Like I said, brewed 9th September 1940. Which was during the Battle of Britain. The log has this note written on it in red ink:
"Air raid warnings:- 5.15 p.m. to 6.25 p.m.
AND 8.40 p.m. to 5.45 A.M."
Just 16 barrels were brewed. Though it was party-gyled with 600-odd barrels of LS and MS.
These are the beer's vital statistics:
OG 1028.80FG 1007.50
ABV 2.82%
apparent attenuation 73.96%
0.84 pounds hops per barrel
6.9 pounds hops per quarter of malt
78% pale malt
6% brown malt
6% chocolate malt
5% dark sugar
4% pale sugar
0.64% oats
A bit weedy, as you can see. And no black malt. So does that prove black malt/roast malt are used in Porter, but not Stout? Not really, seeing as it was party-gyled with Stouts. What's intriguing is that Whitbread were late adopting black malt and see to have been early to ditch it as well. It wasn't in the 1928 Stout grists, either. Must check up exactly when they stopped using it.
Before anyone mentions it, I do realise Whitbread revived a Porter briefly in the 1990's. What I meant was: Whitbread's last Porter from Chiswell Street.
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2 comments:
It doesn't really need saying that this was a wartime beer, of course (what with the air raid and all - the whole area around the brewery was destined to be flattened in a big raid a few months later, though thanks to a well-organised firefighting set-up the brewery survived largely unaffected.) It would be interesting to see what the recipe was like just over a year earlier, in the last weeks of peace ...
The last peacetime versions weren't much different. The real impact of WW II on British beer was in 1943.
London breweries had an impressive survival rate during the Blitz. Shows the importance of having your own firefighters.
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