Shepherd Neame grists in 1940

As promised, the grists for Shepherd Neame’s grists in the early phase of the war.

Not that they’re very exciting. Quite the opposite, in fact. Shepherd Neame only used two malts, pale and black. And the latter only appeared in their two Stouts.

The Pale Ales are particularly dull, consisting of just pale malt and a tiny amount of malt extract. There’s really not much to be said. Oh, I know. There were two types of pale malt: one from UK-grown barley and one from Californian barley. Which was pretty typical in interwar brewing. After war broke out, supplies from California and other parts of the world dried up and brewers had to use all UK barley.

The presence of rolled oats in the two Stouts implies that one or both at least sometimes were being marketed as Oatmeal Stout. As they were parti-gyled together, there was no option but to have oats in both. The stronger DS was brewed in quite small quantities. In this particular parti-gyle, there were 31 barrels of DS and 120 barrels of SS.

Unsurprisingly, the Mild contains No. 3 invert sugar. That was pretty standard in Dark Mild. That there’s no roasted malt in the Mild is also pretty standard, though most would include crystal malt. I’ve no idea what VK is. Some sort of sugar is all I know. CS and FC, which appear in the Stouts, I assume are some mixture of caramel and invert sugar.

Shepherd Neame beers in 1940
Beer	Style	OG	pale malt	black malt	oats	no. 3 sugar	VK sugar	CS sugar	FC sugar	malt extract
MB	Mild	1030.5	79.2%			10.2%	8.1%			2.5%
LDA	Pale Ale	1030.0	90.6%			8.6%				0.7%
AK	Pale Ale	1030.5	99.0%							1.0%
BB	Pale Ale	1038.2	99.7%							0.3%
PA	Pale Ale	1047.0	99.1%							0.9%
SXX	Pale Ale	1055.4	99.7%							0.3%
SS	Stout	1030.5	64.3%	10.7%	5.4%			12.5%	7.1%
DS	Stout	1044.9	64.3%	10.7%	5.4%			12.5%	7.1%
Source:
Shepherd Neame brewing record held at the brewery.