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.