Wednesday 29 March 2023

Let's Brew - 1900 Whitbread Single Stout

I did mention posting a consolation Single Stout recipe after it was just pipped by Imperial Stout in a poll. As I can't think of anything better and I have this recipe to hand*, Whitbread Single Stout it is.

It's exactly the same gravity as Guinness Extra Stout of the day. Which the brewer considered a Double Stout.

Yippee, I thought, when Whitbread were down to just two Stouts. And now they’re up to four. The bastards. I’d forgotten about the return of Single Stout.

For the first time in several decades, there was a Single Stout parti-gyled with the stronger Stouts. I won’t go through the minutiae if the fiddling with the grist. Which saw all of them either go up or down a little bit. Some of the sugar is described as “black”, which I’ve interpreted No. 4 invert.

Still clinging onto two mashes, an underlet and a sparge. Or maybe two sparges. Starting off fairly cool. The time the mash was stood after the underlet keeps getting reduced.

action barrels strike heat time mashed time stood tap heat gravity
mash 1 540 154º F 30      
underlet 50 174º F   75 143º F 1085.0
mash 2 280 180º F 15 30 158º F 1035.0
sparge 300 180º F        


The hops were all east Kent, two-thirds from the 1899 harvest, one third from 1898.

Looks like another Runner, to me. Just a few weeks of secondary. Too little time for Brettanomyces. 

1900 Whitbread Single Stout
pale malt 8.00 lb 50.79%
brown malt 2.25 lb 14.29%
black malt 0.75 lb 4.76%
amber malt 3.25 lb 20.63%
No. 2 invert sugar 1.00 lb 6.35%
No. 4 invert sugar 0.50 lb 3.17%
Goldings 105 min 1.75 oz
Goldings 60 min 1.75 oz
Goldings 30 min 1.75 oz
Goldings dry hops 0.50 oz
OG 1070
FG 1026
ABV 5.82
Apparent attenuation 62.86%
IBU 60
SRM 39
Mash at 148º F
Sparge at 180º F
Boil time 105 minutes
pitching temp 57º F
Yeast Wyeast 1099 Whitbread Ale


* It's one I recently wrote for "Stout!", my upcoming book on London, er, Stout.

8 comments:

Christoph Riedel said...

Looks like an interesting recipe that I should try. Especially since this is a runner, so I can skip on the Brettanomyces.

Was the dry-hop added for the few weeks in secondary? How many weeks exactly was that?

Thanks!

Ron Pattinson said...

Christoph Riedel,

I wouldn't think the secondary conditioning would last more than 8 weeks.

Anonymous said...

Hi, how many litres is this for, and how many litres of strike water?

Ron Pattinson said...

Anonymous,

my recipes are always for 23 litres. About 15 litres of strike water and about the same again for the sparge. If you want to do the fancy method Whitbread used, you should be able to work out the volumes for each step if I let you know that 1,076 barrels were produced in the original batch.

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't think the secondary condition would last more than 5 weeks.
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About 15 litres of strike water and about the same again for the sparge.

Iain said...

I was going to ask if the brown and/or amber malts were diastatic given that it's 51% pale malt and around 10% invert. But the attenuation seems pretty low, even for the time (I think). So maybe that pale malt was doing all the heavy lifting in terms of conversion?

PeeBee said...

Hello Iain. Just what I think ... and I've been writing about it over the last few days here ... https://www.jimsbeerkit.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=83681&p=866868#p866862. Careful with it though! I haven't earned anything like the reputation of Ron (except for being a complete cloth-head ... no way can Ron P. match me for that).