8,000 entries in sight

I've been at work on my Gravity Table again. I try to keep up with transcribing details from the Whitbread Gravity Book. The current count of entries is 7474. Most are for British beers. 6877, to be exact.

This is how they break down by style:

321 Brown Ale
175 IPA
1392 Mild
2376 Pale Ale
347 Porter
1150 Stout
859 Stout

As for breweries, you'll never guess which one I have the most entries for:

597 Barclay Perkins
378 Truman
356 Whitbread

Maybe I'll get around to properly analysing them one day.

19th century Belgian beers

I don't currently have details of many old Belgian beers. A few lagers from the 1950's. Nothing that interesting there. And a handful from the 19th century, mostly lambics. That's more intriguing.

Let's take a look at them.


Someone asked the other day how the acidity was measured in one of my tables. In this case, it's lactic acid percentage by weight. If you compare these lambics with the German top-fermenting beers I wrote about a couple of days ago, you'll see that the lactic acid content of some of the German beers is even higher. Mouth-puckeringly sour, I would say.

The attenuation of the lambics is, as you would expect, pretty high. What surprised me was the alcohol content. Much higher than modern versions. Now can anyone explain that? The Petermann is also unexpectedly strong. I would have guessed 5% ABV max. Just goes to show how accurate guesswork is.

Bottled Stout 1959

Another very specific post today. I just hit a rich seam in the Whitbread Gravity Book. Loads of Stouts, all analysed on September 3rd 1959. The beers came from an array of regional breweries across the Midlands, North and Scotland. A couple are even still around.



The Stouts have broadly similar OG's - between 1039 and 1049 - yet are remarkably diverse in ABV and apparent attenuation. They range from Holt's Brown Stout at 4.7% ABV and 83% attenuation to Younger's Capital Stout at 2.8% ABV and 51% attenuation. The other beers are spread pretty evenly between these maximum and minimum figures.

What does that tell us? That British Stouts were very diverse. The ones at the bottom end of the attenuation scale must have been pretty sweet. The word "Sweet" in the names of many of these beers is a bit of a giveaway on that count. On the other hand, anything with over 80% attenuation must have been dry. These are how they break down:

>80% attenuation 3
70-80% attenuation 4
60-70% attenuation 16
<60% attenuation 15

From which I deduce that a majority of these Stouts were quite sweet. A significant minority - 18% - were dry.

What's the purpose of this? Just me hammering away at the point "Not all British Stout was sweet".

Fuller, Smith & Turner

One of the thrills of the Whitbread and Truman gravity books is finding the beers of long-vanished breweries with exotic names. Beer & Rigden; Buddon Bigg; Catterick & Swarbrick; Cox & Holbrook; Gordon & Blair; Groves & Whitnall; Norman & Pring; Red Tower Lager Brewery; Russell & Wrangham; Starkey, Knight & Ford; Steel & Coulson; Warwick & Richardson; Wells & Winch; Wenlock; Whitworth Son & Nephew; Young, Crawshay & Young.

Then there's the occasional one that's still around. Like Fuller, Smith & Turner.

Let's take a look at their beers, shall we?


London Pride has been around in its current form the longest. I'm not sure when it was given that name, but I'm pretty sure the 1951 Best Bitter is the same beer. You can see how their Pale Ale (or Bitter) was emasculated during WW II, dropping from 1050 to a puny 1032. In 1959 it managed to have an even lower OG than their Mild. I assume that London Pride was introduced around 1951 when government controls on beer gravity were loosened. Many breweries took the opportunity to re-introduce a stronger Bitter, though not at pre-war strength.

Why doesn't ESB appear until so late? Because it wasn't introduced until 1971, when it replaced their Burton (Strong Ale in the table). Fuller's Mild, by then called Hock, was discontuinued as a regular beer in the early 1980's. A shame, as it was rather nice, when you could find it. Mild had already pretty much disappeared as a mainstream beer in London by the late 1970's.


Groves & Whitnall
Regent Road,
Salford,

Red Rose Stout, September 3rd 1959:

Price	size	package	FG	OG	Colour	ABV	attenuation
12.5d	halfpint	bottled	1018.7	1047.5	250	3.7%	60.63%

Bought by Greenall Whitley (spit) 1961 and closed 1972.

There's also a Groves & Whitnall forum. The mere knowledge of its existence brings a smile to my face.

Inspiration and synergy

There were many reasons for me starting this blog. Finding an audience for Barclay Perkins monologues. Keeping track of my research. Showing off. Hoping to inspire others.

What had struck me about beer writing was the minute amount of original research being done compared to the volume of words generated. Not good. My own little forays into the archives had revealed how much primary source information was lying there unused. Guesswork, assumptions and fairy tales were being used instead of cold, hard facts.

I tried to collect details of 19th and early 20th century beers from published sources for five years or more. You should see the pathetic little list I assembled. Fewer than 100 entries. Half a dozen archive visits has increased that by four thousand. That's what I call progress. But it begs the question: with so little material available, what the hell were writers using as sources for their books on beer styles?

I was delighted when Beer Nut told me of a project to document Ireland's vanished breweries. It's a much neglected topic. Unless there's a whole load I've missed. He asked if I could suggest any sources. I can't claim to have been the inspiration, but I'm happy to share my research experience.

To that end, I did a quick web search for Irish trade directories. A great source of brewery names and addresses. Some are available on CD from a web shop at fairly reasonable prices. The same site also offers something that set my heart racing: Barnard's "Noted Breweries of Britain and Ireland". I've wanted to get my hands on a copy for ages. Unfortunately, it's rare and expensive. Twenty-odd euros for a CD version is a bargain. I've already put in my order.

Inspiration is a two-way street. Synergy. Without Beer Nut, I may not have found the Barnard. A book with which I'm sure I'll be boring you for months to come. Another triumph for blogging. Thanks Beer Nut.

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.

My Weekend

What did you do over the weekend? Nice of you to ask. Loads of things. Went into town with Lexie to buy an X-wing Fighter. Read some Barclay Perkins logs. Barbecued in the rain. Made Star Wars 14 film with Lucas and the kids. Bribed Lexie to start cataloguing my books. Drank some St. Bernardus Abt out of a Chimay glass. Fell asleep in front of Tatort. Normal stuff.

At the end of one archive session I photographed a whole load of Barclay Perkins logs from WW II. I didn't look at them properly at the time. That was about a year ago. I finally got around to them this weekend.

The book that covers 1939 and 1940 has some wonderfully matter-of-fact entries relating to the war. "September 28th 1939. 1st war budget. Increase of 1d per pint on beer and increased tax on sugar." "September 16th 1940. Bomb through porter side." "September 29th 1940. Bomb through ale side."

When war broke out, Barclay Perkins were brewing three Milds:

A 1030.84
X 1034.77
XX 1042.7

By 1942, gravity cuts had squeezed them together:

A 1027.3
X 1028.7
XX 1031.4

You wonder why they bothered brewing three beers with only a couple of gravity points between them.

I'll tell you something strange. I can't find any entries in the Whitbread or Truman Gravity Books that match these gravities. Even though I have ones for the same period as the log entries.
Here's an example. I have log entries for A, X and XX from January and September 1939. They're both the same as the first set of gravities above. Yet the Gravity Book entries for January, February, March and May are all 1038. That's way off the gravities of any of the Milds, as brewed. About exactly half way between X and XX.

Any suggestions for an explanation?

Porter and Stout gravities 1805-2005

Sounds impressive, doesn't it, 200 years of data? I have a greater spread of years for Stout than for any other sort of beer.

These are the average gravities, based on the entries in my mega-gravity table.

First Porter:

1805-1899 1057.5 (29 samples)
1901-1917 1053.8 (6 samples)
1919-1929 1037.8 (38 samples)
1930-1939 1035.8 (8 samples)
2002-2005 1046.7 (22 samples)


Now Stout:

1805-1899 1077.8 (39 samples)
1901-1917 1074.5 (14 samples)
1919-1929 1055.5 (144 samples)
1930-1939 1046.9 (321 samples)
1940-1949 1042 (63 samples)
1950-1959 1043.3 (248 samples)
1960-1968 1046.8 (23 samples)
2002-2005 1047.8 (40 samples)

There's a simple explanation for the hole in the Porter figues. No Porter was brewed in Britain for several decades.

It's bizarre that there is currently almost no difference in the gravity of Porter and Stoyut. This could possibly be caused by a blurring of the distinction between the two types.

If your mind works better with pictures than numbers, here's the same information (plus Pale Ale and Mild) in a nice visual format.


May I point out the changing relative strengths over time? The only constant, is that Stout has always been the strongest. Mild, Bitter and Porter have swapped around the other positions. Few today would realise that Mild was once stronger than Bitter.

See. I am using this information it's taken so much effort to assemble.

Plato proud

I'm so proud. After only two hours of frantic scribbling, I've managed to change my OG to Plato conversion into Plato to OG. You wouldn't believe that I had an A-level in maths, the trouble it took me.

This is the OG to Plato formula I started with:

=(-0,003829+WORTEL((0,003829*0,003829)-4*0,00001572*(1-(L205/1000))))/(2*0,00001572)

Eventually I managed to derive this Plato to OG formula from it.

=2000-(((0,003829*0,003829)-(((2*P205*0,00001572)+0,003829)*((2*P205*0,00001572)+0,003829)))/(4*0,00001572))+1)

Don't ask me why the 2000- is at the start of it. I added that so that the right number came out at the end. If you're wondering what the L205 and P205 are, they are the cell numbers of respectively the OG in specific gravity and Plato. I'm using the formula in a spreadsheet, you see.

Rather naively, after leaving school I never expected to have to manipulate complex arithmetic formulae again. Then along came brewing. Converting between Plato and OG and vice versa is a pain. As is calculating alcohol content from OG and FG. At least I only have to do this once. Embedded in the spreadsheet, the calculation occurs automatically. I pity any poor bastard who has to do this by hand.

Why was I doing this? For my mega-gravity table. I've just been incorporating some analyses (is this the correct plural form of analysis? I keep using it) from German sources, where all the gravities are in Plato. Well, Balling, really. I'm aware that it isn't a 100% identical to Plato, but I've already spent several hours playing around with Plato conversions. It'll have to do.

5,360. There's another number for you. How many entries I now have in my mega-gravity table. Now I've added the continental ones.

Pale Ale gravities 1839 - 2005

It's great fun playing with my mega-gravity table, now that I have some modern stuff in there. I've been looking at Pale Ale this time.

I've averaged the gravity of several hundred samples of Pale Ale. I realise that this doesn't give a true average gravity, but it does give an indication of general trends. I suppose I should also define what I mean by Pale Ale. All types of Bitter and Pale Ale. Splitting apart Bitter and Best Bitter just isn't feasible.

Anyway, here are the figures:

1839-1899 1058.55 (4 samples)
1901-1917 1058.9 (12 samples)
1926-1930 1046.7 (83 samples)
1930-1939 1046.7 (235 samples)
1940-1949 1037 (292 samples)
1950-1959 1038.8 (290 samples)
1960-1968 1040.7 (86 samples)
2002-2005 1041.7 (557 samples)

It's quite scary how the 1926-1930 and 1930-1939 came out exactly the same. It looks a reasonable enough average to me for the period. The figure of 1037 is significant, too. For many years during the 1940's that was the average gravity for all beer brewed demanded by the government.

If you compare the same Mild over the same period, you'll notice that its gravity fell significantly in the 1930's:

1839-1899 1068.6 (12 samples)
1901-1917 1050.3 (13 samples)
1920-1926 1041.9 (50 samples)
1933-1939 1036.2 (224 samples)
1940-1949 1030.2 (291 samples)
1950-1959 1032.4 (220 samples)
1960-1968 1032.5 (12 samples)
2002/2005 1037.8 (71 samples)

The difference between Bitter and Mild is now at its smallest since the 1920's.

As I said before, these aren't precise scientific figures. But they do still tell us something. I just have to work out exactly what that is.

What is highlighted, is my lack of data for 1970-2000. Ironic, as this it was in the 1970's that beer gravities first became generally available. Once I get some of those into my table, I should have a pretty good idea of the trends in beer gravities from 1920 until the present. Won't that be groovy?

Mild 1920 - 2005

Now I've got some modern beer details (thanks Ted and Mark) I can start comparing modern beers with those of 50 years ago. I've begun with Mild.

I've calculated the average OG of Milds from various periods:

1920-1926 1041.9
1933-1939 1036.2
1940-1951 1031.3
1952-1969 1032.5
2002/2005 1037.8

I was genuinely shocked to see that the average OG of Mild has increased significantly, a full 5 points, since 1969. I had expected it to have remained much the same.

Of course, this is an average of the OG's of different beers, not an average OG for all Mild sold. That would most likely be significantly lower for 2002/2005, as some of the biggest sellers - Tetley's, for example - have OG's in the low 1030's. It's clear that micros, in general, brew stronger Milds than the ones I drank in the 1970's and 1980's.

Do you think Mild will make it back to the heady 1040+ average of the 1920's? Or will it die out first?

Three hundred and twenty-six

How many different breweries are represented in my Mega Gravity Table? Three hundred and twenty-six. Just Thought I'd let you know. I was going to post the complete list but, covering many pages, it isn't practical. Here are those breweries beginning with the letter 'F':

Feigenspan (Newark, NJ)
Felinfoel Brewery, Llanelly
Flower & Sons
Forest Hill Brewery
Fowler
Frederick Smith, Aston
Fremlin
Friary Holroyd
Frydenlunds Brewery, Oslo
Fuller, Smith & Turner

I may finally publish the Mega Gravity Table soon. It now contains more than 4,000 entries. But I want to finish off the Truman Gravity Book first. And the Whitbread one, too, possibly.

Three hundred and twenty-six. The number of entries for Barclay Perkins. For Charrington, it's 277. Courage 190, Mann 268, Meux 141, Taylor Walker 145, Truman 271, Watney 257. But there are the most for Whitbread - 423.

Just what you wanted. More numbers. Seven, forty-nine, nintey-two. There's a couple more. I promised you numbers when I started this blog. I don't want to be accused of deception.

What did you do this weekend, dad?

"What did you do this weekend, dad? "

"I copied stuff from an old book."

"I love you, dad."

"Andrew. Do you want to to join in the stuff-copying fun?"

"No, dad. I don't love you that much."

Aren't children great?

Barclay Perkins draught beers 1939-1957 I did today. You can see one of the pages to the right.

I spent my Saturday morning doing this. Am I strange?

Truman's draught beers 1926 - 1956

Many pubs in London still carry Truman's livery. Truman's London Stout is still advertiserd on many, though it hasn't been brewed for decades. Ever wondered what Truman's beers were like? Now's your chance to find out.

I was shocked (in a pleasant way) to discover that some of you actually quite like this sort of stuff. Here are Truman's draught beers plus bottled Stout:


Here's an explanation of what some of the beers are:

• X is the standard Mild
• Ale is a cheap, low-gravity Mild that had its origins in the $d Government Ale of WW I
• PA is the standard Bitter
• Strong Ale is Burton, a dark beer

The others are, I think, self-explanatory. Notice that Truman were still brewing two draught Stouts in the late 1930's.

The prices are per pint in the public bar. There's a very logical and structured pricing system that you see repeated across the London brewers. Cheap ale at 4d, Porter at 5d, standard Mild at 6d, Bitter at 7d, Burton and Stout at 8d. It's a much more varied range of draught beers, in terms of both style and strength, than British brewers manage today.

The tax increase of April 1931 and its reversion in April 1933 had an uneven effect. The Mild gravity was dropped to leave the retail price unchanged at 6d a pint. Bitter and Burton remained the same strength, but increased by 1d a pint. Draught Stout increased in price, but bottled Stout dropped in strength. As a result, the difference in strength between Mild and Bitter became larger than ever before. When the tax was dropped back to its old rate, rather than go back to the old strength, Mild was reduced to 5d a pint.

Whitbread Porter and Stout 1805 - 1937

As promised, far more details than you could possibly want, courtesy of the Whitbread and Truman Gravity Books and the Whitbread brewing logs. I'm sure you wanted to know how strong SS was in 1844.

Below are the gravities of the Whitbread Porter and the main Whitbread Stouts. Like all the big London Porter breweries, they produced several Stouts. Pre-WW I, it was fairly simple - S (Single Stout), SS (Double Stout) and SSS (Triple Stout). During the war, only Porter and a new strong Stout, Imp (Imperial, I guess) were brewed. Postwar, there were Porter, draught LS (London Stout), bottled LS and bottled ES (Extra Stout).


In case you're wondering, none of these were Sweet Stouts. All had 65-70% apparent attenuation. Not as attenuated as Guinness (that was 70-75% at this time), but by no means sickly sweet. No Sweet Stout was produced at Whitbread's Chiswell Street brewery in London until after Mackeson was taken over. Mackeson Milk Stout seems to have been brewed at most Whitbread breweries during the 1950's.

See how handy my Mega-Gravity Book is? How much more useful it would be with a few more recent decades included.

I keep including vaguely-hidden plugs for my two beers, SSS and Porter. Here's another. (I'm not quite sure why I bother, given the tiny amounts of each. I could drink the lot, if need be. That would be pretty cool, drinking most of it myself. Mmmm. 100 more boxes of SSS. Nearly 6 months supply.) You can see them in the table. Now you can see how they fit into Whitbread's range in terms of strength and time. It was the end of the road for SSS after nearly 100 years.

British beer has been particularly affected by history. The Napoleonic Wars spurred technoligical advances. The two World Wars decimated gravities. Little proper beer was brewed in Germany in the 1940's. But in the 1950's, as soon as they were able, they went back to pretty much the pre-war gravities. Why is that?

Gravity Project

Wondering why I haven't been my usual prolific self the last few days? I've been too busy with my Gravity Project. No, it's got nothing to do with the force that stops us floating off into space. It's my push to merge all the beer gravities I have into a single spreadsheet.

It's progressing nicely. There are already more than 3,000 rows in the table. Another couple of days and I should be able to start playing with it. My first job is to produce a graph demonstrating the slow but inexorable decline in Mild gravities over the period 1850 - 1950. It should prove fascinating for me and the other three people interested in this sort of stuff.

Not just British beers, but ones from all over thje world will be included. Though obviously I have the greatest quantity of data on Britain. I've already assembled all my information on lagers into one table. And much more will follow. As and when I find it.

Now here's where you come in. I'm making the spreadsheet publicly available. It took several weeks of work to put together. I'm a bit of a nutter when it comes to collecting information but there are limits to what even I can do. As it is now, with about 3,500 entries, it's pretty useful. With your cooperation it could become an essential reference. If a couple of dozen of you chipped in and contributed, say, 100 entries each, it would be a great help.

I suggested transcribing complete editions of the Good Beer Guide. That could be quite a lot of work, so how about just doing breweries starting with the letters C, D and E? If we start at the 2007 Good Beer Guide and work backwards, it should be easy enough for me to coordinate. Go on, pick a couple of letters. If everyone posts their choice as a comment here, it will be easy simple to see which are still free.

Here's an example of both my table and what you could fill in from the Good Beer Guide.

Here's an example of what you can discover. I've put together a table showing the change in Barclay Perkins X Mild over the course of almost a century.

(Note: the OG's for 04/1918 and 04/191g are for 4d Ale. In this period no X Ale was brewed. Up until it was discontinued, it had been their biggest seller. It was replaced by 4d Ale, so-called Government Ale, a price-controlled product.)

Fascinating stuff, I think you'll agree. The impact of the two world wars on Mild gravity is clear. You'll note how gravities fell sharply during both and then recovered after the war ended, but not quite back to the pre-war level. There was a similar dramatic fall in 1931, when there was a substantial increase in the tax on beer and brewers cut gravities to leave the retail price unchanged.

I haven't forgotten about lager. Summer's only just begun. I just can't be arsed to do any translations at the moment.