Whitbread Double Stout grists 1830 - 1880 - the stacked bar chart

A couple of readers suggested that I produce a stacked bar chart for Whitbread grists.

I'll be honest, I didn't know what they meant by a stacked bar chart. My initial reaction was: "Fuck them. Let them create their own fucking fancy charts." Then I realised that it was a way of spinning out another post from this rather threadbare carpet of data.

So I went into Excel and had a fiddle around. And this is what I came up with:

Is this what you meant? I hope it is. Because I've also done one for the Stout grists:

If you like these charts, I can produce more of them. It is, after all, a piece of piss with Excel.

 

Whitbread Double Stout 1830 - 1880

I'm having so much fun doing these tables and charts that I've done some more.

For a couple of reasons. Most important being that the last Stout data was for two different beers: Single Stout and Export Stout. Which made the bitterness chart look weird. Also because I want to check how closely the grists of the Double Stout and Stout resemble each other.

There's no amber malt, just the same as in Stout after 1816. Most of the big London brewers seem to have eschewed its use. Except for Barclay Perkins, who regularly employed it, especially in their more expensive Stouts.

Biggest difference with Stout is the much more stable brown malt content. Which also leads to the pale malt percentage showing less variation, too. At least until 1870, where some was swapped out for sugar. While the black quantity rose slowly and steadiyl.

First, the data in number form:

Whitbread Double Stout 1830 - 1880
year	OG	IBU	SRM	pale malt	brown malt	black malt	sugar
1830	1076.2	117	17	97.86%		2.14%
1835	1081.7	123	25	83.33%	14.81%	1.85%
1840	1083.4	69	26	84.91%	12.58%	2.52%
1846	1085	75	34	76.53%	20.41%	3.06%
1852	1084.8	90	31	80.27%	16.79%	2.94%
1855	1079.2	80	31	79.83%	16.81%	3.36%
1860	1077	104	31	79.83%	16.81%	3.36%
1865	1080.6	127	32	80.42%	15.38%	4.20%
1870	1080.9	106	30	75.76%	11.36%	3.79%	9.09%
1875	1076.5	123	32	61.55%	17.84%	4.28%	16.33%
1880	1080.3	103	35	67.19%	19.20%	3.84%	9.77%
Sources:
Whitbread brewing records held at the London Metropolitan Archives, document numbers LMA/4453/D/09/024, LMA/4453/D/09/029, LMA/4453/D/09/034, LMA/4453/D/09/040, LMA/4453/D/09/045, LMA/4453/D/09/049, LMA/4453/D/09/053, LMA/4453/D/09/059, LMA/4453/D/09/064, LMA/4453/D/09/070 and LMA/4453/D/09/075.

And now as a pretty chart:

Next I'll be doing a chart of bitterness and colour.

Let's Brew - 1881 Whitbread SS

What better way to kick off the new year than a strong Stout recipe? Yum.

Next branch up the Whitbread Stout tree is SS. What I suppose you would have been called Double Stout. And quite a hefty beer.

It wasn’t one of Whitbread’s most popular beers. Just 9,143 barrels were brewed in 1881, out of a total of 284,391 barrels.  Given its gravity and the extended ageing it received, it must have been an expensive beer.

As you’d expect, the grist is quite similar to XPS. As it is, with just a bit more brown malt and a little less pale. They certainly liked their brown malt in London, especially in stronger Stouts.  As in all Whitbread’s beers, the type of sugar is merely my guess.

I’ve also lowered the FG to reflect the secondary fermentation. About a year in vats with Brettanomyces would see to that. Probably more, really.

Quite a lot of different types of hops: English from 1880, 1881 and 1881; Bavarian from 1881 and something merely described as “samples”.

1881 Whitbread SS
pale malt	12.25 lb	68.06%
brown malt	3.25 lb	18.06%
black malt	0.75 lb	4.17%
No. 3 invert sugar	1.75 lb	9.72%
Goldings 90 mins	2.25 oz
Hallertau 90 mins	1.25 oz
Goldings 60 mins	3.50 oz
Goldings 30 mins	3.50 oz
Goldings dry hops	1.00 oz
OG	1081.5
FG	1020
ABV	8.14
Apparent attenuation	75.46%
IBU	98
SRM	37
Mash at	149º F
Sparge at	170º F
Boil time	90 minutes
pitching temp	57º F
Yeast	Wyeast 1099 Whitbread Ale

 

Let's Brew - 1957 Robert Younger SS

Post-WW II Scottish brewing can be pretty weird. Mostly the result of brewers just having one recipe.

SS is one of the oddest Stouts I’ve come across. Because it was parti-gyled with 60/- and Export, two Pale Ales. It’s identical to 60/-, save for what happened in the copper. It’s a sort of hybrid parti-gyle as one of the coppers has the wort intended for the Stout, while the other two coppers were blended the usual way to produce Export and 60/-.

The SS copper has a couple of extra ingredients: liquorice and black malt. And more “colour” which is presumably some sort of caramel. I’m not totally sure that the black malt went into the copper, but that’s definitely the suggestion, given the way the record is laid out. There were also far more hops than you would usually find in the third copper. A sure sign they were doing something different.

It’s not clear how the gyles were blended. The quantities fermented (278 barrels) add up to more than the volume out of the coppers (203 barrels). I assume water must have been added to make up the volumes.

It’s all very strange.

1957 Robert Younger SS
pale malt	5.00 lb	73.42%
black malt	0.50 lb	7.34%
flaked maize	1.00 lb	14.68%
No. 2 invert sugar	0.25 lb	3.67%
malt extract	0.06 lb	0.88%
caramel	enough to hit the colour
liquorice	0.50 oz
Fuggles 120 min	1.25 oz
Goldings 30 min	1.25 oz
OG	1030
FG	1007
ABV	3.04
Apparent attenuation	76.67%
IBU	21
SRM	40
Mash at	151º F
Sparge at	170º F
Boil time	120 minutes
pitching temp	60º F
Yeast	WLP028 Edinburgh Ale

 This recipe is from my wonderful book on Scottish brewing:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/ronald-pattinson/scotland-vol-2/paperback/product-23090497.html 

Let's Brew Wednesday - 1877 Reid SS

All the London Porter brewers made several Stouts. One of the conventions for naming them went like this: Single Stout, Double Stout, Triple Stout and Imperial Stout.

Not every brewery produced the last of those. Though, unlike in the later 20th century, Imperial Stout wasn’t equated with a specific beer from just one brewery.

You would expect the weakest Stout to be the best seller, but that wasn’t necessarily true. In 1887, Whitbread brewed 854 barrels of S, 10,845 of SS and 15,283 of SSS.  Sadly, I don’t have the same sort of production figures for Reid.

We’re back to a three-mash, no sparge scheme:

action	water (barrels)	water temp.	tap temp.
mash	284	164º F	144º F
mash	126	176º F	154º F
mash	94	164º F	150º F

As usual, the hottest mash is the middle one.

The grist is the same as always, with just slightly different proportions of the three malts.

I assume this would have been vatted for at least a few months.

1877 Reid SS
pale malt	17.25 lb	85.19%
brown malt	2.25 lb	11.11%
black malt	0.75 lb	3.70%
Goldings 165 mins	1.75 oz
Goldings 60 mins	1.75 oz
Goldings 30 mins	1.75 oz
Goldings dry hops	1.00 oz
OG	1085
FG	1028
ABV	7.54
Apparent attenuation	67.06%
IBU	57
SRM	23
Mash at	148º F
Sparge at	170º F
Boil time	165 minutes
pitching temp	57º F
Yeast	Wyeast 1099 Whitbread Ale

This is one of the hundreds of recipes in my book Let's Brew!: