Wednesday 27 June 2007

I promised you numbers


I apologise for yesterday's post. I promised you numbers and all you got were bad jokes and dodgy photographs. I'll try to do better today.

Though today is a Barclay Perkins day, courtesy of Stonch, who provided the photo of an example of their signage.

I've just finished going through the draught Pale Ale entries in the Truman's Gravity Book (see yesterday's post for unfunny gravity jokes). Fascinating stuff. I'll be more precise: fascinating stuff for me. But as I'm only writing this blog for my own amusement, that's good enough.

These are the edited highlights, with an emphasis on beers that were still around during my drinking lifetime. (Sorry about the huge blank spaces. I haven't quite mastered this blogging yet. Keep scrolling down to find all the loverley numbers and perhaps even a crap joke.)







You'll see the effect of a big rise in duty in the early 1930s (80 shillings to 114 shillings per 36 gallon barrel). It was reversed in 1933, though it seems many drinkers switched permanently to the cheaper (and weaker) Bitters introduced to negate the effect of the tax increase. The same thing happenned with draught Mild, with Barclay Perkins introducing a new beer - XX - at the gravity their X Ale had previously been, and dropping the X down to 1035.



If you've had the patience to read all those dull statistics, I feel I owe at least one joke. This is from my younger son.

"Why did the chicken cross the road?" "To get to the Burger King Fox." Don't ask me what it means. Look, I just promnised you a joke, not a good quality or even vaguely amusing one.

6 comments:

GenX at 40 said...

Hi Ron,

Great work - keep it up. Just a note that your graphs are rendering large gaps or blans space above and below them around them when read with the Firefox blog reader. Is there some buffereing HTML that you are putting in? Maybe you can post some tests and ask readers to let you know how they are coming across. We are all friendly and good like that I am sure.

Alan
A Good Beer Blog.

GenX at 40 said...

Oops, I wrote before I read. I am going to play with your table HTML to see if I can help.

GenX at 40 said...

I figured it out. Remove all the "br" tags.

Here is your chart with them: http://www.genx40.com/a/other/ronstabletest

Here is your chart with them removed: http://www.genx40.com/a/other/ronstabletest/ronstabletest1

Alan
AGBB

Ron Pattinson said...

Yeah, I can see all the unnecessary br tags. The problem is, I'm not putting them there. They are being generated.

I'm a very old-fashioned sort of guy. Rather than use the editor, I actually wtite the html code directly.

I think I need to investigate further how and why the extra tags are bing added.

Alan said...

I can't help you there as I also whittle my own HTML from the raw lumber. For now, you could screen save the tables and then display them as jpegs. That would control the space.

Ron Pattinson said...

You'll see that I've taken your advice on the tables and converted them to jpg's. It looks a lot better now. Thanks.