Tuesday 9 February 2021

Boddington Bitter sugars 1945 - 1970

No, nowhere near finished with Boddington Bitter yet. You're really going to regret showing enthusiasm for this topic. 

On the face of it, there's an obvious increase of the percentage of sugar in the between 1945 and 1950. However, what you need to bear in min is that during the war and, its immediate aftermath, brewers weren't allowed to use any ingredients they wanted. Especially something, like sugar, which had many other uses in food production.

What really happened is that Boddington reverted to using a similar proportion of sugar as they had done pre-war. The 1939verion of the beer contained 11.3% sugar - much the same as in the later period covered by the table below.

Exactly the same three sugars were used in the whole 25 years covered: DMS (Diastatic Malt Syrup), Flavex and Br. I've no real idea what the latter two were, unfortunately. Except that the former was a proprietary sugar produced by EDME.

While the types of sugar remained constant for 25 years, their proportions didn't. At times most was DMS, at others BR, with Flavex always in the middle position.

What does this tell us? Boddington was very loyal in its selection of sugars in the immediate post-war period.

Boddington Bitter sugars 1945 - 1970
Date Year DMS Flavex Br total
9th Apr 1945 1.74% 1.74% 5.22% 8.70%
15th Apr 1946 2.31% 3.08% 4.62% 10.00%
3rd Jan 1947 3.96% 2.97% 3.96% 10.89%
5th Apr 1948 3.64% 2.73% 3.64% 10.00%
1st Apr 1949 4.46% 3.57% 3.57% 11.61%
6th Apr 1950 4.72% 3.77% 3.77% 12.26%
24th Dec 1951 4.24% 3.39% 3.39% 11.02%
6th Jan 1966 4.62% 3.70% 3.70% 12.01%
9th Jan 1968 5.04% 4.03% 4.03% 13.10%
20th Apr 1970 5.04% 4.03% 4.03% 13.10%
Sources:
Boddington brewing records held at Manchester Central Library, document numbers M693/405/129, M693/405/130 and M693/405/133.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

With bees on their logos, was there any honey at any time in Boddington beers?

Ron Pattinson said...

Anonymous,

a bee is just the symbol of Manchester.

EJ said...

I believe Flavex is EDME SuperFlavex or SFX. It's a dark malt syrup. 1.5 kg yellow cans for home brewers. I bet EDME supplied DMS and SFX to Boddington's. I used to use it to brew stouts in the 1970's.

Anonymous said...

Super Flavex or SFX is a brand of darm malt extract syrup sold by EDME. Would Flevex be similar ?

Robp said...

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/saccharum