Final league table of breweries

We're very nearly done. I'm starting to get a bit impatient myself for it all to be over.

Everything but the final pieces of text are in place. The covers are designed - I'll be announcing the winner of the front cover typography contest soon - I even have the isbn number. It seems like forever since I last issued a book. That reminds me that I have two unfinished volumes: Newark! and Malt!. I must get around to finishing them.

Don't worry - there are still plenty of tables to come. They're one thing I never tire of. That could explain why I've come up with not one but two league tables. One is based on the overall average score, the other on the position in the individual style tables. The results aren't identical. Where to start? Let's go with position.

Ranking of breweries by position
Brewery	Burton	Mild	PA	Porter	Stout	Average
Whitbread	1	4	1	2	1	1.8
Watney	8	2	2	1	4	3.4
Mann	3	1	10	6	6	5.2
Truman	9	6	3	3	5	5.2
Wenlock	6	3	9	7	3	5.6
Courage	2	8	4	5	12	6.2
Huggins	11	10	6		2	7.25
Meux	4	11	7		8	7.5
Lion	7	7	12	4		7.5
Hoare	10	9	11	9	7	9.2
Cannon	14	5	14	11	9	10.6
Barclay Perkins	13	15	8	8	10	10.8
City of London	12	17	5	10		11
Charrington	5	16	15		11	11.75
Source:
Whitbread Gravity book held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document number LMA/4453/D/02/001

In this Whitbread are clear winners. Unsurprising when they were never lower than fourth and had three top positions. But caution is required because the sample sizes were so small. And it was Whitbread doing the sampling. Where did they get their samples? If it was the brewery tap, then the contest is clearly unfair.

Mann, Truman and Wenlock all did pretty well, while Courage were let down by a poor Stout. Not sure if this means anything, but the top four breweries were all still around in the 1970's. And all but Whitbread were in the Watney group. It's odd how rubbish Charrington's beers were. The brewery was large and doing well between the wars. Were its beers really always that poor? Cannon, Barclay Perkins and City of London.  weren't much better. Was it the fault of poor cellarmanship or did beers leave the brewery in poor condition?

We'll move on now to the league table based on average score.

League table of breweries by score
Brewery	average score
Watney	1.36
Whitbread	1.23
Wenlock	0.66
Truman	0.65
Huggins	0.58
Mann	0.57
Lion	0.45
Courage	0.29
Meux	0.21
Hoare	-0.10
Charrington	-0.38
Barclay Perkins	-0.48
City of London	-0.54
Cannon	-0.57

You'll see that Watney tops this table with an impressive 1.36 average. Whitbread is not far behind on 1.23. Only two breweries achieved positive scores for every style: Watney and Huggins, though there was no Porter from the latter. Quite a way behind were Wenlock, Truman, Huggins Mann and Lion. Charrington isn't bottom this time, but is still one of the five breweries with a negative average score.

Barclay Perkins have the unfortunate distinction of having four out of five styles with negative score. I can only warn time-travellers to steer clear of their pubs. In fact I'd avoid all those with averages below zero.

I'm still not quite ready to let you off the hook. I'll be finishing with a look at each brewery's scores in more detail.