The price of malt in WW I

I'm sure the tempting title will have suckered many of you into reading this. But this post isn't just about the price of malt in WW I. There's also stuff about the price of barley.

It wasn't just tax that put up the price of beer in WW I. The price brewers had to pay for their raw materials also skyrocketed. In the space of two and a half years the price of malt more than doubled:

The price of malt (shillings)
	English	Foreign	Indian	Californian
July 1914	40 - 44	37 - 39
December 1914	41 - 45	40 - 42
August 1915	50 - 55	48 - 60
November 1915	65 - 70	58 - 60
August 1916	74 - 78	70 - 72
December 1916	88 - 92		80	90 - 95
Source:
Journal of the Institute of Brewing, Volume 23, Issue 3, May-June 1917, pages 182-184.

And it got worse.

A world without inflation - difficult to imagine, isn't it? Yet up until WW I, that was the case in Britain. Which meant they could easily compare the price of barley over 100 years.

"It may interest you to know that we have here the average prices of Scotch barley for the last 100 years, as fixed by the Fiars Court, and during the 100 years—1815 to 1914—the highest price in any year during that long period was in the year 1818, and the price of barley then only reached 54s. 11d. per quarter, so that it is interesting to learn that in this present season — 1916-1917 — we have been on a level of prices fully 20s. per quarter more than the highest price known for over 100 years. There are only a very few years in which the price during the past 100 years has exceeded 40s., and 1873 was the last date on which it did exceed 40s., being in that year 42s. 1d. The previous occasion was in 1860, when the price was 40s. 5d., and before that we have to go back to 1850, when it was 40s. 6d., and then again to 1846, when it was 41s. 4d., and from that to the year 1824, when it was 41s."
Journal of the Institute of Brewing, Volume 23, Issue 3, May-June 1917, page 181.

Let's move on to a specific example. Courage's records handily give the prices for raw materials and tax. At least from 1917 they do. That year they did something quite unusual - drastically changed the format of their records. The information added was almost all to do with costs. No doubt the war and the ever-rising prices it caused were behind the change.

Here's what I've harvested from Courage's records:

Courage malt prices 1917 - 1919
date	pale	pale	Californian	crystal	brown	black	maize	No.3 invert	glucose
January 1917	67/6	65/6	60/-	69/-	51/6	65/-	62/-	69/-
April 1917	74/-	70/-		76/6	69/-	75/-	68/-	80/-
June 1917	67/6	65/6		76/6	69/-	75/-		80/-
October 1917	86/-	91/-		86/6	69/-	87/-		90/-
January 1918	87/-			86/6	83/-	90/-		94/-
May 1918	90/-	92/-		86/6	83/-	90/-		108/-
July 1918	95/6	97/-		86/6	85/-	97/-			151/-
November 1918	95/6	96/-		88/-	84/6	92/-			150/-
June 1919	93/-	101/6		90/-	86/6	94/-	75/-	123/-
September 1919	95/-	100/-		86/-	82/6	94/-	80/-	123/-
Source:
Courage brewing records held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document numbers ACC/2305/8/249 and ACC/2305/8/250
Notes:
The price of glucose and No. 3 invert is for 224 lbs.
The price of the malts and maize is per quarter of 336 lbs.

You can see that between 1917 and 1919 the price of pale malt rose by about 50%. The increase in coloured malts was rather less, except for brown malt. The lag between the prices here and those in the previous table is to be expected. Brewers didn't buy malt the day before they used it.

No. 3 invert disappears from the records in 1918, presumably because it was unavailable. The cost of sugar rose even more than that of malt. In 1917 a quarter of No. 3 was about the same price as malt, but by 1919 was about 20% higher. Proof - if any were needed - that brewers didn't just use sugar because it was cheap.

While I was looking at the records, it seemed a good idea to calculate the costs per barrel of X Ale:

The cost of Courage X Ale 1917 - 1919
date	cost raw materials per barrel	tax per barrel X	cost per barrel X	OG of X	price per gravity point
January 1917	£0.69	£0.99	£1.68	1045.9	£0.021
April 1917	£0.72	£1.02	£1.75	1045.9	£0.022
June 1917	£0.67	£0.92	£1.59	1041.7	£0.022
October 1917	£0.69	£0.80	£1.50	1034.8	£0.023
January 1918	£0.72	£0.79	£1.51	1034.8	£0.023
May 1918	£0.55	£1.09	£1.64	1023.9	£0.046
July 1918	£0.54	£0.96	£1.50	1022.2	£0.043
November 1918	£0.54	£0.92	£1.46	1021.1	£0.044
June 1919	£0.58	£1.50	£2.08	1023.6	£0.063
September 1919	£0.98	£2.45	£3.43	1040.0	£0.086
Source:
Courage brewing records held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document numbers ACC/2305/8/249 and ACC/2305/8/250
Note:
Cost of X is the cost of the raw materials plus the tax.

I included the OG because otherwise the numbers wouldn't make much sense. The cost of a barrel fell in late 1917, but only because the gravity was reduced. Note that the cost per gravity point shot up in 1918 and continued to rise after the war's end.