Let's Brew - 1939 William Younger DBS Btlg

As promised on Twitter, here's William Younger's Milk Stout from just at the start of WW II - it was brewed in November 1939.

DBS – presumably standing for Double Brown Stout – was another long-standing Younger product, having been around since the 1850s.

It has a peculiar connection with Copenhagen. Karl Jacobsen, son of the founder of Carlsberg, served an apprenticeship at William Younger in the late 1860s. When he returned to Copenhagen he started brewing some British-style beers. Most didn’t last very long, but one did: DBS. A beer which in Denmark would have been marketed as Porter.

The recipe and gravity of DBS changed quite a bit over the years. The biggest change being the addition of lactose in the 1930s. Which makes this beer something of an oddity. In that I’m pretty certain that it was aged. That’s inferred by where it was racked to. It mostly went into butts. None of Younger’s other beers were. Draught beers were mostly packaged into barrels and kilderkins, bottling beers into hogshead or tanks.

For William Younger, it has an incredibly complicated grist. In addition to the standard pale malt and grits there’s also crystal malt and “roasted”. Which could mean either roasted malt or roasted barley. I’ve plumped for the latter. There’s also liquorice, which was very popular in Scottish Stouts.

The sugars are lactose and caramel. I had to guess at the colour of the latter, but 1000 SRM gives a beer of about the right colour.

I’ve adjusted the FG, which is given as 1025º in the brewing record. That’s the cleansing gravity. Instead I’ve taken the FG from a 1939 analysis of the beer in the Whitbread Gravity Book.

1939 William Younger DBS Btlg
pale malt	9.50 lb	64.41%
roasted barley	0.50 lb	3.39%
crystal malt 60L	0.50 lb	3.39%
grits	2.75 lb	18.64%
caramel 1000 SRM	0.50 lb	3.39%
lactose	1.00 lb	6.78%
liquorice	0.25 oz
Fuggles 150 min	1.00 oz
Fuggles 60 min	1.00 oz
Fuggles 30 min	0.75 oz
Goldings dry hops	0.50 oz
OG	1066
FG	1019
ABV	6.22
Apparent attenuation	71.21%
IBU	32
SRM	36
Mash at	155º F
Sparge at	160º F
Boil time	150 minutes
pitching temp	60.5º F
Yeast	WLP028 Edinburgh Ale