Keg Bitter

How many ways do I love you, Gravity Book? Loads. Dead loads. Time to consider another of these multifarious reasons.

Whitbread didn't randomly sample other brewers' beers. There are definite themes. Sometimes it's a particular type of beer. Like, say, Sweet Stouts that competed with its big seller Mackeson. Or Lager. Others it's a geographical thing. Edinburgh beers. Then there are the slightly more sinister ones.

Having started my drinking in the early 1970's, I can remember when Whitbread owned more than a dozen breweries. It's disturbing how often some of these show up in the Gravity Book: Strong, Brickwood, Wethered, Fremlin, Flowers, Starkey Knight & Ford. Surely Whitbread couldn't have been spying on potential takeover candidates?

Rambling again. Whitbread's expansion techniques isn't the theme today. Keg Bitter is. The title sort of gives that away. You know the score. Tables of numbers.

Clearly these new-fangled Keg Bitters were important to Whitbread. In October 1961 they analysed 44 from all sorts of different breweries, both large and small. Just as with Lager, even the smallest breweries didn't want to miss out on the keg action. For one very good reason, as we'll see in a moment.

First Keg Bitters:


For comparison purposes, here are non-keg Bitters:


As you probably don't want to study the numbers too closely yourself, I'll summarise the main differences between the two lots of Bitters.

The Keg Bitters have a slightly higher average OG - about 2.5 points. And, at 1039 are a couple of points higher than the average OG, which was 1037. The attenuation of Keg Bitters is also slightly higher. Though both groups have over 80% apparent attenuation, which is pretty high.

The biggest difference is the price. The average price of the Keg Bitters was 21d, of other Bitters 15d and a bit. But, as the keg beers were on average stronger, the fairest way to compare the prices is taking the gravity into account. Keg Bitters cost 0.54d per gravity point, other Bitters 0.42d. That may not sound like much, but it's a 29% difference.

OK, keg beers probably cost a little more to produce. But nothing like 29% more. With the larger brewers pushing their keg beers as a premium product and getting punters to pay top whack, it's no surprise the smaller players followed suit.

How many of these Keg Bitters still exist? Certainly not the one that most excited me, Warwick & Richardson Crystal Bitter.