transfer this to a little corny keg
and we are going to force
carbonate it so everything is clean and
sanitized at this point all of the
transfer stuff is in the sanitizer and i
just sprayed down the outside of the
carboy with some sanitizer
to make sure that everything is clean
you don't want to get any nasties in
your keg
so let's do the transfer
now this is something i normally do down
in the brewery because you're going to
get
liquid everywhere
okay so siphon
is siphoning okay it's all transferred
over
put the lid on the keg
spray it on the top with a little bit
more sanitizer
and fill it with gas
[Music]
typically i i purge the co2 a couple of
times
[Music]
i'm actually purging the oxygen that's
left in the tank and filling it with co2
it just keeps it for a little bit longer
i'm filling this right now to
30 psi i'm going to move the keg into
our keg fridge for three or four days to
carbonate under 15 psi
and then we'll come back and give it a
taste
[Music]
okay it's it's time
spilling crop what how could you waste
it it's that's a little bit too foamy
perhaps
so it is over carbonated a little over
carbonated we might need to wait
there we go oh second one so the
lighting pour is always better
the line was just uh there you go look
at another glass
all right the line was just overcharged
maybe not cold enough
so it doesn't smell like it did before
like when you boiled it up
yeah it had all the it still has a
strong molasses smell to it
the color is really nice it's got a
great head
it's and it's even like a nice yellowy
kind of color to it
okay so for the first time
in probably 150 years someone's tasting
crunk
grunk drink it clunk is the drink yeah
uh and just as a note a fundraiser from
uh our friends in calgary for the alex
community
food center alex community food center
so one of our viewers in calgary
saw that we were making cronk and crunk
is a big deal in calgary
um so he sent us this t-shirt and
they're doing a fundraiser
so that's got a bite to it
it is
okay so it's a little bit weird yeah
it's not super sweet
even though it tastes like even though
you can taste the molasses there's a
hint of molasses to it it's not super
sweet
so i'm getting molasses mostly on the
nose right at the beginning yeah but i'm
not getting too much of a flavor of
molasses
no this clocked in at 2.9 alcohol so
just under three percent um which is
which is um
about right because in all the
advertisements for this in the 1830s
1860s
it said that it was a temperance drink
and at that time
even though it's 2.9 percent alcohol at
that time this would have been
considered a temperance drink because it
wasn't whiskey at
you know 65 so
i wouldn't define it as being crushable
no it's not crushable it's not crushable
which means it's not an easy light no
flavor kind of yeah you just drink it
back cause it's cold
you couldn't suck this back on a patio
all afternoon so it's it's not a session
beer either
it's not overly bitter so the hops are
just sort of there just a little bit
it is refreshing though it is refreshing
yeah like it is
you know you'd like oh no okay i'm good
i can see how people are like yeah i'm
good i'm ready to go
i don't know what that means but you
know it's weird because in all the
advertisements in the
1800s
it was listed as a health drink as a
temperance drink
as something that you got at the
pharmacy or you got at a tavern or
and it doesn't quite fall into anything
so i don't i don't get any
of the ginger that was put in here
i don't actually taste it as a
sarsaparilla or a root beer if you
if you're trying is not a root beer no
so if you're if you're
thinking oh it's like an a w root beer
or a
sioux city sarsaparilla because it's got
none of that in it none of that at all
and it's not
not in this recipe no and that's the
thing
is this the definitive cronk recipe
is there still a crunk recipe
we've got you know a gallon of about a
gallon of crunch to drink before we uh
attempt something else and by the time
that happens perhaps the uh
the other brewers that are out there
trying to do this we'll have a different
recipe and we'll have tried something
different so there's a commercial
brewery in calgary
that is right now um as we speak it's
probably in their fermenter
and doing they're doing them out like
they're not
our gallon of they're doing at least 100
gallons based on the same recipe and i'd
be interested to find out
how theirs differs so
cronk is the drink thanks for stopping
by
stay safe see you again soon
and yet somehow i drink most of my well
yeah and i think it's gonna go really
well with the montreal smoked meat
that's on the
on the burner here yes yes it will
you