Upcoming highlights

Here's advance warning of the delights I'm preparing for you over the coming days and weeks.

I photographed a load more Truman logs in the archives on Tuesday. As I suspected, many are incorrectly catalogued and are from the Burton brewery. While I was snapping, they started making a lot more sense. I can work out what most the entries mean. I even know for sure what a couple of the beers are. 1 is their Barley Wine, 6 and 7 are Milds. It looks like they added caramel at racking time to create the dark versions of Mild. So expect lots and lots of lovely tables.

I looked at Truman's logs that covered quite a long period, but they all had one thing in common. Terrible handwriting. The one above is pretty typical. Can you read the names of the three beers being party-gyled?

I also went through a variety of Courage records. Brewing logs from the 1920's and 1930's, which are wonderful. Very clear, and include everything you could possibly wish to know. But a couple of notebooks I found were fascinating. One has instructions on how to brew each of the beers in their range. Judging by the handwriting and the beers described it seems to date from the early 19th century. I'll probably publish images of it all, as it's not that many pages. And the writer had lovely handwriting.

Another thing about the Courage logs. Like Whitbread, there's a summary of all the beer brewed in a year inside the front cover. I was immediately struck by how much Porter they brewed in the late 1930's. Way more than Whitbread. And they were still brewing it after WW II. 1950 was the last year I spotted it. When it had become a bottled beer.

One other odd thing about Courage. In the 1930's they still weren't brewing a Pale Ale. They'd bought the Alton brewery in 1903 specifically to supply them with Pale Ales. But it's odd that they only produced dark beers in their main brewery.

And I looked at their lager records. I found their very first brew of Harp Lager. That might be a fun thing to include in Let's Brew Wednesday.

God knows how long it's going to take me to get through all of this. I still haven't processed everything from my last visit to the Metropolitan Archives.