Dry Stout

The Whitbread gravity book. What an inspiring document. (Two full stops in, nowhere a grammatically correct sentence. Make that three. Bum. . . . . that verb just slipped out.)

You must be getting used to my occasional forays into ranting. I see nothing wrong with the odd rant myself. As long as it doesn't become a habit. Most of my friends are ranters. We gather every so often to mutually rant.

It's at moments like these that I'm glad there's a title at the top of the form I'm filling in. "Titel" it says. I'm not dyslexic. My computer thinks I'm Dutch. I keep shouting "I'm English, you bastard. Stop talking foreign to me." It doesn't listen.

Dry Stout it says. The title. Whitbread gravity book it says in the labels. What's the connection between the two? Isn't it obvious?

Getting distracted again. The kids were making too much noise. My solution was to bung "Live at Leeds" into the CD player. 6 is enough to drown out their questions. Now I'm annoying them by humming the bass part and playing drums on my legs (I can only . . . . . . do the latter while . . . . . I'm not . . . . typing.) Hahahaha now the turn has wormed . . . .

[I've just been helping Lexie construct a visor for his stormtrooper helmet. Or is it a clonetrooper helmet? I can't remember the difference.

My computer isn't quite playing the CD right. I seem to have one channel missing. There's loads of bass, but almost no guitar. Absulutely perfect. Why can't my stereo do this?]

Porter and Stout. Recurring themes on this blog. Like sentences without verbs. When I started drinking, all that was left of Porter and Stout was the odd bottled sweet Stout, the magnificent naturally-conditioned Guinness and bland keg Guinness. It was a surpise to learn that black beers had once been pre-eminent.

What had happened? How had Porter (I use the word here in its general sense, meaning all Porters and Stouts - it was good enough for Loftus, it's good enough for me) come to such a sorry state? I'm a nosy git.

[The kids have started to play jousting. Volume up to 8.]

London Porter. That's the story. The history of the city and the beer intertwine for two centuries. Porter made London the brewing capital of the world and became the first global beer style. Stout has been brewed on every continent (OK not on Antarctica - every inhabited continent, how's that?) for over 100 years. Ignoring the obvious Pils, how many other styles can claim that?

Porter fills the largest volume of any style - if you multiply geographic spread by time. That's what makes it so interesting to study. No other style has been submitted to so many different forces. If you want to study the effect of taxation, government control, economic decline, climate, social unrest and anything else you can dream up on a beer style, Porter is your man.

Questions about Porter prompted me to delve into the archives. Scatterbrain that I am, I've since been distracted. Now I'm only interested in Porter again. I spit on your Ale and Lager logs, Barclay Perkins. Whitbread Porter is my true love. Go away with your silly TT. P, SS, SSS and Imp are my new mates.

Dry Stout. I had to get around to it eventually, or toss this post into the wastebasket of unusable ramblings. Nearly full. Not really room for something this long. I've always been a bit uneasy about the term "Dry Stout". As I said above, I remember the fag end of Stout. There were Sweet Stouts, Jubilee Stouts, Extra Stouts, Russian Stouts, Nourishing Stouts, Oatmeal Stouts, Export Stouts. But nothing called Dry Stout.

The Whitbread gravity book. It has thousands of entries. So far I've transcribed 658. At the moment I'm going through the bottled beers of "Sundry Brewers". A very eclectic selection of breweries. Warwick & Richardson, Sam Smith, Style & Winch, Tamplin, Tuborg, Artois, Pilsner Urquell, Tucher, ZHB, Amstel, Ballantine, Simonds, Brickwood, Wethered, Vaux, Lowenbrau, Spaten, Ansell, Tetley. And loads more. Mnn%n@kd and K?vre&#th, are just two of the illegible.

Stouts are some of the best represented styles. At least in the bit I've looked at so far, which covers the period 1939-1951. I've always been sceptical of the tale that English brewers suddenly swapped over to sweet Stout. The gravity book handily includes details of Guinness, too, so it's easy to make comparisons. There are plenty of examples of sweet English Stouts. Beers with high terminal gravities and 65% apparent attenuation or less. But there's another large group, with a much higher degree of attenuation -75% + - which resemble Guinness in terms of OG and FG.

I would give you precise numbers, but I'm not even half way through the gravity book. You try filling a blog every day. I wouldn't post before December if I waited to process the whole bloody book. Next week I should have all the information in neat little tables. This was just a preview.

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Today I came across breweries whose IPA was stronger than their PA. Bugger. Looks like another theory is in need of serious modification. Maybe I should just keep my discovery quiet. Right. Forget what I just said.