Up in Yorkshire, Leeds to be precise, brewers were still producing a selection of Milds at different strengths.
Confusingly, at Kirkstall, these didn’t run X to XXXX. No. They had to make things more complicated than that. In this brewery’s case, X was the middle-strength beer. It’s weaker than the X Ales from larger London breweries like Barclay Perkins and Whitbread, but around the same as the one from Fullers.
The grist isn’t complicated. Just pale malt and a little black malt. Though the latter didn’t really make up part of the grist as it was added in the hop back. Were they worrying about the resale values of the spent grains in not adding it to the mash tun? There’s also a wee touch of caramel, added in the copper.
Three of the four types of hops were English, two from the 1884 harvest and one from 1883. The others are simply described as “foreign” and were from the 1884 crop.
| 1885 Kirkstall X | ||
| pale malt | 12.00 lb | 98.60% |
| black malt | 0.15 lb | 1.23% |
| caramel 1000 SRM | 0.02 lb | 0.16% |
| Cluster 150 mins | 0.50 oz | |
| Fuggles 150 mins | 0.50 oz | |
| Fuggles 60 mins | 1.00 oz | |
| Goldings 30 mins | 1.00 oz | |
| Goldings dry hops | 0.25 oz | |
| OG | 1052.5 | |
| FG | 1013 | |
| ABV | 5.23 | |
| Apparent attenuation | 75.24% | |
| IBU | 41 | |
| SRM | 11 | |
| Mash at | 152º F | |
| Sparge at | 170º F | |
| Boil time | 150 minutes | |
| pitching temp | 58º F | |
| Yeast | Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire Ale Timothy Taylor | |
What's the No. 2 reference to in that label?
ReplyDeleteDid they label beer by strength, or color, or did they have some other meaning for assigning numbers?
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteI'm fairly sure it refers to the strength.
Thanks. It's always interesting to know what things were called on the customer side of things.
ReplyDelete