It's just a little demonstration of the impact the development of black malt had on Stout grists. It's a great example of a solution being found to a specific problem: how to colour Porter?
Porter brewers faced a problem around 1800. Malt taxes were high to pay for the Napoleonic Wars with France. When, through use of the hydrometer, that pale malt was more cost effective than brown, they had switched from 100% brown to mostly pale. Problem was, their Porter was too pale.
For a few years, burnt sugar was permitted as a colourant for Porter. But the Excise wasn't very happy about sugar in breweries. Because, quite rightly, they didn't trust brewers. Sugar was forbidden in 1816. And black malt appeared the following year.
| London Stout 1805 - 1811 | |||||||||||
| Year | Brewer | Beer | OG | FG | ABV | App. Atten-uation | lbs hops/ qtr | hops lb/brl | pale malt | brown malt | amber malt |
| 1811 | Barclay Perkins | BSt | 1075.9 | 1027.0 | 6.47 | 64.43% | 11.14 | 4.98 | 48.54% | 39.88% | 11.58% |
| 1805 | Barclay Perkins | FSt | 1055.7 | 1017.0 | 5.12 | 69.47% | 10.48 | 2.90 | 58.05% | 41.95% | 0.00% |
| 1805 | Barclay Perkins | P Stout | 1078.9 | 1031.0 | 6.34 | 60.73% | 8.67 | 3.97 | 100.00% | 0.00% | |
| 1807 | Whitbread | Sea DS | 1066.5 | 1021.1 | 6.01 | 68.33% | 12.96 | 5.37 | 65.36% | 17.32% | 17.32% |
| 1807 | Whitbread | Sea S | 1060.9 | 1019.4 | 5.50 | 68.18% | 12.18 | 4.00 | 70.02% | 29.98% | 0.00% |
| Average | 1067.6 | 1023.1 | 5.89 | 66.23% | 11.08 | 4.24 | 60.49% | 32.28% | 7.22% | ||
| London Stout 1820 - 1821 | ||||||||||||
| Year | Brewer | Beer | OG | FG | ABV | App. Atten-uation | lbs hops/ qtr | hops lb/brl | pale malt | brown malt | black malt | amber malt |
| 1820 | Barclay Perkins | FSt | 1058.4 | 1016.0 | 5.62 | 72.62% | 11.80 | 3.64 | 72.73% | 26.17% | 1.10% | |
| 1821 | Barclay Perkins | BSt | 1078.9 | 1027.0 | 6.87 | 65.80% | 10.66 | 4.83 | 69.90% | 22.55% | 0.79% | 6.76% |
| 1820 | Whitbread | Stout | 1063.7 | 1019.9 | 5.79 | 68.70% | 10.72 | 3.69 | 91.60% | 7.20% | 1.20% | |
| 1821 | Truman | K Stout | 1073.4 | 1017.2 | 7.44 | 76.60% | 14.9 | 5.86 | 74.77% | 24.39% | 0.84% | |
| Average | 1068.6 | 1020.0 | 6.4 | 0.7 | 12.0 | 4.5 | 77.25% | 20.08% | 0.98% | 1.69% | ||
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3 comments:
This is a dumb question I'm sure. You wrote in this post
http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2013/09/1815-1850-porter-supreme.html
"There was a huge change in the materials used for brewing caused by the enactment of a law prohibiting all ingredients other than malt and hops in 1816. It was a reaction to brewers avoiding the malt tax by either brewing with unmalted grain of sugar."
Do you know why there wasn't an exemption for coloring? I assume it was such a tiny amount it wouldn't have affected tax revenue. Were there exemptions for additions like finings and salts? Or were those not in use at the time?
Of course, you don't need a hydrometer to understand the gravity of your wort.
You can just weigh a repeatable volume - hence 'gravity'.
These values are interesting since I could not find a colour value for Brown malt on your blog.
In BP FSt, 1.1% black malt substituted 15% brown malt. At Whitbread, 1.2% black malt seem to have substituted 23% brown malt. This results in the black malt being 13.6x and 19.2x darker than the respective brown malt. With black malt being ususally 500 SRM, this leads to brown malts having a colour of 37 SRM and 26 SRM respectively.
From the BP BSt we get a substitution of 0.8% black malt for 17.5% brown malt and 5% amber malt. This already contradicts my above calculation and shows that they probably did not keep the colour but rather re-darkened. But his gives me an indication on where to go if I want to recreate the diastatic brown malt.
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