Ticked Good Beer Guides

ticked 1982 Good Beer Guide

Strange day, today. I'm flying off to South America. Again. But my flight leaves quite late in the evening. Leaving me a good chunk of the day to fret whether I've packed everything. I really should have a checklist.

What have I been doing? Continuing with my totally superfluous beer guide to the 1970s. I'm really cracking on and am up to Jennings. Which, due to the crazy number of breweries starting with the letter "H", is just about halfway through the independent breweries.

It's a lot of fun. Remembering all these defunct breweries and their beers. I drank loads of them, having volunteered at the Great British Beer Festival in 1977, 1978 and 1979. Remembering exactly which ones I sampled is more of a problem. I wish I'd ticked beers off in the Good Beer Guide like my mate Simon did. And many others.

Including previous owners of my vintage Good Beer Guides. I did have copies of my own. Once. Not after a couple of international moves. Funny how stuff goes missing then. My second-hand 1980 edition is ticked. All Bitter, as far as I can see.

1982's first owner was another Bitter drinker, only straying with Boddington Best Mild.

I hadn't thought about it before. This is an insight into one particular beer drinker's preferences. Or perhaps into which beers were available to him. Really, a combination of both. Given the broad geographical spread of the breweries ticked, I'm guessing a fair few were drunk at beer festivals. Where Mild probably was an option. Not judging here. Just observing.

1984 isn't ticked. 1987 isn't. Neither is 1990. A shame.

Ticked Good Beer Guides are an amazing resource. A glimpse into what one drinker drank in one year. A sort of beer diary. Did they carry ticks over to the next years Good Beer Guide? Let me know if you were a ticker.

Anyone else have ticked Beer Guides? Either their own or someone else's? I'm particularly interested in ones from the 1970s and 1980s.

Oh dear once more

I've still not finished with the style descriptions in the 2013 Good Beer Guide.

First Old Ale:

"Old ale is another style from the 18th century, stored for months or even years in wooden vessels where the beer picked up some  lactic sourness from wild yeasts and tannins in the wood.. As a result of the sour taste it was dubbed 'stale' by drinkers and the beer was one of the components of the early blended porters."

Old Ale was not a component of early Porter. Porter was an unblended partially-aged beer, at least in the beginning. And it was a beer, so wouldn't have had Ale in it. When later in the 18th century they did begin to blend Porter, it was Mild Porter and Keeping Porter that were blended. Two beers.

We've some to the entry on Bitter (totally different from Pale Ale, remember) now:

"Bitter was a new type of running beer: it was a member of the pale ale family but was generally deep bronze or copper due to the use of slightly darker malts, such as crystal, that gave the beer fulness of palate."

Pale Ale had been called Bitter, Bitter Beer, Bitter Ale, etc before the first running Pale Ale was brewed. Bitter was not coined to describe running Pale Ales and after they had appeared continued to be used in relation to Pale Ales of all types.

Running Bitter wasn't darker than Pale Ale. The two beers were brewed from the same ingredients. In fact they were often parti-gyled together. I've yet to find a single case of crystal malt being used in a Pale Ale or Bitter of any kind before 1900.

Finally Scottish beers:

"Historically, Scottish beers tend to be darker, sweeter and less heavily hopped that [sic] beers south of the border: a reflection of a colder climate where hops don't grow and beer needs to be nourishing."

I sometimes wonder if I'll ever manage to stop people repeating this bollocks. It isn't true. Hops have been grown in Scotland and, just because hops aren't grown in a region doesn't mean brewers don't use them. Where are the hop fields in Staffordshire? Or Yorkshire?

Oh dear again

I'm back with some regretable bollocks from the 2013 Good Beer Guide.

This is from the Pale Ale entry:

"The success of IPA in the colonial trade led to a demand for a beer of similar colour and character in Britain. IPA, with its heavy hopping, was considered too bitter for the domestic market and brewers responded with a beer called pale ale that was lower in both alcohol and hops"

It's a brave man who tries to split apart IPA and Pale Ale like that. Brewers used the two terms pretty randomly in the 19th century. Bass's IPA was officially called Pale Ale. Other brewers changed the name from IPA to Pale Ale without changing the beer. I can only see one way of truly differentiating IPA from Pale Ale: by reserving it for beers that were actually shipped to India.

Of course a beer for the domestic British market would be more lightly hopped. but not because it was too bitter for the British market. It didn't need as many hops because it was going to be drunk more quickly. It's a huge mistake to extrpolate modern practice backwards and assume hopping rates were all about flavour. They weren't. It was about beer preservation. Export versions were always more heavily hopped than domestic ones.

Domestic Pale Ales often had a higher OG than export IPA. Though the ABV was lower because they weren't as attenuated out as far for home use.

"From the early years of the 20th century , bitter began to overtake pale ale in popularity and as as result pale ale became maiinly a bottled product. A true pale ale should be different to a bitter, identical to an IPA in colour and brewed without the addition of coloured malts."

There's the only one person I know who thinks Bitter and Pale Ale are separate styles. They aren't, despite his best efforts. Bitter and Pale Ale were used interchangeably in the 19th century. I've come across dozens of articles and books where the two are used as synonyms.

I think he considers Bitter to be the running ale version of Pale Ale. The terms are really Stock Pale Ale and Running Pale Ale. But the difference in the 19th century between those two wasn't the use of coloured malts. You don't really see that in any sort of Pale Ale until after WW I and not commonly until after WW II. The real difference between Running and Stock Pale Ales was the method of conditioning.

Stock Pale Ales were put into casks and matured for months before sale. They often weren't fined but fell spontaneously bright during the long secondary conditioning. Running Pale Ales were primed and fined on racking to get them into condition and bright in just a couple of days. Running Pale Ales were generally lower gravity. They were more lightly hopped because they were going to be consumed more quickly.

Stock Pale Ales went out of fashion at the end of the 19th century and by the 1920's about the only examples remaining were a few Burton beers, like Bass Red Triangle and Worthington White Shield. Note that these were bottled beers. I'm not sure draught Stock Pale ale made it past WW I. I don't know of any true Stock Pale Ale that has been brewed in the last 40 years. To try to maintain that they live on in the form of "Pale Ale" is ludicrous.

There's a reason why the draught version tends to be called Bitter and the bottled one Pale Ale (thought this isn't always true. I've found plenty of labels that say "Bitter".) Punters in pubs used the simpler term Bitter, even though the official brewery name was Pale Ale. In the days before pump clips, there was nothing to prompt customers to use the term Pale Ale. With bottled beer, however, brewers got to pick the name they put on the label. Bitter is very rare as a brewhouse name before WW II. Pale Ale is common as muck, mostly used for beers that were marketed as Bitter.

This excerpt from a parliamentary report explains Running and Stock beers (for those who don't follow embedded links) better than I can.


Next time I'll be looking at the Bitter entry.

Oh dear

I've a really good collection of Good Beer Guides. Only a few from the 1970's are missing. It's a brilliant resource, providing a snapshot of British brewing in a given year.

It's because I appreciate the book so much, that I get so annoyed. About the rubbish in the chapter "Britain's Classic Beer Styles". This is what it says about Stout:

"During World War One, when the British government prevented brewers from using heavily-roasted malts in order to divert energy to the arms industry Guinness and other Irish brewers came to dominate the market."

Where to start with that steaming pile? Heavily-roasted  malt was so scarce in WW I that brewers started using brown malt in their Milds. I've looked through the food control orders, in particular the ones relating to malt and I've found no restrictions on roasting malt.

London brewers continued to brew Porter and Stout right through WW I and beyond. In considerable quantities. Here's an example: in 1943 Whitbread sold 24,703 barrels of Guinness and 156,813 barrels of their own Porter and Stout (document LMA/44503/C/08/063 held at the London Metropolitan Archives). Doesn't look to me as if Guinness was "dominating the market" in London. You can find more evidence to the contrary here.

"Barley wine dates from the 18th and 19th centuries when England was often at war with France and it was the duty of patriots, usually from the upper classes, to drink ale rather that (sic) French claret."

Nice story. But Barley Wine as a name is first recorded in the 1870's in reference to Bass No. 1 Ale*. A strong Burton Ale. And long after Britain's last war with France (that ended at Waterloo in 1815). The country gentry did make strong beer for their own consumption. But it had little to do with patriotism. More to do with practicality (most decent-sized country houses had a brew house), economy and showing off (boasting who had the strongest or oldest Ale). But there's no direct link between the gentry's October Beer and strong Burton Ale.

Talking of Burton Ale:

"In the 20th century Burton Ale was overtaken in popularity by pale ale and bitter but it was revived with great success in the late 1970's with the launch of Ind Coope Draught Burton Ale."

Wow. The skill to get so much bollocks into one sentence. Burton Ale was never that popular, certainly less popular than Pale Ale. "Pale ale and bitter"? They're the same effing thing. How could anyone mistake Ind Coope Burton Ale for a Burton. It's a Pale Ale. A Burton Pale Ale. For god's sake, it's a cask version of Double Diamond.

It pains me to say that I've not finished yet. Lots more bollocks to come.





* "A dictionary of chemistry and the allied branches of other sciences, Volume 6" by Henry Watts, 1872, page 256.

A milestone and a millstone

I've reached another milestone. After just two and a half years I've extracted all the data from volume one of the Whitbread Gravity Book. My ridiculously large spreadsheet of beer details* has grown even more ridiculously large. But I've noticed a slight problem.

The spreadsheet covers around 200 years: 1804 to 2005. The 19th century details come mostly from brewing records with a few from chemical magazines. I've the most information for the years 1920 to 1960, courtesy of the Whitbread and Truman Gravity Books. There are a few odd entries for the later 1960's and odd analyss from newspaper articles of the 1970's. After that, the Good Beer Guide is my main source.

And that's where the gaping hole emerges. Because the Good Beer Guide doesn't cover all beer. Just cask beer and the odd bottle-conditioned beer. There's a whole world of British beer that suddenly slips from view. I can tell you next to nothing about Brown Ale after 1965. I don't have any data.

While I know all about the cask beers from a mayfly micro of the mid 1980's, British bottled Stouts of the same period are a total blank. It's frustrating. The Good Beer Guide lets me track changes in strength of cask beers because it was published annually. Each edition is a little time capsule of the beers as they were in a specific year.

I'm working my way around to a request. An appeal. Does anyone know of another source of British beer gravities of the last 40 years? Especially of bottled and keg beers. Without them, I can only see half of the picture.

It's weird that the 1980's should be more problematic than the 1920's.



* It hits 20,000 entries later this week.

Filling gaps

I've finally finished harvesting gravities from the Barclay Perkins logs I have photographed. What next? Pretty obvious, really. Time to fill in some of the gaps.

"Which gaps might those be?" The two decades of the 20th century so far unrepresented in my Mega-Gravity Table. The 1980's and 1990's. I've started on with the oldest Good Beer Guide I own, 1983. My guess is that it only contains around 500 beers. With any luck that shouldn't take more than a week.

This seems a good point to renew my call for volunteers. "What do you want us to volunteer for?" Transcribing the gravities and ABV's from part of an old Good Beer Guide. I don't even expect you to do a whole one. Just a couple of letters. Every little helps. This is an example spreadsheet

I've just thought of something else for which I need help. Colours. I have beer colours in a few different formats. Many are in lovibond, but a 1 inch column rather than the 0.5 inch column used today. Anyone any idea how I can convert these figures to EBC? Whitbread uses another variation of 1 inch lovibond, with numbers for brown and red. Help converting these would be handy, too.