They certainly liked their Mild watery in the 1950s. Or rather, drinkers had no choice as that’s just the way it came.
Elgood’s Mild, X, makes their Light Ale look headily alcoholic. Which is quite an achievement. X was brewed at around the effective minimum gravity. No matter how watery your beer was, you paid the tax for a beer of 1027º. So there was no real economic point in brewing anything much weaker than that.
The grist is, er, interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen flaked barley and flaked rice used in the same beer before. Obviously, there’s the malt extract Elgood threw in all their beers. Then there’s a sugar just described as invert. And another called carmose. I’ll go out a limb here and guess that’s some sort of caramel.
The hops were all English and all quite old. This beer was brewed in October 1953 and the hops were all from the 1950 harvest.
| 1953 Elgood X | ||
| Mild malt | 4.50 lb | 76.14% |
| flaked rice | 0.25 lb | 4.23% |
| flaked barley | 0.33 lb | 5.58% |
| No. 3 invert sugar | 0.33 lb | 5.58% |
| malt extract | 0.25 lb | 4.23% |
| caramel 1000 SRM | 0.25 lb | 4.23% |
| Fuggles 95 mins | 1.00 oz | |
| Fuggles 30 mins | 0.25 oz | |
| OG | 1026 | |
| FG | 1006.5 | |
| ABV | 2.58 | |
| Apparent attenuation | 75.00% | |
| IBU | 20 | |
| SRM | 20 | |
| Mash at | 153º F | |
| Sparge at | 176º F | |
| Boil time | 95 minutes | |
| pitching temp | 61º F | |
| Yeast | WLP025 Southwold | |
Re the flaked barley, I brewed the Tetley Mild you posted, with the flaked barley as mandated by the austerity government of the time, and it turned out spectacular with a rich creamy head as if it had been forced through a sparkler.
ReplyDeleteNow I'm going to try and have to get Southwold yeast....
ReplyDeleteWhatS the batch size?
ReplyDeleteJuanjacobs83,
ReplyDelete5 Imperial, 6 US gallon, as always.
What should invert sugar #3 taste like if done correctly.
ReplyDelete@Bitter Donald
ReplyDeleteI don't know about this far back, but certainly in the 1980s Elgood used the yeast from Hole's of Newark. When Hole's were shut down Elgood switched to the Hardy & Hanson yeast by way of Black Sheep, which is a classic phenolic Yorkshire square yeast. I don't know if they have the Hole's yeast but if you tell Brewlab you're cloning Black Sheep they'll send you a yeast labelled "HH" which may be suitable...
It may be worth asking Alison at Brewlab if they have the Hole's strain or other older Elgood ones, but on the assumption that they use HH because it's similar to what they used before, then WLP037 or Wyeast 1469 are better matches than the much cleaner Southwold.
As an aside, Ron reported on his visit to Elgood on 23/Mar/18, there's a nice article from the IBD at http://www.ibdlearningzone.org.uk/article/show/pdf/862/