1956 Shepherd Neame PA

I sometimes wonder what my least popular recipes have been, Ones that no-one could be arsed to brew.

I suspect that a few of the post-WW II austerity beers fall into that category. Including this one. Because it’s one of those perennially dull styles, Ordinary Bitter.

Though, in PA’s defence, it is basically all-malt. I’m not going to count the tiny amount of malt extract as adjuncting it up. Which makes it more unusual than you might suspect. British brewers didn't really do all-malt in the 20th century. Almost everything, with the exception of Guinness, contained sugar.

It’s such a simple recipe that it’s scarcely worth writing down. Pale malt and classic English hops. The hop varieties are I guess. All I know is that they came from Shepherd Neame’s own hop farms in Kent.

Looking at analyses from the Whitbread Gravity Book, it looks as if the colour was corrected to a slightly darker shade of around 6 SRM. Probably not worth bothering with on a homebrew level.

Er, and that’s. The recipe is so simple, it’s left me lost for words.

1956 Shepherd Neame PA
pale malt	9.00 lb	99.01%
malt extract	0.09 lb	0.99%
Fuggles 120 mins	0.75 oz
Goldings 60 mins	0.50 oz
Goldings 30 mins	0.50 oz
Goldings dry hops	0.25 oz
OG	1035.5
FG	1011.6
ABV	3.16
Apparent attenuation	67.32%
IBU	24
SRM	4
Mash at	152º F
Sparge at	170º F
Boil time	120 minutes
pitching temp	62º F
Yeast	a Southern English Ale yeast