Scottish Sweet Stout before WW II

I've finally plucked up the courage to tackle a section of my new book that I'd been dreading: Stout.

Why? Because I have so much data. And there were so many different types of Stout of widely varying strength and character. Put simply, it's a shitload of work. But something I need to engage with, if I ever want this damn book to be finished.

Scottish Stout began to diverge from the English originals already in the 19th century. The style had never been as popular North of the border as in England and, after WW II, many breweries weren’t really making it.

Well, they were and they weren’t. Almost all Scottish brewers had a Stout in their portfolio, but often not in their brewing records. A good example is Drybrough. I’ve seen a big swathe of their brewing logs and there. Not a sniff of a Stout after 1920, yet I have an analysis of it from 1933.

How did that work? My guess is that they took a Pale Ale and primed it up at racking time to transform it into Stout. I suspect something similar was happening at other Scottish brewers, who just parti-gyled different strength Pale Ales from a single recipe.

The move towards Sweet Stout began in Scotland, even before Mackeson had the brainwave of adding lactose. In the 1880s, William Younger brewed Stouts with a poor degree of attenuation and a very low level of hopping, sometimes with partially, or even all, spent hops. After the introduction of lactose, Scottish brewers went mad for it, enabling them to brew ever more poorly-attenuation Stouts.

By the 1930s, Scottish Sweet Stouts were usually below 3% ABV and sometimes less than 2%. This was achieved by a combination of a low OG and a very poor degree of attenuation. Some examples in the table are barely fermented at all. And you definitely weren’t going to get pissed on such beers.

Scottish Sweet Stout before WW II
Date	Year	Beer	Price per pint (d)	OG	FG	ABV	App. Atten-uation
1933	Dryborough	Nourishing Stout		1031	1019	1.54	38.71%
1933	Murray	Milk Stout		1036	1018	2.31	50.00%
1933	Tennent	Nourishing Stout		1024	1015	1.16	37.50%
1933	Tennent	Nourishing Stout		1029	1014	1.93	51.72%
1933	Tennent	Nourishing Stout		1031	1013	2.32	58.06%
1933	Tennent	Light Stout		1032	1014	2.32	56.25%
1937	Younger, Geo	Cream Double Stout		1045.5	1025.5	2.56	43.96%
1937	Murray	Milk Stout	6	1044.8	1019.2	3.30	57.14%
Sources:
William Younger Gravity Book held at the Scottish Brewing Archive, document number WY/6/1/1/19,
Thomas Usher Gravity Book held at the Scottish Brewing Archive, document number TU/6/11.
Whitbread Gravity book held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document number LMA/4453/D/02/001.