W.E. & J. Rigden beers in 1884/85

Not quite Beer & Rigden at this point, as they didn’t merge with George Beer until 1922. This beer was brewed in their Faversham brewery, which later became home to Fremlins when under Whitbread control.

According to an advertisement from 1884, Rigden marketed eleven beers.

Which, you may notice, doesn’t quite match the beers that appear in the brewing records.

Well, that’s not totally true, as TB does turn up. But only in a note at the bottom, saying how a brew was racked. For example, a brew of Beer on the 19th September 1884 was racked as 66 barrels Beer, 76 barrels AK, 9 barrels TA, 9 barrels TB. Presumably, the TA and TB were created by adding water post-fermentation.

Single Stout, I imagine, was created by blending Porter and Stout. Or by watering down some of the Double Stout. Similarly, I’d guess that XX was created by either blending X and XXX or by watering down XXX.

That said, let’s get on with looking at the beers in more detail.

Table Ale is a bit unusual for and English brewery this late in the 19th century. For the price, the gravity of 1042º is pretty decent. It seems to have been basically a weaker version of Beer (or X Ale).

Moving up the strengths, Beer has a pretty reasonable gravity for a provincial Mild Ale. Though it is weaker than a London X Ale. I’m guessing that the stronger XX Mild Ale probably had a gravity of around 1060º.

There are three Bitters: in ascending order of strength, AK, Special Ale and XXK. The last looks like a classic Stock Pale Ale, judging by its gravity and hopping rate. And probably had at least nine months ageing. Special Ale was most likely semi-Stock and aged for just three months. While AK was a classic Running Bitter.

The idea of a Stock AK is quite amusing. As it doesn’t really make any sense. The whole point of Light Bitters like AK was that they weren’t aged at all, Despite the K in its name.

The Stock Ale would also have had at least nine months of ageing. Quite possibly more. It was sometimes parti-gyled with XXK

Fuck. I have to finish this for tomorrow’s post. Just draw own conclusions from the data. Classic copout there.