Monday, 5 January 2026

Boddington boiling and fermentation in 1901

A couple of processes now. Boiling and fermentation.

Starting with boiling. Interestingly, most of the beers only had a single wort.  Which was definitely not typical. You would usually only see that in two circumstances. First, at breweries where the brew length was short. Second, when a batch size was very small.

A Boddington's Pale Ale label with a barrel and two bees.
The boil lengths are sort of middling at mostly two hours plus. About 1.5 hours is the minimum you would see around this time. In this case, the boils are probably a bit longer as there’s only one wort. And some of the boil would be to concentrate the last runnings.

Very consistent is how I would describe the pitching temperatures. Which only vary by 0.5º F. 60º Fis pretty much a standard pitching temperature. Though for stronger beers you would expect it to be a little lower.

There’s nothing odd about the maximum temperatures, which are all around 70º F. Generally, a little higher for the stronger beers. As you would expect.

Around a week for primary fermentation was fairly typical. Some brewers did manage to run their weaker beers through in four or five days.

Boddington boiling and fermentation in 1901
Beer Style boil time (hours) Pitch temp max. fermen-tation temp length of fermen-tation (days)
TA Table Ale 1.83   60º F 68º F 5
X Mild 2   60º F 68º F 7
XX Mild 2 2.17 60º F 69º F 7
XXX Mild 2.5 2.25 60.5º F 69º F 7
XXXX Mild 2.33   60.5º F 70º F 7
AK Pale Ale 2.08   60º F 69º F 7
IPA IPA 2.25   60º F 69º F 7
S Stout 2.25   60º F 69º F 7
DS Stout 2.25   60º F 70º F 7
BB Strong Ale 2.75   60º F 72º F 7
Source:
Boddington brewing record held at Manchester Central Library, document number M693/405/125.


 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

„And some of the boil would be to concentrate the last runnings.“ Does that mean that the different sparges were boiled seperately? And then combined for fermentation?

Ron Pattinson said...

It depended. For some beers all the worts were combined into a single copper. Other beers had two boils which were combined before fermentation.