Shut up about Barclay Perkins: Brewing sugar

Wednesday, 3 October 2007

Brewing sugar

Just a quick question. Does anyone have idea what the characteristics were of pre-WW II brewing sugars? I keep finding Garton's No. 1 and Garton's No. 3 in brewing logs but don't know what the difference was between the two.

16 comments:

Stonch said...: Yeah, I think they were generally quite sweet, and came in the form of white crystals.; 3 October 2007 at 06:06
Kieran Haslett-Moore said...: I have no idea Ron, but in the most unfair way Im going to ask you a question with out answering yours . Do you know anything about Nip Guinness bottled by Read Bro's of London?

http://themothersmilk.blogspot.com/2007/09/family-jewels-and-reminder-of-them.html; 4 October 2007 at 03:52
Terry said...: According to Malting & Brewing Science by Hough, Briggs & Stevens (p296), "Four grades of invert sugars are available, differing principally in their colour. Nos 1 and 2 are used for pale ales, 2 and 3 for mild ales and No 4, usually known as black invert, for stouts.

Number Colour (EBC)
1...................30
2...................70
3..................130
Black 4 ...........500

So it looks as if they may have used all pale malt for the milds, but they got colour from using dark invert sugars ...; 4 October 2007 at 04:17
Ron Pattinson said...: Kieran, I posted last week about Guinness:

http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2007/09/guinness-1896-1982.html

I'm sure that the beer inside your bottle will be a version of Foreign Extra Stout. In my Guinness post you can see some analyses of FES from just after the war. Though it wouldn't make much difference whatever the period. FES has been brewed at the same gravity for 150 years. (Standard Extra Stout had the same gravity until 1916.)

I'm afraid that I can't help you with Read Brothers. I assume that you've seen this page:

http://www.guinntiques.com/labels/foreign/foreign_label_guide.asp; 4 October 2007 at 04:22
Ron Pattinson said...: terrycollmann, I should have asked you first about this, shouldn't I?

That's exactly the information I wanted. I've looked in my brewing text books but couldn't anything about sugar types. It confirms what I had suspected. No. 1 usually appears in Pale Ale and Bitter recipes, No. 3 in Mild.

Is Malting & Brewing Science a good manual? I may pick up a copy if it's worth having.
1933 Whitbread X has 13% Garton's No. 3 and the London Stout from the same year 10%.; 4 October 2007 at 04:38
Ron Pattinson said...: terrycollmann, while we're on the topic of brewing ingredients, you don't happen to know what SA malt is, do you?; 4 October 2007 at 04:54
Kieran Haslett-Moore said...: Thanks Ron

That pages seems to no longer exist. I had read your post on Guinness great stuff.

Cheers.; 5 October 2007 at 01:20
Ron Pattinson said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 5 October 2007 at 01:34
Ron Pattinson said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 5 October 2007 at 01:36
Ron Pattinson said...: Kieran, sorry, I seem to have missed off the end of the URL. This is the right one:

http://www.guinntiques.com/labels/
foreign/foreign_label_guide.asp; 5 October 2007 at 01:36
Terry said...: I wouldn't recommend Malting & Brewing Science as a gripping read up there with the best of Stephen King, and second-hand copies look a bit expensive, but it's answered a few questions for me on subjects such as mild malt, and I always think any book is worth buying that tells me one thing I didn't know before.

SA malt, I strongly suspect, is Spratt Archer - I'm away from my library at the moment, so I can't tell you what year it was introduced, but I'll look it up ...; 8 October 2007 at 12:21
Ron Pattinson said...: terrycollmann, sounds like my kind of book. I can't say I often have brewing manuals on my bedside table, but they are handy for reference purposes. Having a reference on the sugars is a good enough reason for me. Just have to wait until Dolores isn't looking to order it.

On the subject of sugar, the Whitbread logs are annoying because until the 20's, they just give a quantity of sugar and don't say what it is. So guessing the colour of beer is tricky.

Burton. I would love to nail it down better. I think I can guess which beer it is in the logs, but I'm not 100% sure. But a dark, draught beer of 1055 - what do you reckon that is?; 8 October 2007 at 12:58
Terry said...: a dark, draught beer of 1055 - what do you reckon that is?

Sounds like a Burton to me ... but Burtons ranged widely in strength, from the 1100+ OG of Bass No 1 down to 1045 or so (when they were generally sold as milds ...); 9 October 2007 at 02:17
Terry said...: On the subject of SA malt, if SA stands, as I suspect it does, for the barley variety Spratt-Archer, Steeped in Tradition by Jonathan Brown (excellent book) says that was a cross-bred barley between two 19th century types, Archer and Spratt, developed by Herbert Hunter of the Irish Department of Agriculture in 1908 and introduced to England in 1920. Spratt-Archer and another cross, Plumage-Archer, developed by ES Beaven of the Warminster maltings, were the two most popular types of malting barley in England until the 1940s, when they fell out of favour because they weren't suited to mechanised farming.; 9 October 2007 at 02:37
Ron Pattinson said...: That's very interesting about Spratt-Archer barley. Only problem is that I see "Earp SA" in a KK log from 1910. That sounds too early from what you say of the history of Spratt-Archer.

I get the impression that the SA refers to a kind of malt rather than a type of barley. It only appears in the grist for certain beers (never PA, for example). My suspicion is a type of mild malt.

That's one of the easier ones. I've also come across really cryptic things like E.N.O.B.; 9 October 2007 at 03:46
mentaldental said...: I just had a thought, Ron. Could SA stand for South Africa, being the source rather than being a malt type?; 2 September 2009 at 17:47

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