How to interpret brewing records - part six: Scottish format page 1 overview

After the overwhelmingly tepid response to my series looking at a Barclay Perkins record, I've decided to plough ahead with another style of brewing record. What I call Scottish format because, well, it\s the type of record used by most Scottish brewers. And a few English ones, too. Such as Boddington, for example.

Really I just need a few posts I can bash out without interrupting my work on "Stout!" too much. I need to set my priorities. And number one at the moment is getting that book finished. I'm eighty recipes in and haven't got past the 1850s.

Getting back to the topic, Scottish format records gave their pros and cons. Biggest pro is that you get more beers per photo. This period of Younger's records have eight beers per double-page spread. Which means you get four beers per photo. Biggest con is that everything is rather cramped and often in tiny handwriting.

I'll kick off by going through the first page. Which looks like this:

You'll need to click on the image to be able to read anything.

Working from left to right, first is some general information:

I think that's pretty easy to understand.

Next we come to information about the malts:

Here's one of the first challenges: reading the tiny handwriting describing each type of malt. We'll be getting back to this in a later post.

The mashing details follow, logically enough.

Quite a large section follows with everything connected to the copper.

Just two short sections left. First the wort.

And finally, the yeast.

Next time we'll start looking at these sections in detail.