Bum, bum, bum

bum, tee, bum ,bum,

Bit of a bum up. Forgot to put the right date on tomorrow's - well, today's - post. Published a day too early.

I haven't time to waste on a proper post, with all that information and fact crap. You'll have to make do with a bollocks post. Albeit one I'd already planned. As it's almost that time of year again. When the string comes out. Yes, it's time to get ready for

Drinkalongathon 2016!

You know the score. I'll give you the full list later, but this is the bare minimum (the changes from last year are in bold):

1 bottle Lagavullin
12 bottles St. Bernardus Abt
2 pieces of string
1 hard-boiled egg
1 soft-boiled egg
Another bottle of Lagavullin (2016 has been that shit)
1 bottle of Laphroaig (2016 really has been that shit)
1 bottle of Filliers 8 (in preparation for the Brexit whisky famine)
3 bottles of Absinthe
4 bottles of overproof rum (2016 really has been totally, totally shit)
12 330ml cans of Heineken (for the kiddies)
12 tablets of valium (see above on 2016)
1 large cabbage
12 more tablets of valium
2 small parsnips
12 more tablets of valium
1 bottle of dry sherry
1 bottle of wet sherry
1 firkin Harvey's Old Ale
1 bottle Meat Stout

See you on Sunday. And don't forget the string!

Let's Brew Wednesday - 1968 Whitbread Forest Brown

This is an unusual one. Two recipes for the same beer from the same year. Just brewed at different breweries.

I’ll explain how this came about. I was visiting the Wimbledon Brewery on Saturday to chat with my old mate Derek Prentice. I was especially interested in the two Truman’s brewing books he keeps in his office. One covers most of WW I and it was fun pointing out what GA meant (Government Ale) and why it appeared at a specific time in 1917. The other is from 1969 and that contained the biggest shock: a beer called FB.

“That’s Forest Brown,” Derek said, ”we used to brew it for Whitbread.”

That was news to me. And quite a surprise as Whitbread owned more than a dozen breweries at the time. It seems odd that they’d get a London rival to brew one of their core products for them. Were they that short of capacity? Anyway, the beer was fermented at Truman then picked up by a Whitbread tanker and taken off for bottling. They were brewing a fair amount of it a Truman, going by the number of entries in the brewing book. And 500 barrels at a time.

I immediately realised this was a great opportunity. A chance to compare the beer brewed in two different places.

My first guess, having looked at the Truman version, was that it was pretty close to the original. For a start, unlike the other Truman beers it contained no adjuncts, just malt and sugar. And it was fermented with the Whitbread yeast. How wrong I was.

I’d forgotten that Whitbread started using adjuncts in 1963. At first just in their Pale Ales, but later in just about everything. Including Forest Brown. Which got me wondering about when exactly Truman started brewing Forest Brown. Because looking back through the Whitbread brewing books, their recipe appears remarkably similar to the Whitbread one from early 1964. Looks to me like Whitbread changed the recipe, but never told Truman.

See for yourself:

	1964 Whitbread FB	1968 Truman FB	1968 Whitbread FB
pale malt		79.48%	68.46%
flaked barley			13.69%
mild malt	78.97%
crystal malt	7.70%	8.57%	7.82%
no. 3 invert sugar	10.91%	9.87%
no. 1 invert sugar			7.17%
Hays M	2.41%
Duttson CDM		2.08%	2.85%

That got me thinking: how unusual is that? If Brewery A gets Brewery B to make some if its beer, will it pass on every recipe change? In the case of Forest Brown, Whitbread cheapened the recipe by substituting flaked barley for some of the base malt. But let Truman continue to brew it more expensively. And didn’t tell them when they cut the OG of their own version from 1032.9 to 1032.1. That can’t have been an accident.

That Truman were using an old recipe might also explain the colour difference, as Whitbread also darkened the colour in 1965.

Talking of colour, Duttson CDM must be pretty dark. Because when spun through BeerSmith using No. 3 for all the sugar, both the Truman and Whitbread versions come out way too pale. Which is why I’ve substituted No. 4 invert for CDM. I suspect the letters stand for something like “Caramel Dark Mix”

As usual, the hop varieties are a bit of a guess. The 1968 Whitbread version has WGV and some that are just listed as MK. The Truman version only list the grower, though one is Whitbread so I guess it’s probably WGV. Even though the hopping and boil times differ, BeerSmith calculates both to be 19 IBUs.

Believe it or not, this is actually on the strong side for a 1960’s Brown Ale. 1027º – 1030º is a more typical gravity range. Interestingly, Truman always achieved better attenuation than Whitbread. The lowest OG for Whitbread’s version in the 1960’s (in the photos I have) is 1008.3º. The highest Truman’s is 1007.3º. Not sure what that tells us.

Bet you’re just gasping for the recipes. Or maybe not. Geek beers they certainly aren’t. Just easy drinkers.

1968 Whitbread Forest Brown
pale malt	5.00 lb	68.97%
crystal malt 80 L	0.50 lb	6.90%
flaked barley	1.00 lb	13.79%
no. 1 sugar	0.50 lb	6.90%
no. 4 sugar	0.25 lb	3.45%
Fuggles 60 mins	0.25 oz
Goldings 60 mins	0.25 oz
Goldings 40 mins	0.50 oz
Goldings 20 mins	0.50 oz
OG	1032.1
FG	1008.3
ABV	3.15
Apparent attenuation	74.14%
IBU	19
SRM	25
Mash at	150º F
Sparge at	170º F
Boil time	60 minutes
pitching temp	64º F
Yeast	Wyeast 1099 Whitbread ale

1968 Truman Whitbread Forest Brown
pale malt	5.75 lb	80.42%
crystal malt 80 L	0.50 lb	6.99%
no. 3 invert sugar	0.75 lb	10.49%
no. 4 invert sugar	0.15 lb	2.10%
Fuggles 75 mins	0.50 oz
Fuggles 60 mins	0.50 oz
Goldings 30 mins	0.50 oz
OG	1033
FG	1005.5
ABV	3.64
Apparent attenuation	83.33%
IBU	19
SRM	17
Mash at	144º F
Sparge at	180º F
Boil time	75 minutes
pitching temp	62º F
Yeast	Wyeast 1099 Whitbread ale

Reid beers 1837 - 1839

Now I've mentioned Reid's beers we may as well have a look at some of them.

In the late 1830's Reid brewed a wide range of both Porter and Ale. Nothing really odd about that. Three other big Porter brewers: Whitbread, Truman and Barclay Perkins all started brewing Ale in the 1830's having previously been exclusively beer brewers. It was all to do with the 1830 Beer Act.

In the new Beer Houses Ale was very popular and the Porter brewers wanted to get their share of this new market. But where Reid differed from the other three brewers was that later in the 19th century they went back to being exclusively a Porter brewery. No idea why.

What's dead handy is that not only did they brew Mild and Stock Ales, but also Pale Ales. In particular, IPA. The other London brewers I've records from didn't introduce Pale Ales until the 1860's.

Talking of the IPA, it's insanely heavily hopped for what is a beer of quite modest gravity. Which gives me a great chance to bang on about how IPA wasn't a strong beer. Note that its gravity is considerably lower than X Ale, the weakest Mild Ale. And even has a lower gravity than standard Porter, the everyman drink of the day.

Note that the corresponding X and K Ales have identical gravities. And also that, if you look at the hopping rate per quarter, there's a clear difference between the Ales and Beers (Porter and Stout). The Ales are hopped at 7-11 lbs per barrel, the Beers 10-17 lbs. The simple Running Porter was hopped at the same rate as the strongest Stock Ale.

Obviously I'm not including the Pale Aless in this comparison, because that's a totally different class of beer.

Reid beers 1837 - 1839
Date	Year	Beer	Style	OG	FG	ABV	App. Attenuation	lbs hops/ qtr	hops lb/brl
4th Feb	1839	IPA	IPA	1056.8	1007.0	6.59	87.67%	26.6	5.88
16th Feb	1839	BPA	Pale Ale	1056.0	1007.0	6.48	87.49%	22.7	5.61
30th May	1839	IPA	IPA	1056.2	1007.0	6.51	87.55%	28.6	6.53
22nd Dec	1837	P	Porter	1061.2	1018	5.72	70.60%	10.2	2.09
23rd Dec	1837	BS	Stout	1074.0	1023	6.74	68.90%	14.0	4.61
15th Dec	1838	EBSt	Stout	1071.2	1020.0	6.77	71.91%	17.2	5.32
20th Mar	1838	KBSt	Stout	1072.0	1020.0	6.88	72.23%	16.2	5.15
29th Dec	1837	DBSt	Stout	1084.2	1026.0	7.70	69.12%	11.2	4.86
18th Mar	1839	XXX	Mild	1105.3				8.0	3.75
27th Dec	1838	XX	Mild	1088.6				8.8	3.12
31st Dec	1838	X	Mild	1073.4				6.8	2.06
13th Jan	1839	KKK	Stock Ale	1105.3	1033.2	9.53	68.42%	10.7	5.12
11th Jan	1839	KK	Stock Ale	1088.6	1028.3	7.99	68.13%	10.0	3.13
Source:
Reid brewing record held a the Westminster City Archives.

Reid tied houses and free trade 1830 - 1875

Still not done with tied houses. This time we're looking at another of the big London Porter breweries: Reid.

I used to think that Reid's brewery had totally disappeared. It was situated on the junction of Clerkenwell Road and Leather Lane. The site is currently occupied by a block of housing. But there was another part of the brewery on the other side of Leather Lane and part of that survives.Though the name Reid lived on for several decades as a Stout brand of Watney's.

I really should do more with the Reid brewing records I have photos of. I've not gone through them all properly yet. Not sure why, as they were the first ones I collected around ten years ago.

Back to their tied houses. If you remember, Barclay Perkins went from 51 owned pubs in 1830 to 29 in 1875. But for a large part of the period inbetween the numbers were quite stable. At Reid, there was a fall pretty much throughout and resulted in them owning less than a third as many pubs as when they started.

It's frustrating that the table doesn't extend a little later. Because I'm sure the trend towards sales rather purchases would have been reversed. I think the trends in pub ownership can be accounted for by licensing legislation.

Why would a brewers start selling off pubs after 1830? It must surely be connected with the Beer Act of that year. The thing that established beer houses and led to a big increase in the number of pubs, especially in London. As a consequence, they were more outlets for a brewer to choose from, meaning there wasn't such a big need to own pubs.

The beer house provisions in the Beer Act were mostly reversed by the 1869 Licensing Act. This made it nigh on impossible to obtain a new pub licence and even actively tried to reduce the number of licensed premises. Making outlets scarcer and more difficult to obtain. Leading to a mad rush to buy pubs.

Here's the table:

Reid tied houses and free trade 1830 - 1875
Year	Owned	%	Loan	%	Free	%	total	barrels brewed	barrels per pub
1830	168	27.3	355	57.7	92	15	615	127,220	206.86
1835	142	23.7	338	56.2	121	21.2	601	181,187	301.48
1840	122	19.7	360	58.3	136	22	618	195,169	315.81
1845	120	18.2	406	61.6	133	20.2	659	227,306	344.93
1850	120	17.2	391	55.9	188	26.9	699	213,345	305.21
1855	107	15.7	378	55.4	197	28.9	682	179,217	262.78
1860	96	12.8	384	51.2	270	36	750	288,597	384.8
1865	76	9.2	394	47.8	355	43	825	277,757	336.68
1870	55	6	407	44.7	438	49.3	900	264,753	294.17
1875	52	6	391	44.8	430	49.2	873	235,596	269.87
Sources:
The British Brewing Industry 1830 - 1980 by T.R. Gourvish and R.G. Wilson, 1994, page 131.
Whitbread brewing log, document LMA/4453/D/09/023
"The British Brewing Industry, 1830-1980" T. R. Gourvish & R.G. Wilson, pages 610-611

Beer in 1958 (part five)

More on beer and the financial contribution it made to Britain. Which was considerable.

Though that’s nothing new. In the 19th century it was responsible for around a third of the government’s revenue.

“BEER PLAYS a big PART in the country's finances. It provides a substantial part of the Exchequer's income. Here are the facts about beer and money.

Last year beer duty alone brought in the huge total of £261 millions, but this is only one of the contributions made by the brewing industry. Here are the figures:

Beer duty	261,000,000
Brewery Companies' Taxes	40,000,000
Retailers' licences	4,100,000
Brewers' licences	192,000
Dealers' licences	107,000

I make that a grand total of 305,399,000. Quite a lot of dosh in the 1950’s. It paid for quite a lot. Here are some examples:

“The beer duty and taxes brought in last year enough money to pay for —   

Three-fifths of the cost of the National Health Service   
OR All the Agricultural and Food subsidies   
OR Nearly the whole cost of the Royal Navy   
OR Two-thirds the cost of Education”
"Beer in Britain", 1960, page 122.

The proportion of a price of beer that was made up of tax had been rising throughout the 20th century:

“Beer duty
Beer is still, apart from spirits, tobacco and some fuels, the most highly taxed commodity in the country.

Unlike other commodities which involve heavy expenditure in dollars, the barley and hops from which beer is brewed are almost wholly home produced - products of British farms.

Yet far from going down, the burden of duty to the customer has been going up.

1900	1938	1958
10% duty	35% duty	50% duty

In 1900 the average tax was 0.25d. on a pint of beer costing 2.5d. - 10 per cent.
In 1938 it was 2.25d. on 6.5d. or about 35 per cent.
In 1958 it is 8.5d. on 1/6d. - nearing 50 per cent.
"Beer in Britain", 1960, page 122.

I doubt very much that the percentage of tax has declined since then.

Some weird stuff about hotels next.

Let's Brew - 1912 Thomas Usher IP

I just can’t resist another watery IPA recipe. You might get the idea that I’m trying to prove a point with these recipe. As if I’d ever do something as tacky as that.

I hope you aren’t getting bored of all these Scottish recipes. I see it a documentary duty to get at least a few dozen genuine Scottish recipes out there. One wee widdle into a hurricane, given the number of made up ones out there. But at least I’m trying. I have increased the number of fact-based recipes by several hundred percent this year. Looking at it positively.

It’s always a good laugh looking at how a beer like this scores on the style characteristics in BeerSmith. Way wrong on every single one. The only one even vaguely close, the ABV, is wrong because it assumes a much better rate of attenuation than the original achieved.

Here’s how it scored:

This isn’t a dig at BeerSmith. It just uses the “official” BJCP styles. Hang on. BeerSmith lets me define my own style.

I’ve just added this one:

That looks way better, doesn’t it? When do you reckon the BJCP will add English Watery IPA to their style guidelines? When they start gritting the roads in Hades? Even though I’ve done all the work for them. I can even think of at least two current examples: Greene King IPA and Harvey’s IPA. Which is about as many “Southern English Brown Ales” I can think of.

I need to take this further. Add more real old styles, old and new. Entering as many recipes to BeerSmith as I am, I should be able to refine the definitions as I go on. What a fascinating project.
Almost forgot about the recipe. It’s more pale malt, flaked maize and sugar. Incidentally, they’re the ingredients listed in my official style definition of English Watery IPA. Do you think I should trademark the term? Wouldn’t want some bastard nicking it.

What else? All English hops, which is a bit odd pre-WW I. You’d usually expect some American ones in there.

It was parti-gyled with a couple of even weaker beers, 50/- Br and 60/- Br, at 1034º and 1031º. Really, really watery for back then. I’m still wondering what the hell “Br” means. First records I have that mention it are from 1894. Could it mean “Bright” or “Brilliant”, i.e. a chilled and filtered bottled beer? The 1890’s is when that type of beer was appearing. None of the beers with the designation is over 1037º.

Right. Recipe time. (And tea-time for me.)

1912 Thomas Usher IP
pale malt	7.25 lb	80.56%
flaked maize	1.00 lb	11.11%
No. 2 invert sugar	0.75 lb	8.33%
Fuggles 90 min	0.75 oz
Fuggles 60 min	0.75 oz
Fuggles 30 min	0.75 oz
OG	1042
FG	1014
ABV	3.70
Apparent attenuation	66.67%
IBU	28
SRM	6
Mash at	150º F
Sparge at	170º F
Boil time	90 minutes
pitching temp	60º F
Yeast	WLP028 Edinburgh Ale

Barclay Perkins tied and free trade 1830 - 1949

Still not finished with tied houses. How could I resist Barclay-Perkins-related info?

By nailing togetehr information from a few different sources I've been able to put together a table. I'm not sure what it tells us, really. Other than that they accumulated lots of pubs in the periods not covered by the figures.

I'd known that the big Porter brewers had tied estates. But didn't have many details as to the size of those estates. Barclay Perkins appear to have owned quite a modest number of pubs in the early 19th century, generally fewer than 50. But by the early 20th century that had shot up to almost 300.

There was a good reason for that. In the 1880's and 1890's, with new licences almost impossible to obtain, brewers began buying pubs like crazy. With the free trade rapidly disappearing, any brewers who didn't follow suit was likely to find themselves with nowhere to sell their beer. The prices paid for pubs in grotty parts of East London were phenomenal: £15,000 or £20,000 at a time when Mild Ale was 2d per pint.

Barclay Perkins were still actively acquiring pubs until WW I. After the war, the number fell again due to closures or sales. A few pubs were sold on to other brewers. A couple of licences simply surrendered. Others surrendered with compensation. Though they were also still picking up a few new pubs in the 1920's.

I'm not sure where the big jump in pubs between 1924 and 1949 comes from. OK, they bought Style & Winch in the which must brought in some new pubs. But nothing like 700. I'm confused.

Just for a laugh, I thought I'd look at the average sales per pub. Which were rising steadily during the middle part of the 19th century. Only to fall again in the 20th. Not sure that tells us all that much.

I know from the Beer Trades document (Document 2305/1/517 held at the London Metropolitan Archives) that the amounnt of beer sold per pub in a year varied enormously, from as little as 36 barrels to as much as 2,000 barrels. One of the pubs doing the biggest trade was the Anchor, their brewery tap, which sold 1,833 barrels in 1924. That's an impressive 5 barrels of beer each day.

Barclay Perkins tied and free trade 1830 - 1949
Year	Owned	%	Loan	%	Free	%	Total	Barrels brewed	Barrels per pub
1830	51	5.8	476	54	355	40.2	882	262,306	297.4
1835	44	5	462	53	354	41.2	860	382,063	444.26
1840	33	4.2	462	59.3	284	36.5	779	400,838	514.55
1845	40	5	457	57.6	297	37.4	794	396,784	499.73
1850	38	4.7	449	55.8	318	39.5	805	397,360	493.61
1855	36	4.4	442	54	340	41.6	818	357,836	437.45
1860	36	4.5	420	52.1	350	43.4	806	421,286	522.69
1865	34	4.7	390	53.4	306	41.9	730	415,142	568.69
1870	35	5.1	392	57.3	257	37.6	684	410,710	600.45
1875	29	4.4	396	59.9	236	35.7	661
1901	272							573,302
1905	292							549,634
1910	308							500,205
1914	310							582,263
1920	303							464,033
1925	290							329,464
1949	1,005							367,691	321.96
Sources:
"The British Brewing Industry 1830 - 1980" by T.R. Gourvish and R.G. Wilson, 1994, page 436.
"The British Brewing Industry 1830 - 1980" by T.R. Gourvish and R.G. Wilson, 1994, page 131.
Document 2305/1/517 held at the London Metropolitan Archives.
Whitbread brewing log, document LMA/4453/D/09/023
"The British Brewing Industry, 1830-1980" T. R. Gourvish & R.G. Wilson, pages 610-611
Document ACC/2305/1/711/1 in the London Metropolitan Archives

Big Seven tied houses 1963 - 1989

I'm not quite done with tied houses yet. Especially now I've found some handy new information.

I've now got a fairly decent set of numbers on how many tied houses the big brewers owned. It's made me realise that the rise of the Big Seven was more uneven than I had realised. With some of the companies coalescing earlier than others.

Allied - created by a merger of Ind Coope & Allsopp, Tetley Walker and Ansells - was fully formed in 1963 and didn't really grow after that date. For a while they were considerably larger than any of their rivals.

Courage and Whitbread, on the other hand, didn't reach their peak size until the 1970's. In the case of Courage, this was after their merger with John Smiths, a considerable force in the North of England. While Whitbread continued to snap up medium-sized regional breweries through the 1960's and early 1970's.

Bass Charrington, a merger of Bass M&B and Charrington United, was a combination of the third and fifth largest brewing companies. They immidiately catapulted to the top of the league and remained there until the Big Six melted away in the 1990's.

The whole consolidation process came to a jarring halt in the mid-1970's, when the Labour government told the Big Six they weren't allowed to take anyone else over. I can see now that it had a stultifying effect on British brewing. Along with the Beer Orders, it's the main reaason no large Brirish brewing company exists today. Without interfernce, the Big Seven would probably have been whittled down to three of four, at most.

I didn't realise it at the time, but when I started drinkibng in the early 1970's, the big brewers had already reached their peak. They owned around 55% of all pubs but, through loan, ties, controlled even more. There was very little truly free trade in the early 1970's. In 1974, 13,800 were owned by smaller brewers, meaning around three-quarters of pubs in the UK were owned by a brewer.

It's strange now to think that at one point two companies owned a qurter of the UK's pubs and three more than a third. How the beer retailing world has changed in the last 30 years.

Big Seven tied houses 1963 - 1989
	1963		1967		1970		1974		1989
Company	no. pubs	%	no. pubs	%	no. pubs	%	no. pubs	%	no. pubs	%
Allied	9,300	12.60%	8,250	11.37%	8,250	11.55%	7,665	10.87%	6,000	7.48%
Watney	5,500	7.45%	6,667	9.19%	6,135	8.59%	5,946	8.43%	6,100	7.60%
Bass M&B	4,100	5.56%	10,230	14.10%	9,450	13.22%	9,256	13.13%	7,300	9.10%
Charr Utd	5,000	6.78%
Courage	4,800	6.50%	4,418	6.09%	6,000	8.40%	5,921	8.40%	5,100	6.36%
Whitbread	3,500	4.74%	7,376	10.17%	8,280	11.59%	7,865	11.16%	6,500	8.10%
S&N	1,700	2.30%	2,076	2.86%	1,700	2.38%	1,678	2.38%	2,300	2.87%
Guinness	2		2		2
total	33,902	45.94%	39,019	53.78%	39,817	55.72%	38,331	54.37%	33,300	41.51%
total no. pubs	73,800		72,550		71,457		70,495		80,212
Sources:
The British Brewing Industry 1830 - 1980 by T.R. Gourvish and R.G. Wilson, 1994, page 472.
The Brewers' Society Statistical handbook 1973”, page 50.
2011 Statistical Handbook of the BBPA, page 74
"Brewers' Almanack 1971", page 83.
“The Brewing Industry, a Guide to Historical Records” by Lesley Richmond & Alison Turton.