Saturday 15 September 2018

Let's Brew - 1914 Crowley Porter

Unusually for a provincial brewery, Crowley still produced a Porter in 1914.

At 1050º, it’s a similar strength to London Porter. Though the grist is quite different. For a start there’s no brown malt, which a London Porter would always include. No black malt, either, instead there’s chocolate malt. It’s a very early date to see this type of malt. Though Whitbread started using it in the 1920s.

The presence of a small amount of oats mean they must have been selling some of the brew as Oatmeal Stout. There’s not much of it, despite it being considerably more than London brewers bothered with.

Then there’s lots of sugar: around 14% of the grist in total. The original had three sugars, in addition to the caramel, 10 cwt cane, 2 cwt candy and 1 cwt CDW. I’ve rolled the last two together as candy.

As with most of Crowley’s beers, the hops are a combination of 1912 and 1913 English with 1913 Oregon.


1914 Crowley Porter
pale malt 8.25 lb 75.00%
chocolate malt 1.00 lb 9.09%
flaked oats 0.25 lb 2.27%
cane sugar 1.00 lb 9.09%
candy sugar 0.25 lb 2.27%
caramel 500 SRM 0.25 lb 2.27%
Cluster 120 mins 1.00 oz
Fuggles 60 mins 1.00 oz
OG 1050
FG 1017
ABV 4.37
Apparent attenuation 66.00%
IBU 38
SRM 36
Mash at 155º F
Sparge at 176º F
Boil time 120 minutes
pitching temp 59º F
Yeast Wyeast 1275 Thames Valley ale

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you mean Belgian candi sugar? I wasn't aware the British used it, although this obviously is fairly unusual regardless.

Ron Pattinson said...

Anonymous,

just candy sugar. Nothing particularly Belgian about it.