Barclay Perkins Porter and Best Stout 1913 - 1922

You've had too much entertainment in the last couple of days. Time to return to educative tables.

The London Metropolitan Archives has a wonderful collection of brewing logs from the capital's major breweries. From just after 1800 right up to the 1970's. Except there are a few gaps. In particular, the Barclay Perkins Porter logs from the last decades of the 19th century until the 1920's. Which has left some holes in my wonderful gravity table.

But I've discovered a way around this problem. The gyle summary books for WW I are in the archive. They give the amount brewed, the amount racked and the costs of raw materials. Crucially, there's also the number of standard barrels. That's for tax purposes, as duty was paid per standard barrel. A standard barrel has a gravity of 1055. Using this and the number of barrels brewed it's a piece of piss to calculate the actual gravity.

You can see the results below:

TT = Porter, BS = Best Stout.

Why are there numbers missing for TT? Because it wasn't brewed for almost two years.

I was surprised how low the gravity was in 1914. About as aweak as London beers got. By the early 1920's it was even weaker, venturing into barely alcoholic territory.

Best Stout, on the other hand, was brewed right through the war and never dropped below 1050. A very respectable gravity for the darkest days of the war. No wonder many switched from Porter to Stout.