It's not easy to know what was going on in pub cellars. Especially when those activities were against the law. The only way of finding out if watering was occurring was for inspectors to take samples in pubs, work out what the original gravity had been and check with brewers if that tallied with the beer as sent out.
So I was dead happy when I bumped into a long article from the Manchester Evening News about prosecutions for diluting beer in the Manchester area. It reports on the prosecution of nine licensees for diluting beer. It seems this was just the tip of the iceberg and that the practice was widespread. With more prosecutions to follow.
Mr. William Hill, who conducted the case for prosecution, said after the hearings, “The Customs and Excise made their swoop after many complaints of poor quality beer from members of the public.
“They found many houses with diluted beer, particularly in the Oldham area. Now the brewers are working in full co-operation with the Customs men.
“Another 25 licensees are soon to appear in court on charges of possessing diluted beer from the Rochdale and Oldham area.”
Mr. H. J. Dunhill, assistant collector for the Customs and Excise in Manchester, said: "A high proportion of the houses visited had diluted beer. We are continuing investigations in spurts in an parts of our area from Rochdale in the north to Altrincham in the south."
Manchester Evening News - Friday 23 October 1959, page 32.
The article does mention the real gravity of one of the beers and that was in the low 1030ºs. Already pretty damn weak. No wonder drinkers complained, if their already watery beer had been diluted even further. As we'll see later, in some cases, the quantity of water added was ludicrously high. We'll also see the ludricous excuses landlords came up with to explain away their nefarious activities.
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4 comments:
This perhaps shows up my complete ignorance of the mechanics behind kegging, but would it be harder to water down a kegged beer versus cask? At what point in the process was the water added?
I guess what I'm asking is: were these widespread nefarious practices by publicans one reason the major breweries were keen to foist keg ale onto beer consumers?
Iain,
pretty sure you can't just open up a pressurised keg.
I think brewers were keen to push keg was that they could charge more money for it.
In Australia where the majority of beer has been "keg" for many decades, there were often only one or two beers on tap. For example in Queensland in the 70s you had the Red pubs (XXXX heavy) and the Blue Pubs (Carlton and United, with one beer on tap called Carlton Draught but derived from the earlier Bulimba Draught).
To handle the very heavy trade, rather than having to halt service to change a keg, a lot of pubs had a "daisy chain" arrangement in the cold room where six or seven kegs would be chained, with the beer flowing from one keg to another. I'm not sure about the exact keg changing arrangements but it was sometimes discovered that the publican had slipped in a keg of water somewhere in the middle. One of my early jobs in Australia was a pub cleaner working from 4 am to opening at 10.
I wasn't allowed anywhere near the cold room, which remained locked.
Nowadays with up to a dozen taps in pubs and clubs daisy chaining is no longer done.
Ron,
I suspected as much, so it made me wonder whether watering down was more common with cask beers.
Bribie,
Good point about daisy chaining! However, the practice of linking kegs in a series (i.e., daisy chaining) is still very much alive in busy craft beer bars, at least in the US. The practice is illustrated in the latest Draught Beer Quality Manual from the Brewers Association.
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