Thursday 4 June 2009

Lots of sugar

I'm sure I mentioned my trip to London this week. Yesterday, it was. These day trips are a bit of an endurance test. I'm still knackered.

I'll be busy for weeks combing through everything, but I thought I'd give you a random taste. As we were halfway through a conversation about sugar, that seems a good place to start. I photographed logs from quite a few new breweries and guess what? They all used sugar. Lots of different types.

Russells Gravesend Brewery did something I'd not seen before. Use cane sugar, invert sugar and glucose in the same brew. And, just for good measure, something called "tintose". I suppose that's a proprietary sugar. In case you're wondering, it's from 1929 and the beer is 6d Ale. Best Mild, you could call it. OG 1041.55. Sugar made up 14% of the grist.

7 comments:

Barm said...

Presumably Tintose was a colouring sugar, going by the name and the relatively small quantity?

Ron Pattinson said...

Barm, that's what I'm assuming.

Jim Johanssen said...

Ron - I found a an old corkscrew on a auction site that has Caramel Tintose Brand on it. Tintose seems to be a Caramel tint and flavoring. What type/name of beer is it used in?

Cheers
Jim

Oblivious said...

It appears that Tintose was "Tintose Caramel Brand" from advertising on a Wedgwood teapot

Ron Pattinson said...

Jim, Tintose is used in just about anything dark. I've found in it the logs of a couple of breweries I harvested yesterday.

Anonymous said...

Ron, do you have some tips to gain access to such logs? I'm in Quebec, and I am very curious about reading old logs from our long gone breweries like Dawes, Boswell and Frontenac. And also actual brewery like Molson or Labatt. Any idea where I can find those?

Ron Pattinson said...

ealusceop, records are usually held in one of two places:

- public archives
- company archives

Records from companies that are still going you'll find in the second. Disappeared breweries, you'll find in the first. Getting access to company archives is much more difficult.

For defunct breweries, start in the archives for the area where the it was located.

I recently did a quick search to see if I could find brewing records in US archives and found some in about 10 minutes. You need to look for brewing records or production records.

In the UK, there's a central search site for archives everywhere in the country. That's how I found all the new breweries this time around. I had a good search through the catalogue before I went. Maybe Canada has something similar.