Sunday 6 September 2009

Usher's beers in WW I

Time for a table. Or two. How about some stuff from the Scottish Brewing Archive? Yes, go on then.

I've just finished ploughing through the WW I brewing records of Thomas Usher. The Edinburgh brewer. Fascinating. For me. Unsurprisingly, the logs told a similar tale to those of the London brewers I've already looked at. Falling gravities after 1916 and a savage reduction in types of beer brewed during 1918.

Take a look:


I haven't included all their pre-war products. There were a couple of other Milds (44/- and 50/-), a few low-gravity Pale Ales and two more Stouts. After the war their product range was very different. Susprisingly, it was almost all Pale Ale. They brewed four: PA, PA 60/-, PA 70/- and PA 80/-. X disappeared without trace. The Milds were trimmed down from 5 to 1 and the Stouts from 3 to 1. And the Mild and Stout were party-gyled. Something I've never seen before. And there werre the odd few barrels of Strong Ale brewed, party-gyled with PA.

For comparison purposes, here are Barclay Perkins AlesI:


And Whitbread's:


Not sure what all that tells us. Maybe you can tell me.

4 comments:

Rob Sterowski said...

It doesn't look like X disappeared without trace. It looks like it was replaced by MA and the GA.

Was PA weaker than PA 60/–?

If 60/– aka Light was a Pale Ale and not a Mild, it would make sense to me. McEwan's core advertised products for decades were "Pale and Export Ales" (sometimes with the addition of Strong Ale).

Ron Pattinson said...

Barm, er, well, I'm not 100% sure X do really was Mild. From the logs, it looks more like a Pale Ale or Stock Ale.

I still need to digest Usher's beers. Not in an interesting (physical) way, sadly. There's much I don't understand.

Zythophile said...

Barm - "light" in Scottish terms, surely, means "mild", as "heavy" means bitter ...

Ushers had a big export business to Belgium, where Scottish beers were popular, after the First World War = I wonder if this distorted the sorts/proportions of beers they brewed?

Rob Sterowski said...

I have never been comfortable with the notion Light = Mild, but only the logs will show up whether there is a real difference.