Sunday 18 June 2017

Scottish colours

Just a quick post. Something I harvested at the Scottish Brewing Archive on my recent visit.

It's quite a handy document. It has the brewery specifications of all the beers brewed and William Younger's Holyrood Brewery and William McEwan's Fountain Brewery. Lost of useful information about the beers. But tehre's one little problem: I don't no when exactly it's referring to.

The document is a bunch of loose leaves which was the response to an enquiry to a former brewer. The covering letter is dated 23rd June 2001. But it must refer to much earlier because the Holyrood Brewery closed in 1986. It also mentions No. 1, which I think was discontinued well before Holyrood closed. My guess would be 1960's or 1970's.

It's another demonstration of how crazy the Scots were about colouring beer.

Fountain Beers
Beer colour (EBC)
B5/A (BL) 30
XXPS (Btg) 24
No 3 (Btg) 48
H5/B 24
4/A 26
H2/B 95
E2/B 80
XXP (P5/A) 30
G5/A (D5/A) 80
XXP (Pale) 18
XXP (P70/-) 20
3 L 65
P80/- 25
BE2/B 80
1 BR 75
3 BR 55
1 BR 90
200/- B 80
NBA 52
Source:
Holyrood and Fountain beer specification sheets held at the Scottish Brewing Archive, document number WY/6/1/8/1.

NBA = Newcastle Brown Ale.

Holyrood Beers
Beer colour
* S/Stout 270
Harp (bott) 9
DCA 70
DBS 270
PA 24
K 5/A 48
** BA 85
Harp (CT) 9
XXPS 25
5/B 25
Source:
Holyrood and Fountain beer specification sheets held at the Scottish Brewing Archive, document number WY/6/1/8/1.

There's a lovely note under this second table:

* SS is brewed at a colour of 600° - when blended with reprocessed beer, the final colour is 270°
** BA is brewed at a colour of 220° - when blended reprocessed beer, the final colour is 85°

"Reprocessed beer" is a euphemism for returned beer and all sorts of other shit. It must have formed a large pecentage of the blend, given that it's more than halved the colour value.

DCA = Double Century Ale.
DSB = Double Brown Stout.
BA = Brown Ale.

I'm amazed at how many different products they had. Most Scottish breweries only had half a dozen.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What exactly was the process of "reprocessing" returned beer? Did it get pasteurized in the brewery? It probably would have been oxidized, right? I mean we are talking about stale casks are we not?
I agree with you that it must have made a very large percentage of the blend to achieve such a drop in color.