Let's Brew Wednesday - 1840 Truman Export Stout

I really should rename this feature Let's Brew Thursday. Much more accurate.

Our series of export beers continues, this time with another Export Stout. Truman's brewed quite a range of Porters and Stouts in the 19th century. In 1840, there were three: Running Stout, Double Stout and Export Stout. Unusually it wasn't strength that differentiated them. The gravities were very similar: 1080.1 (Running), 1081.2 (Export), 1083.1 Double. Not much between them there. The grists, however, did diffeer considerably.

What would you expect in a Porter/Stout of this period? Pale malt, brown malt, black malt and optionally amber malt. Truman's Stouts all contained the first three. Just in quite different proportions. As you can see:

Truman Stouts in 1840
beer	pale	brown	black	lbs hops/barrel
Running Stout	90.50%	7.60%	1.90%	5.18
Export Stout	70.42%	26.62%	2.96%	8.61
Double Stout	73.73%	23.89%	2.39%	6.42
Source:
Document B/THB/C/41 held at the London Metropolitan Archives.

Unsurprisingly, the Export Stout is the most heavily hopped. Over 8 pounds a barrel. That's a lot. More than an IPA of the time. Makes you think.

Before anyone mentions it, I have noticed the difference between my grist for the Export Stout and Kristen's below. Truman's appear to have only employed brewers with terrible handwriting. It's a recurring theme in their brewing records, spanning a century and a half. The log upon which this recipe is based has some funny squiggles for the name of one malt. I think it's "Br" for brown malt. But it could be "A" for amber malt. See what you think. It's the third row:

I had been going to say that I had no idea where Truman sent their Stout. Then I did a quick search and found this:

South Australian Register, Thursday 28 June 1855.

Australia, then, was one of the destinations. No wonder they hopped it like crazy if it was going all that way.






That's me done for now.  . . . . . . over to Kristen . . . . .

Kristen’s Version:

There isn’t really a whole lot to say about this beer. We’ve done some exporty porters and stouts before so none of this is really new. 4 base malts and 100% one hop. The only thing that I would caution on is the use of this much brown malt. If you haven’t used it before, make sure you let it have a good rest as there are a lot of dextrins in brown malt than can mess up your final OG unless you rest it long enough.

Ingredients
 

Grist – Like the majority of the porters and stouts of the era, this one really focuses on the brown malt. This beer is much more ‘brown’ than black. It is very dark but comes off very different and less ‘espresso’ than later editions. This beer I used 100% Crisp ingredients as I had some certificates I had to use up. The Crisp pale malt was apparently Fanfare. I’ve used it previously and found it to be very nice and close to Maris Otter…maybe a bit more ‘malt’ to it. All of these worked very well together as one would expect from the same malster. However, anything brown or amber you can get, do your best.

Hops –  Just got 5lb of some nice 2010 Fuggles. 5.4%. Smell absolutely fresh. I used these 100% in this beer. If not, I’d go with some Willamette or even Goldings. I’m not really a huge fan of citrus and brown malt. It does work though. Just something that bugs me about it. This is one that really focuses on the freshness of the hops. The oldest hop was probably just about a year old in this one and the rest were only about a month old. Go for freshness over type if you have to choose.

Yeast – I was lazy. I had a fresh yeast cake of the Fullers yeast so I decided to do that. The plans for using the Australian yeast cake will have to wait until this next week sometime. Any yeast you like that does a good job of drying out would be prudent. This beer will finish high no matter what so be mindful.

Processes

Advanced Mash – There was a short underlet but the single infusion worked pretty much exactly like the multi-infusion. Really, nothing special.