Friday 24 January 2020

Whitbread's Ale and Stout

Random price list time. Today it's the turn of Whitbread bottled beers from 1937.

It comes from a bit away from London - Grantham in Linconshire. Which is about 100 miles due North of the capital. I usually refer to Grantham as Newark's evil twin. Especially when speaking with Dolores. She wasn't impressed by Grantham.

Whitbread was one of the small group of brewers whose products were sold nationally. Though it Whitbread's case the more distant trade seems to have been exclusively bottled. Whereas others - such as Bass - also supplied draught beer all overs the country.

Listed below is pretty much the full set of Whitbread's bottled beers. The only one missing is Extra Stout. But there's a good reason for that - it was brewed exclusively for export, principally to Belgium. There's still a beer sold as Whitbread Extra Stout in Belgium

Grantham Journal - Saturday 11 December 1937, page 4.
Here are the details of the beers themselves. Plus the relative price per strength.


Whitbread bottled beers in 1937
Beer Style OG FG ABV App. Atten-uation lbs hops/ qtr hops lb/brl price per pint (d) gravity points per d
IPA IPA 1037.1 1009.5 3.65 74.39% 10.00 1.58 7 5.30
X Mild 1033.1 1011.0 2.92 66.77% 7.92 1.12 7 4.73
DB Brown Ale 1054.7 1012.5 5.58 77.15% 9.98 2.32 9 6.08
LS Stout 1044.6 1013.0 4.18 70.85% 6.94 1.26 8.5 5.25
LOS Stout 1044.6 1013.0 4.18 70.85% 6.94 1.26 8.5 5.25
MS Stout 1057 1024.5 4.19 57.02% 6.95 1.48 10 5.70
Sources
Whitbread brewing records held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document numbers LMA/4453/D/01/103, LMA/4453/D/01/104 and LMA/4453/D/09/125.
Thomas Usher Gravity Book held at the Scottish Brewing Archive, document number TU/6/11.

Surprisingly, Double Brown is the best value, followed by Mackeson. Though there are some caveats. The gravity given for X/Forest Brown is probably too low. From analyses I know that the real OG was higher - more like 1038º. The increase is due to the addition of primings at racking time. In value for money terms. it's prbably really about the same as IPA.

The OG and FG of Mackeson I've taken from an analysis rather than the brewing record. As the lactose added at racking time isn't recorded in the brewing record.

2 comments:

Barm said...

Just to clarify, Ron, Mackeson was never sold on draught in the UK was it? So when you refer to racking time, that’s when it was transferred to hogsheads or whatever for bottling?

StuartP said...

Dolores is right about Grantham.