Sir Allan MacNab’s best beer recipe
Hamilton restaurant’s new brew is made with historic hops grown at Dundurn Castle
HAMILTON— When railway magnate Sir Allan Napier MacNab called Dundurn Castle his home, everyone in the place drank beer.
Certainly Sir Allan himself, and his business cronies. Strong, dark beer for them, from the butler’s basement brewery. But the servants and the kids too all imbibed. They got the “small beer,” a feeble brew made from barley that had already been used to make that first batch for Hamilton’s high rollers.
Now, nearly 200 years later, any average Hamiltonian will be able to get a taste of what the beer of Dundurn Castle might have been like.
How? Well, the hops that flavoured that beer were originally grown in the castle’s rectangular kitchen garden, overseen by Scottish gardener William Reid. Two centuries on, Devyn PrinceReid (also Scottish, but no relation) started brewing beer in a back room of Valentino’s Restaurant in west Hamilton.
Across time, the two Reids collided. The 32-year-old Valentino’s brewer, who’s been making beer for the restaurant since 2012, sought out some of the historic Cascade hops that were replanted in the kitchen garden when it was restored in 2004. The hops, which grow up and over the south-facing garden fence, look like small, lime-coloured pine cones. Crush them and the oily yellow resin inside gives off a grapefruitlike aroma, common to contemporary craft beers.
Prince-Reid visited the garden in late summer and harvested about two
pounds of the fragrant flowers. He let them dry out on cookie sheets in the restaurant. The castle’s senior curator, Debra Seabrook, sent Prince-Reid a historic beer recipe and a journal from the Seagram Museum in Waterloo, to give him a taste of how beer might have been brewed in the castle during the 1800s. When Seabrook interviewed for the curator’s job she had shared her hope that a Dundurn beer might be possible, and so was keen to see the idea ferment.
Prince-Reid did his own historic research, exploring the blends of hops that might have been used and discovering antique filtration techniques. He then crafted his own recipe, strongly influenced by history and the hops of Dundurn Castle. “I’d never delved so deeply into the history of certain hops before picking them out for this recipe,” he said.
At the suggestion of the castle’s contemporary gardeners, he decided to name his new brew Reid’s Dundurn Ale, in honour of the historic site’s first gardener. “It’s pretty cool we share the same last name, but this is for William Reid,” the young brewer explained.
Prince-Reid makes the beer by steeping British Brown and Victory malts in water. That sweet brew, redolent with the grain’s natural sugars, is then boiled while bitter hops like Fuggles and East Kent Golding are added.
In the final few minutes, he tosses in a cheesecloth bag full of Dundurn Castle’s Cascade hops to give it the unique aromatic flavour. He also sent some of spent grain or “wort” over to Dundurn Castle so it could be made into bread in the site’s wood fired ovens — something that would have happened in MacNab’s time as well.