What did you do over the weekend? Nice of you to ask. Loads of things. Went into town with Lexie to buy an X-wing Fighter. Read some Barclay Perkins logs. Barbecued in the rain. Made Star Wars 14 film with Lucas and the kids. Bribed Lexie to start cataloguing my books. Drank some St. Bernardus Abt out of a Chimay glass. Fell asleep in front of Tatort. Normal stuff.At the end of one archive session I photographed a whole load of Barclay Perkins logs from WW II. I didn't look at them properly at the time. That was about a year ago. I finally got around to them this weekend.
The book that covers 1939 and 1940 has some wonderfully matter-of-fact entries relating to the war. "September 28th 1939. 1st war budget. Increase of 1d per pint on beer and increased tax on sugar." "September 16th 1940. Bomb through porter side." "September 29th 1940. Bomb through ale side."
When war broke out, Barclay Perkins were brewing three Milds:
A 1030.84X 1034.77
XX 1042.7
By 1942, gravity cuts had squeezed them together:
A 1027.3
X 1028.7
XX 1031.4
You wonder why they bothered brewing three beers with only a couple of gravity points between them.
I'll tell you something strange. I can't find any entries in the Whitbread or Truman Gravity Books that match these gravities. Even though I have ones for the same period as the log entries.
Here's an example. I have log entries for A, X and XX from January and September 1939. They're both the same as the first set of gravities above. Yet the Gravity Book entries for January, February, March and May are all 1038. That's way off the gravities of any of the Milds, as brewed. About exactly half way between X and XX.
Any suggestions for an explanation?
Maybe something like the Whitbread KKK beer. Using high gravity stuff and diluting with water instead of a lower gravity wort to the lower gravity beers. I thought this was illegal but during the war who knows.
ReplyDeleteI know the UK gov made a lot of laws during WWII regarding opening hours of bars to keep workers from coming into the factories. Couldn't some concessions have been made for dilution to keep the alcohol down also?
I'm not seeing anything like that on the statute book, Kristen. Dilution does seem to have happened, though, using beer rather than water. So we have the Finance (No. 2) Act 1939 (12th October), section 1.3 dealing with the tricky issue of excise duty payable on blended beers:
ReplyDelete"Where beer has been prepared by a process of mixing by a brewer for sale and the aggregate amount of the duty of excise charged under this section on the several constituents of the beer exceeds the amount of the duty which would have been so charged on the mixture, the Commissioners may, subject to such conditions as they may prescribe, remit or repay the excess."