Beer codes - a partial explanation

In all the excitement of going to Franconia I almost forgot about this. My life is just too full.

In a moment of boredom, I browsed the oldest Fullers logs I have. From 1887. Plucking out the OG, FG and hopping rate for my mega-gravity table.

It's something I'd been meaning to do for a long while. But I'd been put off by all the handwriting. The early Fullers logs aren't on a preprinted form. Just a plain sheet of paper. With squiggly writing. Where half the ink has disappeared. I'll show you one sometime. but not today.

If I had bothered to give them more than a cursory glance, I'd have noticed something dead handy. I'd seen the AK. But I'd been looking for that. XK, AKK, XXK and XKK. Those I'd overlooked. A whole set of beers with funny codes. And because they're in brewing logs, even though I've no extra clues to the origins of the codes, I can at least see what the beers were like.


Let's take a look at the beers, shall we? In this table, I've sorted them by the amount of hops per barrel.



One thing is immediately apparent: the more K's the heavier the hopping. Except for the IPA, which has no K's.

Now let's look at them sorted by OG:


The progression of strength goes AK, AKK, X , XKK, XK, IPA, XX, XXK. So allowing for slight variations from batch to batch, The A's and X's definitely indicate gravity. With A below X and XX above X. Is it starting to make sense yet?

I'd love to hear your opinions.