The document in question is LMA/4453/D/08/010, held at the London Metropolitan Archives. It's a brewing record, but I've no idea where it's from. It's in the Whitbread archive, but I'm pretty sure it's not Whitbread. The brewhouse names aren't right.
Even worse, it seems to be miscatalogued. According to the archive's website, the LMA/4453/D/08 records are the notbooks of F.G.S. Baker. But going deeper into the catalogue, the notebooks all have LMA/4453/D/07 number. LMA/4453/D/08/010 I can't find anywhere in the catalogue. Brilliant.
It's ll a bit of a mystery. They look like records from another London Porter brewery. But a second division one, as the batch sizes are 400-500 barrels. About half that of Whitbread's.
That's all irrelevant, really, as it's not the brewing records themselves that caught my eye, but a couple of pages at the back. Where it lists the beer in vats. Not just that. It shows the dates when the vats were filled and when they were emptied.
It shows that Porter was being vatted for betweeen 3 and 8 months. Which is surprisingly variable.
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It doesn’t look like anything sensible like beer maturing faster in the summer either.
Wooden vats vary of course, and it’s possible they were taking samples and emptying the vats when they tasted right.
Mind you, it’s no good if the beer is just right if you don't have a buyer for it yet. I once had a brewer show me a conditioning tank full of beer and say that the contents would basically stay in there until he had an order for it. Probably something like that.
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