Monday 29 March 2010

Burton beers ca 1955 (part three)

This is working perfectly. I'm spinning a whole month's worth of posts out of  Andrew Campbell's "The Book Of Beer". Today I finish off Burton beers.

First off, Truman. Who were both a London and Burton brewer. They were incredibly proud of their Burton brewery. Which is why you can still see references to it plastered all over former Truman pubs.

"Truman, Hanbury, Buxton & Co's origins are the oldest in London, beginning with a certain Mr. Thomas Bucknall who established a brewhouse in Losworth Field, Spitalfields, about 1666, and which was bought by a Joseph Truman in 1694. In 1800, Samuel Hanbury joined in partnership with the Truman family  and Thomas Fowell Buxton. It was not until 1873 that they bought a brewery in Burton, but as they brew their pale and bitter beers at Burton, they must be included in the Burton group of breweries. Their milds and stouts are brewed in London.

As we write, an intensive advertising campaign is in course to establish their beer Ben Truman as a national beer. Of similar strength to Bass, Double Diamond, and Worthington, it is a good solid beer, with a strong flavour. Another strongly publicized line for which a major campaign is being conducted and a mutual marketing agreement made with Whitbread's and Tollemache, is Trubrown, a brown ale of higher than usual gravity, sweet and well carbonated."
"The Book Of Beer" by Andrew Campbell, 1956, pages 204-205.
Let's take a look at those beers in more detail:


Truman Burton beers in the 1950's
Year
Beer
Style
Price
size
package
FG
OG
Colour
ABV
attenuation
1950
Bitter
Pale Ale
16d
pint
draught
1005.6
1035.3
22
3.86
84.14%
1951
PA
Pale Ale
16d
pint
draught
1006
1038.2
21
4.19
84.29%
1951
Bitter
Pale Ale
17d
pint
draught
1003.8
1038.8
23
4.57
90.21%
1954
PA
Pale Ale
17d
pint
draught
1006.8
1036.9
19
3.91
81.57%
1954
PA
Pale Ale
17d
pint
draught
1006.4
1036.7
18
3.94
82.56%
1955
PA
Pale Ale
17d
pint
draught
1005.9
1037.7
17
4.14
84.35%
1957
PA
Pale Ale
17d
pint
draught
1007.1
1037.2
18
3.91
80.91%
1959
Keg Bitter
Pale Ale
22d
pint
draught
1008.8
1040.5
22
4.12
78.27%
Source:
Whitbread Gravity Book

Unfortunately, the Whitbread Gravity Bookonly lists their ordinary Bitter, not Ben Truman. But don't despair. I can check Truman's brewing records to find out more.


Truman Burton beers in 1953
Beer
Style
OG
FG
ABV
App. Attenuation
lbs hops/ qtr
hops lb/brl
pale malt
crystal malt
no. 1 sugar
no. 3 sugar
other sugar
flaked maize
high dried malt
I.M. Co.
P1 B
Pale Ale
1050.7
1014.7
4.76
71.04%
7.21
1.39
90
1
4


7
15
3
P1 B
Pale Ale
1050.7
1017.7
4.36
65.03%
7.15
1.38
90
1
4


7
16
3
No. 7
Mild
1032.7
1006.6
3.44
79.66%
5.00
0.61
21
3


3

21

P1
Pale Ale
1044.6
1013.3
4.14
70.19%
6.14
1.04
112


4


20
4
P2
Pale Ale
1036.8
1008.6
3.74
76.69%
6.14
0.86
112


4


20
4
XX
Mild
1030.7
1005.8
3.30
81.08%
6.14
0.72
112


4


20
4
No. 7
Mild
1032.7
1009.1
3.11
72.03%
4.90
0.85
41
7


7

42

XXX
Mild
1035.7
1007.5
3.74
79.07%
4.90
2.21
41
7


7

42

P1 B
Pale Ale
1051.2
1013.3
5.02
74.05%
7.16
1.42
51

4


4
7
2
Source:
Truman brewing records.

P1 is Ben Truman, P1 B the bottling version. P2 is ordinary Bitter. None of these Pale Ales was particularly heavily hopped. The grists are what you would expect: mostly pale malt with some crystal malt, maize and sugar. I'm not quite sure what they mean by high dried malt. I suspect something like mild malt.

Finally a brewery that still exists: Marston's. And still brews in Burton. Incredible, eh? Here's an admission: I like Marston's Pedigree. Especially the farty smell, the sign of a true Burton Pale Ale. I'm not quite sure why it gets so much hate. Too ubiquitous, I guess. Sometimes I feel the beer world is getting like Northern soul: obscure just for the sake of it.

"Marston, Thompson and Evershed had a somewhat later start than some of the Burton breweries, and in fact are technically not in Burton-on-Trent at all, but are at Horninglow, a nearby village where they have been since 1834. Among their important brews is a barley wine type, of considerable strength and mellow character, Old Roger."
"The Book Of Beer" by Andrew Campbell, 1956, page 205.

Unfortunately, I don't have details of the one Marston's beer Campbell mentions, Owd Roger. He got the name slightly wrong, but I'll forgive him that. Instead of details, I've an Owd Roger anecdote. The Old Kings Arms in Newark used to have draught Owd Roger in the winter. I can remember Mogg drinking 5 pints of it one night and being carried out because his legs had stopped working. Served him right for drinking an 8% ABV beer by the pint. Proof that it's impossible to session a beer of that strength.

Here are the Marston's beers I do have information on:


Marston's beers in the 1950's
Year
Beer
Style
Price
size
package
FG
OG
Colour
ABV
attenuation
1950
Pale Ale
Pale Ale
17d
pint
draught

1040.9
28


1952
Extra Stout
Stout
1/3d
half pint
bottled
1011.4
1042.1
1 + 13.5
3.98
72.92%
1954
PA
Pale Ale
1/7d
pint
bottled
1005.1
1044.3
20
5.12
88.49%
1959
Mello Sweet Stout
Stout
15d
halfpint
bottled
1013.6
1040.3
325
3.45
66.25%
Sources:
Truman Gravity Book
Whitbread Gravity Book

Not much I can say about that. Except that Mello is a great name for a Sweet Stout.

8 comments:

Graham Wheeler said...

I wish that I could make sense of the Whitbread colour specifications. The move to the EBC colour glasses around 1954 is apparent in the logs, more so in previous postings. Prior to 1954, with their pale beers they sometimes suffice the colour with B, indicating the S52 brown series glasses, the same scale that the Americans still use. With their dark beers they use a red glass to compensate for the lack of red in the S52 glasses, which complicates comparison.

But after they moved over to EBC, the values for like-for-like pale beers drop, yet the EBC glasses give higher numerical values than the old S52. Odd.

Ron Pattinson said...

Graham, I believe Whitbread used a different sized cell for really dark beers like Stout.

Graham Wheeler said...

Really dark beers would be diluted to bring them within range of the comparator which, with EBC, is 2 to 27; S52 is, I think, 4 to 30.

So a 150 EBC beer would be diluted 9:1 (to give 10%) to bring it within range of the glasses. The measured value (15EBC) would then be multiplied by 10 to give the true value.

All colour measurements of this type must be referenced to a path length, otherwise it is meaningless. In Europe it was 1 inch but is now 25mm; America still uses half-inch.

They can vary path length to bring stuff within range too. A 40 EBU beer, being out of range at one-inch, could be measured in a half-inch cell, and the 20 EBU reading multiplied by two to normalise it to the one-inch standard.

Irrespective of path length or dilution ratios, after the measurement the result is always normalised so that the result is specified as if the sample was undiluted and as if 25mm path length was used (half-inch for Americans).

Oblivious said...

I think Marston's use the traditional 15% of sugar in Pedigree, but i could be wrong

Ron Pattinson said...

Graham, there are mentions in the Whitbread records of different-sized cells. Just can't put my hands on one at the moment.

Graham Wheeler said...

Ron Pattinson said...
Graham, there are mentions in the Whitbread records of different-sized cells. Just can't put my hands on one at the moment.

Yes, they would have used different cell sizes and thus different path lengths to suit the beers. They could specify a colour along with the path length, but in the absence of a specified path length, it is expected that it would be normalised to 25mm. So if they did the measurement in a 40mm cell, they would multiply the reading they got by 25/40 to give the colour referenced to 25mm.

Contrary to the belief of some, there is nothing official or enshrined in law about the EBC. It is basically just a big brewer's club. There is no requirement for any brewer to comply with their methods; many do not.

In the Whitbread stuff, they could have been using their own internal method prior to 1954. It seems likely. This was internal stuff anyway, and was not meant for external consumption.

Ron Pattinson said...

Graham, the Whitbread colours make no sense if they all used the same cell. I mean how could a Stout be 1 + 9 and a Brown Ale 14 + 40?

Mostly Whitbread, like Barclay Perkins, used a 1 inch cell. If I remember it right, for the Stouts it was a quarter inch.

Now I think about it, I'm pretty sure it's somewhere in the Gravity Book where it's mentioned.

Graham Wheeler said...

The old IoB standard referenced everything to a one-inch cell, irrespective of what sized cell was actually used. There is little reason for Whitbread to be any different, particularly as Whitbread were major participants in the IoB and were certainly involved in the development of the standard.

The colour numbers given in the gravity book are worse than useless if they referenced to anything other than one-inch.

Everything goes to pot once Whitbread use the red glass in the darker beers. I don't pretend to understand what is going on there, and I can see no relationship between several samples.

40 for the red is a very high number; one would expect that to be almost opaque, particularly so as the red green and blue glasses of the standard Lovibond colorimeter, used in other industries, only went up to 20.

Perhaps something subtractive is going on. One really needs sight of a 1950s copy of the IoB procedures to discover what's happening, assuming that it mentioned the used of red glasses. Using a bit of red for dark beers was common among a number of breweries, so it looks as if it was a standard method. 40 sounds like a lot of red, so it is somewhat bewildering.

Also Lovibond is an old 1885 scale; it doesn't necessarily tally with modern optical colour theory, not that I know much about optical colour theory. If I did I'd probably understand what is going on. Lovibond's own 1915 book does not help a lot either.