Even for a London brewer, Barclays produced a very large variety of Stouts, seven in all. Many of them were produced in tiny quantities. The exceptions being LS and BS which were pretty mainstream products.
Porter was just clinging on at this point, after declining precipitously immediately after WW I. It wouldn’t be around much longer. By the late 1930s, Barclay Perkins brewed it in tiny batches of a couple of dozen barrels. It could only have been on sale in a handful of pubs.
The other beers are various types of Stouts, not all of which were available in their pubs. For example, I’m pretty sure that RNS was a beer for the Royal Navy. Barclay Perkins supplied beer to merchant ships – in the form of Sparkling Beer – so why shouldn’t they also provide beer for the Navy?
Working through the other beers, LS = London Stout, BS = Best Stout, OMS = Oatmeal Stout, IBS = Imperial Brown Stout (Russian Stout) and BBS Export. Not sure what that last one was, other than strong. OMS was the same as BS really, just with a tiny amount of oats. IBS Export was the full-strength version of Russian Stout. One of a handful of beers brewed to a pre-WW I gravity.
Most were heavily primed, increasing the effective OG, in some cases considerably:
| Beer | OG before primings | OG after primings | % increase |
| TT | 1032.5 | 1038.7 | 18.84% |
| BS | 1051.5 | 1057 | 10.68% |
| OMS | 1051.5 | 1053.5 | 3.86% |
| RNS | 1053.8 | 1059 | 9.60% |
| IBS | 1060.4 | 1063.4 | 4.98% |
| Source: | |||
| Barclay Perkins brewing record held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document number ACC/2305/01/621. | |||
Only the two strongest Stouts, BBS Export and IBS Export, and the weakest, LS, received no primings.
The rate of attenuation is low for every single beer. Even the highest – for RNS – is still just below 70%. Clearly, they were trying to leave the beers with a considerable body. In the case of IBS Export, however, the racking gravity would have been considerably higher than the true FG. A couple of years in the company of Brettanomyces would have a bout halved the FG in the table.
The hopping rates vary from reasonably high for the weaker examples to extremely high for the two strongest. Few beers in the 1930s were hopped as heavily as BBS Export and IBS Export.
As with their Ales, Barclay Perkins had colour standards for their Porter and Stout. Most of them were pretty dark. Some extremely dark.
| Barclay Perkins Stout colour standards in 1946 | |
| I.B.S. | 270 - 350 |
| B.S. | 270 - 320 |
| L.S. | 270 - 320 |
| B.B.S. Ex. | 350 - 400 |
| I.B.S. Ex. | 350 - 420 |
| Source: | |
| Barclay Perkins brewing record held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document number ACC/2305/01/627. | |
| Barclay Perkins Porter and Stout before WW II | ||||||||
| Year | Beer | Style | OG | FG | ABV | App. Atten-uation | lbs hops/ qtr | hops lb/brl |
| 1936 | TT | Porter | 1032.5 | 1011.0 | 2.85 | 66.20% | 6.93 | 0.95 |
| 1936 | LS | Stout | 1046.6 | 1015.0 | 4.18 | 67.81% | 7.00 | 1.31 |
| 1936 | BS | Stout | 1051.5 | 1017.5 | 4.50 | 66.02% | 6.93 | 1.50 |
| 1936 | OMS | Stout | 1051.5 | 1017.5 | 4.50 | 66.02% | 6.93 | 1.50 |
| 1936 | RNS | Stout | 1053.8 | 1016.5 | 4.94 | 69.35% | 8.13 | 1.79 |
| 1936 | IBS | Stout | 1060.4 | 1020.0 | 5.34 | 66.88% | 8.13 | 2.25 |
| 1936 | BBS Export | Stout | 1079.5 | 1029.5 | 6.61 | 62.87% | 14.93 | 5.46 |
| 1937 | IBS Export | Stout | 1104.5 | 1041.5 | 8.33 | 60.29% | 15.21 | 6.46 |
| Source: | ||||||||
| Barclay Perkins brewing record held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document number ACC/2305/01/621. | ||||||||
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3 comments:
The low attenuation fits with the trend towards sweet-tasting stouts at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th centuries, which culminated, of course, in the invention of Milk Stout. It would be interesting to know how long after they were casked/bottled those beers were expected to be drunk …
Martyn,
TT and BS would have been drunk pretty young.
IBS Export, obviously, was aged a couple of years. But there are clues in the grist which suggest that a couple of the others were aged, too. We'll get to that in my next post.
It would seem unnecessary and potentially dangerous to prime bottles that contained Brettanomyces and were intended to be aged for a while. There would be plenty of time and fermentable material available for conditioning in the bottle.
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