Barclay Perkins and WW II

It's been too long since I last dedicated myself to the inspiration for this blog: Barclay Perkins. Time to put that right.

I photographed Barclay Perkins' wartime brewing logs 18 months ago (14.03.2007 to be precise). Until now, I'd barely even looked at them. I haven't paid much attention to WW II at all so far.

Breweries are a conservative bunch. Their recipes don't usually change much from one year to the next. Wartime is an exception. Shortages and government interference forced breweries to modify their recipes sometimes as often as every week or two. 1917 to 1919 was one such period. 1942 to 1943 is another.

Simplicty. That's another feature of older brewery recipes. Porter and Stout aside, they rarely include more than a couple of types of malt. Simplicity also went out of the window in wartime.

The war started promisingly. Ok, they cut gravities a year or so in, but in 1941 they drastically reduced the adjuncts in their grists by dropping gflaked rice and reducing sugar to less than 5%.

Oh, and dozy twat that I am, I've only just noticed that the Barclay Perkins logs specify the varity of hop used. I'd noticed "F's" and "G's", but I only twigged today what they stand for: Fuggle's and Goldings, of course. I really am thick sometimes.

Here's what happened to Barclay Perkins X Ale in the first half of the war:


As you can see, they vary a fair bit. The percentage of sugar (including caramel) went from 11% to 19% to 6% to 8%. In 1939, just as in the interwar period, the only other adjunct was maize. In 1940 this was replaced with rice. In 1941, there was neither rice nor maize. Both flaked and torerefied barley were introduced in 1942.

What else changed? The gravity went from 1034.77 to 1031.84 to 1031.32 to 1027.50. The hopping rate dropped from 7 pounds per quarter of malt to 5. It must have been confusing for drinkers, wondering what their Mild was going to taste like this week.

My first impression when looking at the 1942 grist was that they were using up what was left in their cupboard. What on earth is lager malt doing in Mild? Very unusually, there's no 6-row malt. Maybe they couldn't get hold of any. But there are two different types of amber malt to make up.

X isn't even the craziest recipe. Take a look at these two:


Malted rye in KK? That's weird. KK was Barclay Perkins Burton. I've never seen malted oats in any other version of their BS Stout, which they'd been brewing for at least 150 years. And how come they were suddenly putting lactose in what wasn't a Sweet Stout? As you can see, both had some lager malt in them, too.