Let’s Brew Wednesday - 1916 Barclay Perkins X

Now we’ve got to WW I we’re going to be going through the years rather more slowly than before. There was just so much happening.

Though not in the early years of the war. Apart from gravities falling a small amount, there wasn’t much change in the first three years of the war. As you’ll see from the recipe below. The gravity is a bit lower, but the recipe is essentially the same. The only difference is a sugar I’ve substituted. In the previous recipe it was “dark sacc.” In this one BS. Pretty sure both of them were dark in colour, so I’ve just bumped up the No. 3 content.

Oddly, this beer was slightly more heavily hopped than the 1914 version. Not sure why that was. There was a glut of hops after 1917, when beer production was  drastically cut, but that didn’t mean prices fell. In 1914 a hundredweight of hops cost £4 3s 9d, in 1916 £6 14s and in 1918 £18 15s.*

I’ve not really anything else to say. This recipe is really just for comparison purposes so you can see how quickly and drastically things changed over the next couple of years.

1916 Barclay Perkins X Ale
pale malt	5.75 lb	58.90%
amber malt	0.75 lb	7.68%
flaked maize	1.25 lb	12.80%
no. 3 sugar	2.00 lb	20.49%
caramel 500 SRM	0.01 lb	0.12%
Fuggles 120 mins	1.00 oz
Fuggles 60 mins	0.75 oz
Fuggles 30 mins	0.75 oz
OG	1048.6
FG	1012.2
ABV	4.82
Apparent attenuation	74.90%
IBU	30
SRM	17
Mash at	152º F
Sparge at	170º F
Boil time	120 minutes
pitching temp	61º F
Yeast	Wyeast 1099 Whitbread Ale

* Brewers' Almanack 1955, page 63.