Thursday 16 August 2012

Tetley Pale Ales 1868

You know the drill by now. I'll be drilling into these Tetley brewing records for a while yet, throwing in a little bit of compare and contrast for fun. In a week or two you'll be wishing I was drilling into your head to end the misery.

Here's a question. How do you identify what style each beer in the records is? Sometimes it's pretty obvious, like if the beer is called Porter or something Stout. But it isn't always that simple. Brewhouse names can be pretty cryptic. Like one in this Tetley set: K 1/. At least that's what I think it says. What style is that? Remembering that Lees used K to designate one of their Milds.

I have a couple of approaches. One is to look at the ingredients to see what style it matches best. Though this can be tricky in the 19th century when most beers were brewed from 100% pale malt and hopped like hell. Another is to search for price lists and try to match the beers with the brewing records. In the case of K 1/, I did a bit of both.

My first guess on seeing the records was Light Bitter. That's based on the OG and the hopping. You might think that odd, given how few hops it appears to contain. But if you include the 450 lbs of spent hops from a brew of PA the same day, things look quite different. The hopping rate then shoots up to over 4 lbs per barrel. Plus, it wasn't part-gyled with any of the Mild Ales. And one of the Milds, X, had the same gravity.

That was still just guesswork. Then I found a Tetley's advert. One that specifically mentioned K Light Bitter Ale. Case closed.

Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, Wednesday 4th December, 1907, page 1.

Now it's time for contextualisation. Where I compare Tetley's Pale Ales with my benchmark: London beers. You may notice that I haven't found a great number of London Pale Ales. There's a very good reason for that: it's right at the beginning of when London brewers started brewing them. Whitbread first brewed theirs in 1865. Truman had been a little earlier, 1845, but Barclay Perkins didn't brew one until after 1880. Tetley, with their Pale Ale and Light Bitter, were ahead of the London brewers. I find that slightly surprising.

Here's another point to ponder. Though it had the brewhouse name of PA, Tetley's Pale Ale was always advertised as East India Pale Ale. Like I've said many times before, the choice of the name Pale Ale or IPA was pretty random in the 19th century. Brewers were very inconsistent in their usage. Anyone who claims that there was a definable difference between the two back then is a liar.

As you can see from the tables, Tetley's PA had very similar specs to Whitbread's and Truman's. All were a touch over 1060º. And all had around 18 pounds of hops per quarter. I can't say much about attenuation, because I only have the figure for one London beer. Even the pitching temperatures are pretty much the same.

That's not really a surprise. Like I said, this was early days for Pale Ale and breweries tended to stick to a similar profile. As time progressed, Pale Ales in different parts of the country would diverge.


Tetley Pale Ales 1868
Date
Year
Beer
Style
OG
FG
ABV
App. Atten-uation
lbs hops/ qtr
hops lb/brl
boil time (hours)
boil time (hours)
Pitch temp
max. Fermen-tation temp
length of fermen-tation (days)
comments
19th Oct
1868
K 1/
Pale Ale
1046.5
1016.9
3.92
63.69%
2.00
0.38
1.5
2
62º
62º
8
some spent hops
6th Oct
1868
K 1/
Pale Ale
1047.4
1015.5
4.21
67.25%
4.00
0.77
2
2
62º
64º
8
some spent hops
1st Oct
1868
K 1/
Pale Ale
1047.6
1022.4
3.33
52.91%
2.00
0.37
2
2
60º
64º
6
some spent hops
20th Oct
1868
PA
Pale Ale
1058.2
1014.4
5.79
75.24%
18.00
4.14
1.5
2
62º
68º


1st Oct
1868
PA
Pale Ale
1060.1
1015.0
5.97
75.12%
18.00
4.60
1.5
1.5
59º
64º
7

2nd Oct
1868
PA
Pale Ale
1061.8
1012.2
6.56
80.27%
18.00
4.44
1.5
1.5
58º
65º
8

Source:
Tetley brewing record held at the West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, document number WYL756/16/ACC1903



London Pale Ales 1865 - 1868
Date
Year
Brewer
Beer
Style
OG
FG
ABV
App. Atten-uation
lbs hops/ qtr
hops lb/brl
Pitch temp
16th Oct
1868
Whitbread
PA
Pale Ale
1061.2



16.42
5.49
58º
16th Nov
1868
Whitbread
PA
Pale Ale
1061.5



16.32
5.25
58º
28th Nov
1865
Truman
Pale Ale
Pale Ale
1064.3
1011.6
6.96
81.90%
18
6.87
58º
Average




1062.3
1011.6
7.0
81.9%
1062.3
5.9
58º
Sources:
Whitbread brewing record held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document number LMA/4453/D/01/034
Truman brewing record held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document number B/THB/C/147


3 comments:

Martyn Cornell said...

My personal theory for the slowness in the big London brewers to brew pale ales was because the London pub scene before the 1860s (and for a while aft5er) as still one where many pubs were taking their beers from two or three different suppliers: porter from the porter brewer, mild from the mild brewer, pale bitter ale (where there was a market for it - and it was still a minority taste) from the bitter ale brewer. Gradually, as porter declined in popularity and more brewers started being able to supply the entire range of beers, meaning pubs no longer had to deal with a multitude of different suppliers if they didn't want to, I suggest, the pressure grew for the big specialists to move into making other kinds of beer as well. In the provinces, however, there had never been the kind of specialisation seen in London, so eveybody already made everything.

Ron Pattinson said...

Martyn, that makes a lot of sense. Especially as it's around the 1860's when London Porter brewers get into Pale Ales - just when the decline in Porter was becoming obvious.

Anonymous said...

It's interesting that Tetleys obtained much higher and much more consistent attenuation in their higher gravity IPA than in the K1 (which I'm guessing would be their standard pale ale).

This is, of course, counterintuitive - in most cases, as the OG goes up, the attenuation falls. Alcohol is toxic to yeast, and as alcohol levels rise, the ability of the yeast to continue to metabolize sugars is compromised (as is its ability to split/reproduce).

The best guess I have for this apparent contradiction is a different strain of yeast is being used for the IPA as opposed to their pale ale - perhaps a strain obtained from a different brewery?