Saturday 27 July 2019

Let's Brew - 1944 Barclay Perkins London Stout

Still forlornly beating my 1944 recipe drum. Still plenty more to come. Unless I suddenly see sense. (Not much chance of that. When I get an idea in my head it takes some shaking out.)

On a Barclay Perkins price list from 1944, five Stouts appear:


Stout (draught) 8.5d per half pint
Stout 7.5d per half pint
Best Stout 9.5d per half pint
Victory Stout 9.5d per half pint
Russian Stout 18d per nip

Though I’m pretty sure that they only brewed three, with the brew house names BS, LS and IBS. Draught Stout, Best Stout and Victory Stout all look like the same beer to me. Especially if you consider that the difference in price between a draught and a bottled beer was 1d per half pint. By this point London Stout (LS) was being marketed as simply Stout.

After the war, Best Stout and Victory Stout were separate brews, with the former being the stronger of the two.

The grist is very similar to BS. No surprise there since, as you would expect, the two were often parti-gyled together. Though both beers were also brewed single-gyle. When parti-gyled, the quantity of LS was always much greater than that of BS.

The kettle hops were Mid-Kent Fuggles from the 1943 harvest and Kent Fuggles from 1941. Rather surprisingly, given the difference in strength and the fact that LS was a bottled beer, which often weren’t dry-hopped, this contains the same quantity of dry hops as BS.


1944 Barclay Perkins London Stout
mild malt 4.00 lb 49.23%
brown malt 0.50 lb 6.15%
amber malt 1.00 lb 12.31%
crystal malt 60 L 0.50 lb 6.15%
roast barley 1.00 lb 12.31%
No. 3 invert sugar 1.00 lb 12.31%
caramel 1000 SRM 0.125 lb 1.54%
Fuggles 90 mins 0.75 oz
Fuggles 60 mins 0.75 oz
Fuggles 30 mins 0.50 oz
Goldings dry hops 1.00 oz
OG 1034.5
FG 1013
ABV 2.84
Apparent attenuation 62.32%
IBU 27
SRM 31
Mash at 143º F
After underlet 149º F
Sparge at 165º F
Boil time 90 minutes
pitching temp 60º F
Yeast Wyeast 1099 Whitbread ale

1 comment:

James said...

I was going to ask where the flaked barley is, and then I remembered from your earlier post that Barclays was allowed to use roasted barley as the non-malted grain mandated by the government. Seems like cheating but maybe it made sense (I suppose roasted barley really is less resource-intensive to make than black malt).

Skimming through some prewar recipes on your site, I haven't found any breweries using roasted barley prior to the war, with the lone exception of Barclays, which was using roasted barley in fairly large quantities in the 1930s. (It wasn't a thorough search though, I could be missing some other breweries.) I suppose that gave Barclays a leg up in complying with the government mandate to use non-malted grains. As an aside, I'm surprised more breweries didn't shift to roasted barley after 1880, as they were already halfway there before it was legalized, per this post:

https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2013/06/roasted-malt-or-roasted-barley.html

In some other posts you mentioned Barclays's practice of adding roasted barley to the copper. Would that have been done here or would it have been mashed with the other grains?