Scottish beer in Australia

People are always sending me stuff. Often quite useful stuff. Like what I'm about to share with you. It's from the Australian Brewers' Journal of 21st february 1910 and shows the prices of various imported beers in Sydney.

Let's take a look, shall we?

First it's Ales. Take a close look and you may find something odd about certain Ales:

10 of the 13 draught Ales are Scottish. At least that I can recognise. I'm not sure where Palace and Guild & Co. are from. Just checked. Looks like they're both Scottish, too. Let's get this right: every draught beer except Bass No. 4 is Scottish.

Talking of which, what an odd beer to have exported. Not all the Bass beer I would have guessed. That's a Burton Mild Ale which, in 1870 had an OG of 1070. It probably hadn't changed much by 1910.

It's a shame that it's not more specific as to what type of beer most of them were. I could guess. But as there are no clues, there's not much point.

In the bottled beers, only four English brewers are represented. Two pretty obvious ones, Bass and Allsopp. Plus two less obvious ones, Combe of London and Tennant of Sheffield. Hang on. That can't really be from Combe. Their brewery closed in 1899, when they joined Watney, Combe, Reid. It must really be a Watney's beer.

Spot the funny Ales? Bit obvious, all those German Lagers. Amusing that they lumped the Lagers with Ales but listed Stouts separately. They couldn't have been paying attention in BJCP class. Note the the two Scottish Lagers, from Tennent and Jeffrey.


Now the Stouts:

I can only spot two Scottish breweries: Jeffrey and Tennent. That's hardly surprising. Stout wasn't such a big thing in Scotland. The best-known Stout brewers were in London and Ireland. Which is reflected in the list. Glad to see Barclay Perkins putting in a cameo. They certainl;y picked some odd brands to sell beer: Beaver, Fish, Pelican, Dog's Head, Dagger (my favourite) and Pig. Lots of different flavours of Guinness, though I'm sure the beer inside the bottles was the same.

Scotland is ridiculously over-represented, especially in the draught Ales. The percentage of beer exported must have been much higher in Scotland than in England.