If you burn one pound of sugar, put a quart of boiling hot water to it; stir it about, and let it boil a quarter of an hour longer, then take it off and let it cool.  A pint of this mixture is sufficient to colour a pipe of wine; but note, that with every pint you must mix a quarter of an ounce of common allum pounded to a fine powder; which will set the colour so that it will not subside, other wise it will fall to the bottom, and have no good effect on the liquor.

If you would have your wine of the colour of port, you must take eight ounces of logwood raspings, four ounces of alkanet root, one ounce of cochineal.  Infuse them over a slow fire for three hours; strain the liquor from the wood, and keep it boiling.  Then burn three pounds of brown sugar as before, and put the colour’d liquor to it; boil all together a quarter of an hour longer; then take it off, and when cold, bottle it for use.

A pint of this liquor will make a pipe the colour of port wine.  You must always remember to set the colour with a quarter of an ounce of common allum, ground or beaten to a fine powder.

PART III

THE Housekeepers DIRECTOR.

FORCING for BEER.

There are two sorts of forcings for beer; for what will agree with one kind of beer will not serve for another.  Some beer when kept twelve or fourteen months will taste as new and sweet as if not brew’d more than six or seven, nay a much shorter time, which must have a different forcing from that which is proper for beer that is ripe or less sweet.

Beers that are full and sweet must be forc’d in the following manner, viz.

For a hogshead, take a gallon of stale cyder, likewise one ounce of isinglass beat and pulled to small pieces, with an ounce of common allum ground to a fine powder, put them to the cyder; whisk it well together and let it stand ’till it’s a jelly.  Then break it in your can, and put one ounce of cream of tartar, and two pounds of stone-dust to it; whisk it well together, and dilute it with some of the beer till you have made the gallon five.  Apply it to the hogshead, and stir it well about; and when the ferment is gone off (which will be in two or three hours) bung it up close.  Leave out the vent-peg; and in a day or two you’ll find it fine and bright.

Beers that are not Sweet are forced with stum, the same that is made for raisin wine, with this difference only, that you must take for one hogshead, three pints, and two pounds of alabaster; stir them well together, and dilute with beer as above.  This will carry down all the foul particles, and make the beer fine in three or four hours.

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FORCING for ALE.

ALE that is brew’d in the winter to be drank in about two months is apt to get foul, occasion’d by the brewer’s neglecting it when cooling.  Sometimes it is left out in the frost, which will chill it, and make it curdy as it were, and and foul; to remedy this you must