Brewing records only tell so much. Mostly what goes on in the brew house. That was never the end of things. Most of the horrors occurred later. Around packaging time. Beers were left to roam free-range during fermentation. Then came the rack. Sorry, racking.
I take the piss out of Watney for all the returned crap that they mixed into their beers. Didn't that make their beer rubbish? But I only know that because I've seen their internal quality control document. Which shows 10% of "stuff" added to most beers after fermentation.
Due to the tax system in the UK, adding crap on which there was effectively no tax made a huge deal of sense. Financially. The brewers weren't so keen. Derek Prentice told me of the effort it took to stop Fullers trying to recycle beer, even when it made no real financial sense any more. After the introduction of brewery-gate taxation.
Why a dinosaur? Well, that's what I am and it's bigger than an elephant, Also like me. It's because pretty much everyone was up to blending in various types of rubbish. Even when brewing the beers I loved, like Tetley's Mild. Which, according to the brewery's Specifications Manual, could be up to 12.5% "stabilised beer".
Let's not kid ourselves. There was a lot of recycled beer in the pints we so happily slurped back in the 1970s. Whether it happened at the pub or in the brewery, you were lucky if it was the first time around for all of the beer in your glass. In a Tetley's pub with handpumps, it might be as little as 80%.
And still I loved it.
Keg beer was harder to fiddle with in the retail phase. That didn’t dodge all the dodgy brewing practices.
A former Watney’s brewer relates just how bad it could get:
“That was the problem with Watney beers at The Whitechapel Brewery all the ullage was pumped up into the old wooden Porter vessels 3 x 500 brls each.”
Dr Mike Cowbourne.
Doesn’t that sound lovely?
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10 comments:
Having been born at the start of the decade, I'm too young to have drunk in the seventies, but do recall seeing a lot more home brewing equipment on sale in shops as a kid than there seems to be now. I wonder to what extent poor quality cask and keg beers helped spark that boom (the low price amidst a background of rising inflation must have been a factor too).
you cant the piss out of of Watneys. There would be nothing left.
One of the big deterrents to drinking mild when I started out in the 1970's was the widely held belief that at the end of the session the slops went into the mild barrel. I don't know how true this was, but it seems logical that if it was happening at the brewery, it was also happening at the pub.
I think we're a similar age Matt, and my Dad started homebrewing in the early 80's with a kit from Boots, of course. He'd been made redundant and simply couldn't afford to drink in the pub as much as he had done. He was happy enough with pub beer from memory. There was also a home wine making boom at that time as well, part of a general air of homey crafty back to nature stuff going on in the UK in the late 70's and early 80's - The Good Life, etc - whether just a trend or because of rampant inflation and general economic malaise in the UK, or both, or something else, I don't know. Would be interesting if some home brewers from those could explain why they started.
How did they keep the beers withing colour and bitterness specs with a presumably unknown and constantly variable ullage mix added in? Or didn't they much care?
I'd kill for a pint of early 80s Tetleys (Leeds) bitter now, even with 7.5% ullage. At the pub I worked in, the overflow went back into the tap room mild barrel.
For my grandad in the 1980’s it was cheaper to homebrew.
Oscar
In Brains pubs in South Wales, just like Tetley, the Dark, Bitter and SA were served through a tight sparkler, and beer escaped down the outside of the glass to a drip tray that went down to a cask. However I have no idea whether it went to the dark cask or its own cask.
When CAMRA got going, my local, the Royal Oak on Newport Road began to park a cask of SA on a stillage behind the bar and serve on gravity. It was a bit of a stunt because CAMRA rated Brains anyway, but it never caught on because the gently poured beer tasted nothing like proper SA, it was almost fizzy and little or no head. So back to the tight sparkler!!
In the early to mid 70s I used to brew Tom Caxton, which was really good for home brew. It came with a big plastic bag that you set in your plastic dustbin, mixed up the tin and some sugar, pitched the yeast and closed off the bag with the twistie tie, but not too tight, so that the CO2 could escape. I never had an infection and bottled it in twist top cider flagons of the era.
The TV ads stressed great beer for fourpence a pint or whatever, so cost certainly came into it!!
Surprised that the brand is still going, must still be OK.
At a pub I worked in during the early 90's, we were instructed (under threat of dismissal) to collect the contents of the drip trays in pint glasses below the bar. Then these were then just used when someone ordered a pint. Not the worst crime in the world, and not as bad as filtering dead pints at the end of the night through a sieve and pouring the product into the Pedigree cask - mild, bitter, lager, whatever - as happened at a pub a friend worked at.
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