Someone did request this. A long-term chart of Whitbread Stout gravity. So it's not my fault, OK. Though I had already constructed the chart before they asked.
Let's crack on with the pretty chart, then.
The gravity kicks off pretty low. That's a result of the Napoleonic Wars and the high taxation required to pay for them. The gravity then rises in reaction to a reduction in the malt tax. Then falls again when the malt tax was increased in 1819.
In 1830 there's another rise. I assume prompted by the abolition of excise duty on beer.
The fall in 1854 is when the malt tax was increased to pay for the Crimean War. I had wondered about why there was a fall in gravity in the early 1860s, as there was no increase in the malt tax then. But there was the introduction of a much higher charge for brewing licences, which was a shilling per quarter (336 lbs) of malt.
1880, of course, is when the malt tax was abolished, and the system of taxation based on OG was introduced.
Not quite sure what happened in 1846 and 1875. But, in general, all the troughs correspond to tax increases and the peaks to tax reductions.
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When did Whitbread last produce a stout under their own name? The first pub I drank in as a teenager in the late eighties was a Whitbread house and sold bottles of Mackeson Stout, a brand they'd taken over in the late twenties.
Awesome, thanks for the graph! So fascinating that the peaks and dips correspond to tax development. No better incentive for change than money, I guess.
i wonder if 1816-17 were also low due to the horible harvests due to the year without a summer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
According to Frank Baillie's Beer Drinker's Companion published in 1974, Whitbread was still brewing a bottled Special Stout along with the sweeter Mackeson Stout then. I'd guess it disappeared when they shut their Chiswell Street brewery a couple of years later.
Matt,
Whitbread Stout was around much later that that. I drank a bottle in Mechelen about 15 years ago. I guess that was Extra Stout, which was the beer Whitbread brewed for the Belgian market.
By the way, there are a lot of anecdotal accounts of barley crops being killed after the eruption of Mt. Tambora and big price increases as a result, such as these.
https://www.readersdigest.ca/culture/1816-the-year-without-a-summer/
https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/1816-a-year-without-summer/
https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/palmer.2/Geradstetten/Report%20of%20the%20Famine%20and%20Hhe%20Hyper-Inflation%20of%201816%20and%201817.pdf
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