Tetley Pale Ales 1868

You know the drill by now. I'll be drilling into these Tetley brewing records for a while yet, throwing in a little bit of compare and contrast for fun. In a week or two you'll be wishing I was drilling into your head to end the misery.

Here's a question. How do you identify what style each beer in the records is? Sometimes it's pretty obvious, like if the beer is called Porter or something Stout. But it isn't always that simple. Brewhouse names can be pretty cryptic. Like one in this Tetley set: K 1/. At least that's what I think it says. What style is that? Remembering that Lees used K to designate one of their Milds.

I have a couple of approaches. One is to look at the ingredients to see what style it matches best. Though this can be tricky in the 19th century when most beers were brewed from 100% pale malt and hopped like hell. Another is to search for price lists and try to match the beers with the brewing records. In the case of K 1/, I did a bit of both.

My first guess on seeing the records was Light Bitter. That's based on the OG and the hopping. You might think that odd, given how few hops it appears to contain. But if you include the 450 lbs of spent hops from a brew of PA the same day, things look quite different. The hopping rate then shoots up to over 4 lbs per barrel. Plus, it wasn't part-gyled with any of the Mild Ales. And one of the Milds, X, had the same gravity.

That was still just guesswork. Then I found a Tetley's advert. One that specifically mentioned K Light Bitter Ale. Case closed.

Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, Wednesday 4th December, 1907, page 1.

Now it's time for contextualisation. Where I compare Tetley's Pale Ales with my benchmark: London beers. You may notice that I haven't found a great number of London Pale Ales. There's a very good reason for that: it's right at the beginning of when London brewers started brewing them. Whitbread first brewed theirs in 1865. Truman had been a little earlier, 1845, but Barclay Perkins didn't brew one until after 1880. Tetley, with their Pale Ale and Light Bitter, were ahead of the London brewers. I find that slightly surprising.

Here's another point to ponder. Though it had the brewhouse name of PA, Tetley's Pale Ale was always advertised as East India Pale Ale. Like I've said many times before, the choice of the name Pale Ale or IPA was pretty random in the 19th century. Brewers were very inconsistent in their usage. Anyone who claims that there was a definable difference between the two back then is a liar.

As you can see from the tables, Tetley's PA had very similar specs to Whitbread's and Truman's. All were a touch over 1060º. And all had around 18 pounds of hops per quarter. I can't say much about attenuation, because I only have the figure for one London beer. Even the pitching temperatures are pretty much the same.

That's not really a surprise. Like I said, this was early days for Pale Ale and breweries tended to stick to a similar profile. As time progressed, Pale Ales in different parts of the country would diverge.

Tetley Pale Ales 1868
Date	Year	Beer	Style	OG	FG	ABV	App. Atten-uation	lbs hops/ qtr	hops lb/brl	boil time (hours)	boil time (hours)	Pitch temp	max. Fermen-tation temp	length of fermen-tation (days)	comments
19th Oct	1868	K 1/	Pale Ale	1046.5	1016.9	3.92	63.69%	2.00	0.38	1.5	2	62º	62º	8	some spent hops
6th Oct	1868	K 1/	Pale Ale	1047.4	1015.5	4.21	67.25%	4.00	0.77	2	2	62º	64º	8	some spent hops
1st Oct	1868	K 1/	Pale Ale	1047.6	1022.4	3.33	52.91%	2.00	0.37	2	2	60º	64º	6	some spent hops
20th Oct	1868	PA	Pale Ale	1058.2	1014.4	5.79	75.24%	18.00	4.14	1.5	2	62º	68º
1st Oct	1868	PA	Pale Ale	1060.1	1015.0	5.97	75.12%	18.00	4.60	1.5	1.5	59º	64º	7
2nd Oct	1868	PA	Pale Ale	1061.8	1012.2	6.56	80.27%	18.00	4.44	1.5	1.5	58º	65º	8
Source:
Tetley brewing record held at the West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, document number WYL756/16/ACC1903

London Pale Ales 1865 - 1868
Date	Year	Brewer	Beer	Style	OG	FG	ABV	App. Atten-uation	lbs hops/ qtr	hops lb/brl	Pitch temp
16th Oct	1868	Whitbread	PA	Pale Ale	1061.2				16.42	5.49	58º
16th Nov	1868	Whitbread	PA	Pale Ale	1061.5				16.32	5.25	58º
28th Nov	1865	Truman	Pale Ale	Pale Ale	1064.3	1011.6	6.96	81.90%	18	6.87	58º
Average					1062.3	1011.6	7.0	81.9%	1062.3	5.9	58º
Sources:
Whitbread brewing record held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document number LMA/4453/D/01/034
Truman brewing record held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document number B/THB/C/147