Let's Brew - 1953 Elgood Strong Ale

I make a point of trying to collect new brewing records whenever I’m in the UK. On my last trip I managed to pick ones up from a couple of sources. One being Elgood.

I first asked the brewery if I could drop by a couple of years ago. The reason I hadn’t made it there until now is purely a question of the practicalities. Wisbech has no train station. Even though it isn’t that far from Newark, getting there by public transport is a nightmare. Luckily my mate Henry has a van and he drove me down.

Before we go any further, I’ll point out the problems that I had with this recipe. Basically, the numbers don’t add up. The grist consisted of 14 quarters, 93 barrels of water were used in mashing and sparging and there were 80 barrels of wort in the copper. But there were just 19.5 barrels in the fermenter. Where did the other 60 barrels of wort go? I can’t imagine it was thrown away.

To take this discrepancy into account, I’ve divided the hopping rate by four. And then reduced them some more because they were from the 1950 season. I know nothing else about them, other than that they were English. 5 of the 85 lbs really were added in the hop back.

The grist is almost as simple as it appears. There really just is a single base malt. The sugar in the original, however, is half invert and half something called Muntona.

The mashing scheme is an infusion stood at 149º F for 20 minutes followed by an underlet held at 152º F for 100 minutes. Then sparging, obviously.

1953 Elgood Strong Ale
pale malt	9.00 lb	90.00%
No. 2 invert sugar	1.00 lb	10.00%
Fuggles 95 mins	0.75 oz
Fuggles 60 mins	0.75 oz
Fuggles hop back	0.13 oz
OG	1047
FG	1017
ABV	3.97
Apparent attenuation	63.83%
IBU	20
SRM	7
Mash at	152º F
Sparge at	167º F
Boil time	95 minutes
pitching temp	61º F
Yeast	WLP025 Southwold