Wednesday 14 October 2009
Spent hops
I'd read of hops being re-used. Usually in the older brewing manuals. And usually when a Table Beer or Small Beer was made from the later runnings. Second-hand beer, you could call it. Second-hand malt, second-hand hops.
But the Younger's logs are the first where I've seen evidence of the practice of re-using hops lasting until comparatively modern times. The examples below date from 1898.
Younger's brewed a crazy number of different beers. 25 just at the Abbey brewery. Because their mash tuns were relatively small, their brews were relatively small, just 120-140 barrels. This also meant they brewed multiple times a day. Usually 6 or 7 times, at least. Which is handy when you want to re-use spent hops.
Where was I? Hops. Loads of different beers. That's it. Younger's produced 6 Stouts. Two, MBS and DBS, resemble London Stouts of the day. Then you've got S1, S2, SS1 and SS2. It took me a while to get my head around those. In particular the hopping.
This is a log for SS1 and S1:
20 is the amount of hops in SS1. A whole 20 pounds for 68 barrels. S1 only got 10 pounds for 74 barrels. Hardly worth bothering, you might say. But then there were the second-hand hops. SS1 got all 350 pounds from an earlier brew of No.3 plus 97.5 pounds from a brew of SLE.
Sometimes they didn't bother with any fresh hops at all. This comes from a log of S1 and S2:
It's where the hop entries should be. This particular brew used no fresh hops at all, instead re-using those from a brews of LAE and No. 3 / XXX earlier in the day. Given that they'd already been boiled for 3 hours, I can't imagine they had a great deal of goodness left in them.
These are the details of Younger's Stouts:
It's more evidence of Scottish brewers leading the way. (Like Lager and low-gravity Pale Ales.) These lightly-hopped and poorly-attenuated Stouts are more like those of the 1930's than the 1890's. In London, such sweet Stouts were unknown in the 19th century.
But the Younger's logs are the first where I've seen evidence of the practice of re-using hops lasting until comparatively modern times. The examples below date from 1898.
Younger's brewed a crazy number of different beers. 25 just at the Abbey brewery. Because their mash tuns were relatively small, their brews were relatively small, just 120-140 barrels. This also meant they brewed multiple times a day. Usually 6 or 7 times, at least. Which is handy when you want to re-use spent hops.
Where was I? Hops. Loads of different beers. That's it. Younger's produced 6 Stouts. Two, MBS and DBS, resemble London Stouts of the day. Then you've got S1, S2, SS1 and SS2. It took me a while to get my head around those. In particular the hopping.
This is a log for SS1 and S1:
20 is the amount of hops in SS1. A whole 20 pounds for 68 barrels. S1 only got 10 pounds for 74 barrels. Hardly worth bothering, you might say. But then there were the second-hand hops. SS1 got all 350 pounds from an earlier brew of No.3 plus 97.5 pounds from a brew of SLE.
Sometimes they didn't bother with any fresh hops at all. This comes from a log of S1 and S2:
It's where the hop entries should be. This particular brew used no fresh hops at all, instead re-using those from a brews of LAE and No. 3 / XXX earlier in the day. Given that they'd already been boiled for 3 hours, I can't imagine they had a great deal of goodness left in them.
These are the details of Younger's Stouts:
It's more evidence of Scottish brewers leading the way. (Like Lager and low-gravity Pale Ales.) These lightly-hopped and poorly-attenuated Stouts are more like those of the 1930's than the 1890's. In London, such sweet Stouts were unknown in the 19th century.
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2 comments:
This is one of the sweetest stouts from England, and it is modeled after 19th century Scottish stouts:
http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/103/3657
Ros Lone, surely that's an American Stout.
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