Holyrood and Fountain beer specifications

There's a bunch of papers in the Scottish Brewing Archive title "Holyrood and Fountain beer specifications". They seem to be the reply to an enquiry about the Scottish & Newcastle beers brewed in Scotland in the 1990s.

The original enquiry isn't included, just the reply, and a bunch of loose sheet.

23rd June 2001
Dear Alma
Pleas find enclosed the specifications of the fountain and Holyrood Beers. These would be about five years old and I think that they would be correct lor the previous fifteen years. I hesc are Photostats taken from Gordon Buchanan's own note book and I hope that you can cut them up a bit as I have no access to a guillotine and the notes were back to back. I now have them in the correct order. I lope to see you soon

Kind Regards
Holyrood and Fountain beer specifications held at the Scottish Brewing Archive, document number WY/6/1/8/1.

The loose sheets contain colour specifications for all the beers. Plus individual sheet for some beers. Which include things like OG, FG, IBUs, colour and CO2 content. But no details of ingredients or process.

At the very end, there's an interesting note.

The query relating to McEwans Pale Ale was related to the market for "low" gravity beers. Many of the customers were involved in the coal industry and they requested higher colours. Pale Ale was brewed at 1030 and blended with fairly large quantities of yeast pressings. The bottled Pale Ale was sold as Blue Label mostly in small screw tops and the darker Pale Ale as larger Green Label screw tops. The principal beer sold in the fifties and sixties was 5/A which was 25 Lovibond and for the Glasgow and Lanarkshire market 46 Lovibond. It was strange that the miners market changed to lager and paler beers at a later date.
Holyrood and Fountain beer specifications held at the Scottish Brewing Archive, document number WY/6/1/8/1.

5/A was the brew house name for McEwans Pale Ale. And pretty watery stuff it was. This is from the specs, so the 1990s version of the beer:

McEwans Pale Ale
OG	1030.5
FG	1009.1
ABV	2.83
App. Attenuation	70.16%
colour EBC	48
IBU	17
Source:
Holyrood and Fountain beer specifications held at the Scottish Brewing Archive, document number WY/6/1/8/1.

I'm sure all those yeast pressings added character to the beer.

I already knew about the Scots colouring up the same beer in different colours for different markets. You'll note that the 1990s version was brewed at the darker colour. The pale version seems to have disappeared. Though the spec is for the keg version. An earlier sheet has these two bottled beers:

Beer	EBC
XXP (P5/A)	30°
G5/A (D5/A)	80º
Source:
Holyrood and Fountain beer specifications held at the Scottish Brewing Archive, document number WY/6/1/8/1.

Where P5/A stands for Pale 5/A and D5/A stands for Dark 5/A. G/5A is Glasgow 5/A. Which shows the Glasgow version as being even darker. As dark as Dark Mild.

Wasn't that fun. All from a few little bits of text.