Let's Brew Wednesday - 1921 Truman XXX

I'll kick off with an apology. This recipe had been lying around in my inbox for 10 days unnoticed. In my defence, it did arrive the day before I flew to San Diego.

I can remember when I first looked at the records in the 1921 Truman Burton set. They confused the hell out of me. For a start, Truman seems to have used pretty much a single recipe for their whole of their range. Or at least XXX was parti-gyled with all the other beers: P1 (Pale Ale), R4 (Running Burton Ale), XX (Mild Ale) and 7d (Mild Ale).

But it gets even weirder than that. They also blended the beers after fermentation. This is a fairly simple example. The first three, S, W and XX are as fermented, the second two the beers as racked (with the OG back calculated):

Beer	barrels	gravity
S	133	1054.77
W	129	1040.31
XX	286	1033.92
Beer	barrels	gravity
XXX	262	1047.54
XX	286	1033.92
Source:
Truman brewing record held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document number  B/THB/C/335

In this case, all of S and W were blended together to produce XXX. It seems an awfully complicated way of going about things.

In this example some of the R4 was used to bump up the gravity of the XXX:

Beer	barrels	gravity
R4	215	1054.77
XXX	203	1043.37
Beer	barrels	gravity
R4	188	1054.77
XXX	333	1047.54
Source:
Truman brewing record held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document number  B/THB/C/335

There are also examples where worts of 1055.6 and 1039.5 were fermented separately then blended to create XXX with a theoretical OG of 1047.5.

I've no idea why they did this.






Take it away Kristen . . . .

Kristen’s Version:

Notes: These mid-1920’s Truman logs are chock-O-block full of information. Tons and tons of it…however they do leave a few things out…specifically the color.  We do our best to extrapolate where this color should be specifically by the ingredients and then comparing different gyles for the same beer. Meaning this beer, the XX, was gyled with the XXX which was also gyled with the pale ale – the XXX that is. The only difference in any of the recipes is for the XX, there’s a good load of caramel. Not in the XXX and not in the pale ale. Shows me all this went into the XX but as Ron can explain, lots of beers during these times were just different colored versions of the same/very similar beers. So here were are…a very pale mild, doctored up with a goodly amount of caramel, for your ocular enjoyment. A great one to split, caramel half and then pour them side by side. See what your friends say!

Malt: Five pale malts, four of them being English and one American 6-row-y variety. Mix and match to your hearts content. Do your best to get that US in there though. If you had to pick single pale malt, I’d probably either choose Mild malt or some tasty Optic. 10%ish maize isn’t a ton and you probably won’t taste it but it will reduce the ‘weight’ of the beer making it feel even lighter that an all malt version. Same goes for the Invert…which you can swap right out for plain-old-white-sugar (POWS).

Hops: Similarly hopped like a bunch of other ‘interwar’ beers there are a bunch of similar/same hops from different years. They spread over about 4 years actually. About 60:40 Goldings-type:US Cluster. This beer really isn’t hop focused but has a decent enough amount to at least taste them so choose something you’ve got way too much of…unless it’s CTZ…

Yeast: As with all these old recipes, nothing about yeast what so ever. So go nuts. Pick your favorite; I really like the London III for this baby. Will dry out enough but leave plenty of character behind.

Cask: Standard procedure:
1) let the beer ferment until finished and then give it another day or so. For me right around 5-7 days.
2) Rack the beer to your vessel of choice (firkin, polypin, cornie, whatever).
3) Add primings at ~3.5g/L
4) Add prepared isinglass at 1ml/L
5) ONLY add dry hops at 0.25g/l – 1g/L.
6) Bung it up and roll it around to mix. Condition at 55F or so for 4-5 days and its ready to go. Spile/vent. Tap. Settle. Serve at 55F.