How to test a beer book

Beer books. We all love them. I always take a couple to bed with me every night. And show them what good loving is.

But you want to know if you can trust your beer book. These are the tell-tale signs that your beer book is cheating on you. When it says:

- IPA was brewed stronger to survive the journey to India.
- Porter was originally a blend of three beers.
- Russian Imperial Stout was strong to survive the journey to Russia.
- "mild" means lightly hopped.
- Stout always contains roasted barley.
- Scottish beer is lightly hopped because hops don't grow in Scotland.
- there's a Czech beer style called "Bohemian Pilsener".
- Robust Porter wasn't just made up.
- Hefeweizen is a German Ale.
- there's a difference between Pale Ale and Bitter

Brown Ale 1920-1939

It's time to started kicking one of my favorite dead dogs again: the rubbish talked about Brown Ale.

To summarise St. Michael, Brown Ale came in two varieties:

- Southern Brown Ale, weak, sweet, dark brown, basically bottled Dark Mild that's been sweetened. It's typified by Mann's Brown Ale. About 3% ABV,
- Northern Brown Ale, stronger, paler. Newcastle Brown. Between 4.5 and 5% ABV.

Let's see how true this description was between the wars.



Brown Ale

Though first revived by Mann's around 1900, Brown Ale was only widely picked up by other breweries in the 1920's. It was only available in bottled form.

Here's a bunch of Brown Ales from the 1920's and 1930's, all from the South.


Surprisingly, the gravity of rose during the 1920's. While in 1926, it was in the range 1040-1044º, by 1932 it was 1052-1054º. Over the same period, other styles were more likely to have fallen in gravity.

Just a look at those gravities tells you that Brown Ale of the period could not possibly have been just a bottled version of Mild. No-one was brewing a Mild with a gravity over 1050º in the 1930's. All the examples in the table are from London breweries. Surely they should be in the weak Southern style? Well they aren't. These are all quite strong beers - the average gravity was around 1043 at the time.

I wonder what happened to Mann's Brown Ale? The 1932 version, at over 1054º, is one of the very strongest. How on earth did it end up under 3% ABV?

There's another indication that, at the time, Brown Ale had no connection with Mild. Whitbread and Barclay Perkins brewed it as a single gyle beer. It wasn't party-gyled with their Mild Ales. Their Brown Ales also had a distinctly different grist composition to the Milds and they were much more heavily-hopped. Colour, maybe they had that in common. Except that not all Milds were brown. Barclay Perkins produced amber and brown versions.

Let's take a closer look at Whitbread's DB Brown Ale and X Mild from 1933:


OK, both have a grist that's 70%-odd pale malt and both have around 75% attenuation. But that's about it as far as similarities go. The X has a fair bit of crystal, but no dark malts. The DB has a touch of chocolate. X is using the dark No. 3 sugar, DB Albion. The hopping is totally different, with DB using the same types of hop as the PA and IPA. It's much more heavily-hopped that the X, too (It has more hops than both PA and IPA as well.). The DB has a much higher gravity than X and was one of the strongest beers Whitbread brewed. Oh, they are a similar colour. I'll give you that one.

Does it look as if DB was a version of X? Not at all. Colour is about the only thing they really have in common. DB also doesn't look much like a sweet, weak beer, as Southern-style Brown Ales are supposed to be, either.

Still not convinced? Lets move on to Barclay Perkins. In 1936, their Mild Ales - X, XX and A - all had their brewing water treated in the same way: 2/3 oz. salt and 7/12 oz gypsum per barrel in the hot liquor back, 1/8 pint per barrel of bi sulphite lime added just before mashing, 3 ozs per barrel of salt in the copper. Water for their Brown Ale was treated quite differently: 1.5 ozs. salt and 4 ozs gypsum per barrel in the hot liquor back, 2 ozs per barrel of salt in the copper. That doesn't look very similar to me.

Porter and WW I

The decline and eventual death of London Porter has always intrigued me. It's one of the things I've been most keen on researching during my archive trips. I think I've found one more piece of the jigsaw.

This is what Michael Jackson has to say on the topic:

"When both Porters and Stouts diminished in popularity in Britain, why did they stand their ground in Ireland?

One reason may be that restrictions on the use of energy during World War I made it difficult for British maltsters to roast their grains.

These restrictions were not imposed in Ireland, where rebellion and independence were in the wind."

It sounds like a reasonable theory - brewers in England couldn't get their hands on the right malts and so were unable to brew Porter and Stout. Let's see how well it matches with the evidence from Whitbread's brewing logs.

In 1914 Whitbread brewed an impressive range of Porter and Stout: Porter, ES (Export Stout), LS (London Stout), SS (Double Stout) and SSS (Triple Stout).

Dark malts - brown malt and black malt - made up between 12% and 16% of the grist, depending on the beer type.

What would happen later in the war if, as the theory suggests, dark malts were in short supply? It would seem logical that either Whitbread would have stopped brewing Porter and Stout or that the amount of dark malts employed in their manufacture would have been greatly reduced.

Most breweries pared back their beer ranges in WW I because of government restrictions on beer strengths and shortages of raw materials. Barclay Perkins discontinued their bread and butter beer from before the war - X Mild - and replaced it with the low-gravity 4d government ale. Most stronger ales weren't brewed at all between 1917 and 1919. Whitbread was no exception.

Between April 1917 and April 1918 the Whitbread Porter brewery produced only two beers: Imp (Imperial Stout) and Porter. From April 1918 to April 1919, they only brewed Porter and LS (London Stout). The one beer that they brewed throughout the war was Porter.

Let's take a look at how Whitbread's Porter and Stout shaped up towards the end of the war. Remember that April 1917 is when the goverment began to really put pressure on the brewing industry with emergency legislation.



Well fancy that - the proportion of brown and black malt in the grist increased later in the war. In 1917 it was around 18%, in 1918 and 1919 between 18.5% and 22.7%. You know what, it doesn't look as if they were running out of brown and black malt, does it?

The terminal decline of Porter was well underway before WW I broke out. As for other styles, wartime restrictions forced down the gravity, but they don't appear to have had any more effect than that. Porter's popularity continued to ebb away during the 1920's and 1930's and by the outbreak of WW II it had all but disappeared.

So don't blame Kaiser Wilhelm or Lloyd George for Porter's demise. The answer is far simpler - public taste had moved on.