Sunday 17 June 2018

The colour of Watneys bottled beers

In 1963. Didn't want to nake the title to specific.

Toiling on my new book, I needed to dip into the Watney Quality Manual to harvest some recipes. After I - stupidly late - realised that my new book contained recipes that I'd already published in Let's Brew! last year. My own stupid fault.

The Watneys recipes I had via Usher's of Trowbridge, were amongst the problem recipes. How could I publish a book covering 1945-1965 without anything from Watney? The trend-setter of the time.

Luckily I've material so far unused. There's loads of it. Brewing logs photographed, but not processed. Plus other stuff like the Watney Quality Manual.

Boak and Bailey need to be thanked for sending me a pdf. It may not record individual brews, but it gives far more deails than any log. It even lists hop additions and target bitterness levels.

Along with specifying the exact amount of slops you could mix in at racking time. Lovely.

There's also a chart of bottled beer colours. SRM is about a quarter of of these numbers.


WPA = Watney Pale Ale
WBA = Watney Brown Ale
Manns = Manns Brown Ale
CLS = Combe London Stout

Not sure about the others.

5 comments:

John Lester said...

Interesting stuff. I think DMS is Dairymaid Stout; and CLS is Cream Label Stout. At around this time there was a bottled Red Barrel Export Pale Ale: I assume that on this list it was represented by PA Export, but in that case what was BRB (which could be bottled Red Barrel)? No idea what the "Y and G" under WPA represents.

Unknown said...

Were the Y & G included to indicate a regional trading area difference or an out bottler ?

Anonymous said...

Did the slops make it into the bottled beer too? I am wondering at which stage it was mixed back in; whether when racking into kegs/casks or at some point before that.

Ron Pattinson said...

Y and G are Yellow and Green, two different beers, I think. I've a recipe for WPA Yellow

Ron Pattinson said...

Anonymous,

yes. The blending with returned beer happened before packaging. Some of the bottled beers - I'm looking at Cream Stout - had even more shit in them.