Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/134

 The method of brewing is to put the sugar into boiling water in the proportion of a pound to a gallon, and when the scum has well risen and has been thoroughly cleared off, to throw in as many ounces of hops as there are pounds of sugar, and then to boil the whole for a full hour longer. The liquor is afterwards poured into coolers, and should be worked with yeast according to the good old rule "when the brewer can see distinctly the reflection of his own face in the wort." Like its prototype small beer, sugar-beer ought to "see a Sunday," but in hot weather it is often drunk at the end of four days, whether Sunday has intervened or not. The natives are so fond of anything sweet, that they consider an empty sugar bag a valuable prize, and, when fortunate enough to obtain one, they soak it in a tub of water, and all sit round the tub drinking the mixture in great sociability: they are not, however, lucky enough to get such a prize often, for so much sugar adheres to the matting of which the bags are made that some saving people always boil the bag up with the mash when they brew, by which process I can hardly imagine that they improve the taste of their beer.

Rosa used often to enlist Khourabene's services in brewing, on which occasions he always lighted a fire out of doors, and, making an extempore little grate of bricks, with two pieces of iron hooping laid across them as bars for the copper to rest upon, he would diligently skim the sugar, and constantly stir the hops that they should not boil over. The fact of thus helping to brew seemed, as he thought, to give him a vested interest in afterwards drinking the beer, and he seldom appeared in the kitchen without reminding us of his assistance. I was lying down