Truman's Ales (part 3): 1860 - 1861

This is fun, isn't it? Going through Truman's Ales decade by decade. Who needs TV, when you've got entertainment like this?


What's fun about these numbers? Well,you can see that the gravities have dropped. X Ale was 1078 in 1850, but just 1067 in 1860. 40/- Ale fell from 1084 to 1077, XXX from 1106 to 1087. That's quite a sharp decrease. Exactly why and when, I don't know.

What are the usual culprits for gravity drops? War and taxation. Or rising costs.

For once, tax seems to have played no part. The malt tax (there was no tax on beer per se between 1830 and 1880) was steady at 2s 7d a bushel. To give you some idea what that meant, brewing a 36 gallon barrel of Porter of 1056º required two bushels of malt. So about five bob tax per barrel. Whereas before 1830 the excise duty on a barrel of Porter was ten shillings.

The price of malt could be the key. You know me. I have numbers coming out of my ears. Not for the price of bloody malt, though. I need to get myself an older Brewers' Almanack. I only have these figures:

1820 58s per quarter (approx. 336 pounds)
1857 42s
1860 36s

Doesn't look like malt was getting more expensive.

War? There was the Crimean in the 1850's. But no tax increase.

I'm a bit stumped. There's only one last thing I can think of. That the price breweries charged for a barrel of beer fell. Haven't got time to check up on that now. I've already missed my tea and the Simpson's has just started.

Truman's Ales 1850-1851

A promised, more crazily-strong Truman Ales from the 19th century.

Beers made stronger for Export? Take a look below. The second-weakest beer is Export Ale. I have a suspicion where the idea that export beers were stronger came from. After WW I. I've found plenty of export beers in the logs in the 1920's and 1930's. They have the gravities of pre-1914 beers. Brewers continued to make the old-style beers for foreign markets as they weren't liable for UK tax.

Guinness, that's a good example. Until 1916 Extra Stout and Foreign Extra Stout had the same OG: 1074. FES is still about the same, while Extra Stout is a puny 1042 or so. (How can you have a Stout with a gravity below 1055? Guinness Extra Stout is a travesty and doesn't deserve to be called Stout.)


Oh yes, note that the Pale Ale was the weakest beer at 1067. Not very popular, either. There were only a couple of brews a year. X Ale, the ordinary Mild of the day, was an impressive 1078. As the 19th century progressed, the gravity of X Ale dropped to 1055, but Pale Ale stayed much the same, at about 1065.

Truman Ales part one: 1831 - 1841

I told you this week was Truman week. It's exciting, isn't it? I'm going to kick off with an overview of Truman's Ales in the middle of the 19th century.

It's funny how beer styles develop over time. Go back 150 years and the relationships between the styles is often quite different. Especially when you look at Mild (a beer where "Alcohol content is traditionally very low"). Odd word, "traditional". Very vague, don't you think? It refers to a practice that was common at some unspecified period in the past.

If "traditional" covers the years 1940 to 1980, then the assessment of Mild being very low in alcohol isn't far from the mark. Go back any further than 1914 and it's utter and complete bollocks. As you'll see from the tables below. The weakest Mild brewed by Truman in the period I cover had a gravity of 1066. I don't think that counts as exceptionally weak in anyone's books. Certainly not mine.


In the 1830's, Truman brewed a wide range of K and X Ales, which varied in strength from strong to bloody strong. The equivalent K and X Ales, for example XX and XXK had similar gravities (though the K version's was usually a touch higher). Their main difference was the hopping rate, which was 50-100% greater in the K Ale.

One other point of interest. Take a look at when the K Ales were brewed. In the table above they were all brewed in March. One of the traditional times for the brewing of Strong Ales.


By 1840, little had changed, except that a new beer had been introduced , 40/- Ale. Now you shouldn't start getting confused by thinking of Scotland. Prior go adopting the use of the X and K system, English breweries had also used the retail price per hogshead as a way of indicating the relative strengths of their different beers.

Table Beer is intriguing, too. Did they really give it to kids? With gravities of 1049 and 1058 neither was exactly watery. They weren't brewing a great deal of Table Beer, squeezing some out of the later runnings of stronger beers every now and again.

You'll note again that all the K Ales but one were brewed in February, March or April. Very traditional.

Don't worry. I've not finished yet. Still more lovely OG charts to come.

Truman's Ales 1831-1832

This week I finally ordered into directories the remaining photos from my last archive visit. A load of Truman's Ale logs from the 19th century. I thought I may as well take a look at them while I was fiddling around.

I've not spent much time on Truman's logs. Especially the Ale ones. There are a couple of reasons why. Most obvious is that I hadn't photographed many until recently. And their 20th century logs are a nightmare to understand. I can't even work out what type of beer most of them are for. The handwriting is often a problem, too. They only seem to have employed brewers with scruffy handwriting. Some entries are little more than squiggles.

Rather than attempt extracting everything from the logs, I've just gone for OG and hopping rate. For a couple of reasons. Most important of which is that I don't properly understand the mashing details. Boiling is easy. The logs don't give any details at all. Ingredients? Pale malt and hops. Not much to say about those. Occasionally there's a bit more, like EK or white malt. But not often.

In this period, Truman's naming convention was simplicity itself. A number of X's with sometimes a K stuck on the end. Except for Table Beer.


As you can see, they weren't brewing a great deal of session beer. Even the Table Beer had a gravity of about 1040. Take a good look at those OG's. Now think about IPA. Remember that old wives tale about IPA being a strong beer? Take a look at the table below. To be extra fair, I've only included IPA's that were exported to India.


The strongest IPA had a gravity of just 1070. That's weaker than every single Truman Ale, with the exception of the Table Beer. Which was the stuff they let their toddlers drink. Anyone out there still think IPA was a strong Beer? I bet there are. No amount of facts will persuade some geeks that what they believe is fantasy.

Getting back to the real topic of this post, what does the first table tell us? Firstly, that Truman had two parallel ranges of Ales. Those with a "K" suffix and those without. I don't think that I'm going out on a limb when I say it stands for "Keeping". The difference between the K Ales and the straight X equivalent is mostly the hopping. The grists, basically just pale malt, are the same for all the Ales.

X, with 4.5 lbs to 7 lbs of hops per quarter of malt, was the least heavily hopped. No surprise there. (The one with 14 lbs per quarter was party-gyled with XXXX, before you ask.) XX and XXX were both hopped at between 6 and 8 lbs per quarter, a pretty typical figure for the period. XXK had 10 lbs of hops per quarter and XXXK 14 lbs. XXXX was hopped at 10 lbs per quarter, XXXXK 14 lbs per quarter.

Gravities start in the low 1070's for X and go over 1100 for the strongest. It's pretty hard to equate such powerful beers with modern Mild.

If you're lucky, there will be more Truman archive Ale fun tomorrow. That's if I don't overindulge in cask Fuller's ESB tonight.