To follow on from my post about London draught beers in the 1930s, here's Whitbread's price list from 1934.
As it includes the prices for various cask sizes, it must be a trade list, That is, for publicans. Though it does include the public bar price per pint. In the posher rooms, such as the saloon or lounge, 1d more per pint would have been charged.
To put the cask into context, in 1914, a 36-gallon barrel of X Ale cost 36/- That was for a beer of 1050º. While 1934 X Ale was 1036º. That's about 2.5 times more expensive and 28% weaker. Quite a change. The reason? Extra tax piled on as a result of WW I.
What else can I spin out of this scrap of source material? The final line. Where XXX is crossed out, replaced by 33. A more expensive beer.
Why is the new beer call '33? Because that's when the disastrous tax increase of 1931 was reversed. To celebrate. Whitbread bumped up the gravity of their Burton Ale from 1045º to 1061º*. While also bumping up the price by 1d per pint. I think I would have been able to live with that. But I'm a pisshwead, as Mikey keeps reminding me.
Interesting that Porter and Stout come first on the list. That must be a hangover of Whitbread's time as an early Porter brewer. And one of the largest.
Oh, the Light Ale. That was dark. A piss-weak Dark Mild. Slightly confusing, the name.
* Whitbread brewing records held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document numbers LMA/4453/D/01/099 and LMA/4453/D/01/100.
I'd guess that was the heyday of "four ale" (i.e. 4d ale) and the "four-ale bar" (i.e. the public, where the hoi polloi got tanked up on same – although they'd have to work at it). Google's Ngram viewer shows the phrase "four-ale bar" being in wide use from roughly 1928 to 1964, so right through the 1930s, 40s and 50s - a bit later than I would have thought (surely inflation had started to kick in by the end of that period?).
ReplyDeleteI believe the term "four-ale bar" originated before WW I. It referred to the price of Mild Ale in the public bar per quart.
ReplyDeleteThat would explain why it appears (according to Google) in the late 1900s. 4d a quart as a price point won't have held for very long, though - I wonder if over time it was quietly redefined as referring to the "4d-a-pint" bar, and that's what people were using it to mean in the 30s. Or maybe the name had just stuck, and nobody cared what the 'four' did or didn't refer to.
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