BJCP 2004 Style Guidelines - Society of Barley Engineers



History (see timeline on reverse)

Pre-Dark, Stout used as descriptor for “strong ,or robust”

The rise of the Porter

Differences in style, Taxes, malts, and preferences.

Guinness, the first Mega beer.

Decline of dark beers in England

The style today

Six BJCP styles.

Dry Stout, Also known as Irish or Irish Dry.

Sweet Stout, frequently called Cream Stout

Oatmeal Stout

Foreign Extra Stout

American Stout

Russian Imperial Stout

Some other styles not in BJCP

Chocolate

Coffee

Oyster

Nitrogen in Stout

Reason for it is a bit nebulous, but seems to have come from Guinness experimenting for ways to get a creamy head without over carbonating.

Special faucet forces beer through series of very small holes, creating tiny nitrogen bubbles. Cascade effect will happen with any gas/ liquid, but is visually pronounced with white bubbles in black beer.

Widgets reproduce effect in containers.

Cliff Claven Corner

William Seely Gosset and Modern Statistics.

Was hired as manager at Guinness in England during a period where they taking a very scientific approach to scaling up beer production and making it consistent. Could not publish findings due to Corporate security concerns so, published under the pseudonym “Student”. Ended up being one of the fathers of modern statistics and quality control (Students t-distribution and t-Test)

By the early 20th century, Oatmeal stout was no longer being made anywhere. Michael Jackson mentioned one in 1977 and sparked the curiosity of entrepreneur who commissioned a new version to be brewed by Samuel Smith’s. This beer is available today.

In the early 20th century, Guinness ran a very well known ad campaign/slogan of “Guinness is Good for You!”

The government banned this reference as misleading (as well as banning the use of the term Milk Stout). Recent research shows that antioxidants in Stout really can help prevent the buildup of cholesterol on artery walls.

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From CAMRA site:

Porter was a London style that turned the brewing industry upside down early in the 18th century. It was a dark brown beer – 19th-century versions became jet black – that was originally a blend of brown ale, pale ale and ‘stale’ or well-matured ale. It acquired the name Porter as a result of its popularity among London’s street-market workers. At the time, a generic term for the strongest or stoutest beer in a brewery was stout.

The strongest versions of Porter were known as Stout Porter, reduced over the years to simply Stout. Such vast quantities of Porter and Stout flooded into Ireland from London and Bristol that a Dublin brewer named Arthur Guinness decided to fashion his own interpretation of the style. The beers were strong – 6% for Porter, 7% or 8% for Stout. Guinness in Dublin blended some unmalted roasted barley and in so doing produced a style known as Dry Irish Stout. Restrictions on making roasted malts in Britain during World War One led to the demise of Porter and Stout and left the market to the Irish. In recent years, smaller craft brewers in Britain have rekindled an interest in the style, though in keeping with modern drinking habits, strengths have been reduced. Look for profound dark and roasted malt character with raisin and sultana fruit, espresso or cappuccino coffee, liquorice and molasses, all underscored by hefty hop bitterness. Porters are complex in flavour, range from 4% to 6.5% and are typically black or dark brown; the darkness comes from the use of dark malts unlike stouts which use roasted malted barley. Stouts can be dry or sweet and range from 4% to 8% ABV.

Wikipedia:

The breweries pioneered several quality control efforts. The brewery hired the statistician William Sealy Gosset in 1899, who achieved lasting fame under the pseudonym "Student" for techniques developed for Guinness, particularly Student's t-distribution and the even more commonly known Student's t-test.

Stout and porter are dark beers made using roasted malts or roast barley. There are a number of variations including Baltic porter, dry stout, and Imperial stout. The name Porter was first used in 1721 to describe a dark beer popular with street and river porters of London that had been made with roasted malts. This same beer later also became known as stout,[1] though the word stout had been used as early as 1677.[2] The history and development of stout and porter are intertwined.[3]

1 History

Porter was first recorded as being made and sold in London in the 1730s. It became very popular in Great Britain and Ireland, and was responsible for the trend toward large regional breweries with tied pubs. With the advent of pale ale the popularity of dark beers decreased, apart from Ireland where the breweries of Guinness, Murphy's and Beamish grew in size with international interest in Irish (or dry) stout.

"Nourishing" and sweet "milk" stouts became popular in Great Britain in the years following the Second World War, though their popularity declined towards the end of the 20th century – apart from pockets of local interest, such as Glasgow with Sweetheart Stout, and Jamaica with Dragon Stout.

With beer writers such as Michael Jackson writing about stouts and porters in the 1970s, there has been a moderate interest in the global speciality beer market.

Originally, the adjective "stout" meant "proud" or "brave", but later, after the fourteenth century, "stout" came to mean "strong." The first known use of the word stout about beer was in a document dated 1677 found in the Egerton Manuscript,[2] the sense being that a stout beer was a strong beer. The expression stout porter was applied during the 1700s to strong versions of porter, and was used by Guinness of Ireland in 1820 – although Guinness had been brewing porters since about 1780, having originally been an ale brewer from its foundation in 1759. "Stout" still meant only "strong" and it could be related to any kind of beer, as long as it was strong: in the UK it was possible to find "stout pale ale", for example. Later, "stout" was eventually to be associated only with porter, becoming a synonym of dark beer. During the end of the nineteenth century, stout porter beer gained the reputation of being a healthy strengthening drink, so that it was used by athletes and nursing mothers, while doctors often recommended it to help recovery.[4] In fact, in Ireland, blood donors and post operative patients were once given Guinness due to its high iron content.[4]

2 [edit] Types of stout

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A pint of Guinness stout awaits consumption with a slice of bread and butter.

Stouts have a number of variations.

1 [edit] Dry or Irish stout

Irish stout or dry stout is very dark or rich in colour and it often has a "toast" or coffee-like taste. The most famous example, Guinness, is from Ireland. Its alcoholic content and "dry" flavour are both characterized as light, although it varies from country to country.

2 [edit] Imperial stout

Imperial stout, also known as "Russian Imperial Stout" or "Imperial Russian Stout," is a strong dark beer or stout that was originally brewed by Thrale's brewery in London, England for export to the court of the Tsar of Russia as "Thrale's Entire Porter".[5] It has a high alcohol content (nine or ten percent is common) intended to preserve it during long trips and to provide a more bracing drink against cold climates. The colour is very dark, almost always opaque black. Imperial stout exhibits enormously powerful malt flavours, hints of dark fruits, and is often quite rich, resembling a chocolate dessert.

3 [edit] Porter

Main article: Porter (beer)

Porter is an alternative name for stout. It was originally used in the 18th century. Historically, culturally and technically there are no differences between stout and porter, though there has been a tendency for breweries to differentiate the strengths of their dark beers with the words "extra", "double" and "stout". So the term "stout" was used to indicate a stronger porter than other porters issued by an individual brewery — though one brewery's porter could easily be stronger than a neighbouring brewery's stout. Though not consistent, this is the usage that has most commonly been employed.[6]

4 [edit] Baltic porter

A version of porter which is brewed in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Russia. It has a higher alcohol content than ordinary porters. Export ales (see Russian Imperial Stout) introduced from Britain in the 18th century were influenced by regional styles when they began to be produced locally. What was once a top-fermenting ("ale-style") beer, it is now mostly brewed as a lager-style bottom-fermenting beer in Slavic and Baltic breweries.[7]

5 [edit] Milk stout

Milk stout (also called sweet stout or cream stout) is a stout containing lactose, a sugar derived from milk. Because lactose is unfermentable by Saccharomyces cerevisiae, it adds sweetness, body, and calories to the finished beer. Contemporary labelling standards in place since 1945 prevent the use of the term in the UK. The classic example of sweet stout is Mackeson's XXX.

Milk stout was supposed to be very nutritious, and was given to nursing mothers. In 1875, John Henry Johnson first sought a patent for a milk beer, based on whey, lactose, and hops.

Milk stout was not very widely distributed before Mackeson's Brewery acquired the patents to produce it in 1910. Since then its production has been licensed to other brewers.

6 [edit] Oatmeal stout

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The original modern Oatmeal stout

Oatmeal stout is a stout with a proportion of oats, normally a maximum of 5%, added during the brewing process. Even though a larger than 5% proportion of oats in beer can lead to a bitter or astringent taste,[8] during the medieval period in Europe, oats were a common ingredient in ale,[9] and proportions up to 25% were standard. However, despite some areas of Europe, such as Norway, still clinging to the use of oats in brewing until the early part of the 20th century, the practice had largely died out by the sixteenth century, so that Tudor sailors refused to drink oat beer offered to them in 1513, because of the bitter flavour.[10][11]

There was a revival of interest in using oats during the end of the nineteenth century, when restorative, nourishing and invalid beers, such as the later Milk stout, were popular, because of the association of porridge with health.[12] Macklay's of Alloa produced an Original Oatmalt Stout in 1895 which used 75% "Oatmalt", and a 63/- Oatmeal Stout in 1909 which used 30% "Flaked (Porridge) Oats".[13]

But by the early 20th century these beers had all but disappeared. When Michael Jackson mentioned the defunct Eldrige Pope Oat Malt Stout in his 1977 book The World Guide to Beer, Oatmeal stout was no longer being made anywhere, but Charles Finkel, founder of Merchant du Vin, was curious enough to commission Samuel Smith to produce a version.[14] Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout then became the template for other breweries' versions.

One of the first to follow Samuel Smith was the Broughton brewery in the Scottish Borders with their Scottish Oatmeal Stout,[15] a 4.2% beer they have made since 1979 with roasted barley and pinhead oats. Young's Brewery of London were not long after with their 5.2% Oatmeal Stout, a beer that is mainly made for the North American market. One of the most notable of the USA versions is the Anderson Valley Brewing Company's Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout, a bottle conditioned stout of 5.7% strength that has won several awards.[16] In Canada, McAuslan Brewing's St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout has also attracted attention and a significant award.[17]

Oatmeal stouts are now made in several countries, including Australia with Redoak of Sydney producing a 5% Oatmeal Stout[18] and WinterCoat of Denmark brewing a 5.9% Oatmeal Stout using roasted barley and chocolate malt.[19]

7 [edit] Chocolate stout

Chocolate stout is a name brewers sometimes give to certain stouts. The name "Chocolate stout" is usually given because the beers have a noticeable dark chocolate flavour through the use of darker, more aromatic malt; particularly chocolate malt — a malt that has been roasted or kilned until it acquires a chocolate colour. Sometimes, as with Young's Double Chocolate Stout, and Rogue Ales' Chocolate Stout the beers are also brewed with a small amount of real chocolate.[20][21]

The Brooklyn Brewery of New York produce a very strong (10.6% abv) Black Chocolate Stout which uses six types of black, chocolate and roasted malts.[22] Denmark's Ølfabrikken brewery[23] have produced a strong stout called ØL, which is made with ingredients from four continents: cocoa from South America; coffee from Asia; hops from North America; and malts from Europe.

8 [edit] Coffee stout

Dark roasted malts, such as black patent malt (the darkest roast), can lend a bitter coffee flavour to dark beer. Some brewers like to emphasize the coffee flavour and add ground coffee. Brewers will then give the beer a name such as "Guatemalan Coffee Stout", "Espresso Stout", "Breakfast Coffee Stout", etc.

The ABV of these coffee flavoured stouts will vary from under 4% to over 8%. Most examples will be dry and bitter, though others add milk sugar to create a sweet stout which may then be given a name such as "Coffee & Cream Stout" or just "Coffee Cream Stout". Other flavours such as mint or chocolate may also be added in various combinations.

9 [edit] Oyster stout

Oysters have had a long association with stout. When stouts were emerging in the eighteenth century, oysters were a commonplace food often served in pubs and taverns. Benjamin Disraeli is said to have enjoyed a meal of oysters and Guinness in the 19th century, though by the 20th century oyster beds were in decline, and stout had given way to pale ale.

The first known use of oysters as part of the brewing process of stout was in 1929 in New Zealand, followed by the Hammerton Brewery in London, UK, in 1938.[24] Several British brewers used oysters in stouts during the "nourishing stout" and "milk stout" period just after the second world war.

Modern oyster stouts may be made with a handful of oysters in the barrel or, as with Marston's Oyster Stout, just use the name with the implication that the beer would be suitable for drinking with oysters.

By Michael Jackson on Porters:

By then, the term Porter had all but vanished in Britain. Dr John Harrison, who has researched brew-house records from London to Scotland, points out that a British brewer in the 1800s typically produced Porter to as many gravities and strengths as he later made Pale Ales and today that style's descendant, Bitter.

The lower-gravity Porters evolved into Mild ales, those in the middle range retained their original designation (only to vanish for decades before their recent revival), and the fuller-bodied versions came to be known as Stouts.

Brewing historian Terry Foster argues that the term Stout derived from the fuller flavours introduced when the drum-roasting of malts was developed in 1817.

Guinness, which has brewed in Dublin since 1759, first made ales. It launched a Porter in the 1770s, and was concentrating on that style before the decade was out.

For a time, there were two gravities of Porter, marked with a single and a double "X", and aIready a stronger third version for export to the Caribbean.

In 1820, the double was renamed Guinness Extra Stout Porter, and at some point the triple "X" gained the soubriquet Foreign Extra Stout. In 1974, the "single," still known as Porter. was dropped.

The type of Dry Stout made by Guinness and its couple of local competitors had in the meantime become Ireland's national style of beer.

When both Porters and Stouts diminished in popularity in Britain, why did they stand their ground in Ireland?

One reason may be that restrictions on the use of energy during World War I made it difficult for British malters to roast their grains.

These restrictions were not imposed in Ireland, where rebellion and independence were in the wind.

If the terrible beauty finally finds a lasting serenity, perhaps the toast should be in a new brew called Peace Porter.

From The Zythophile

1 Bristol-fashion Guinness and the roast barley question

Published November 6, 2007 Beer , Beer styles , History of beer

Tags: barley, Guinness, malt, porter, Stout

Where and when was the first Guinness brewery opened in England? If you answered “Park Royal, 1936”, whoops, the loud noises and flashing lights have gone off, that’s the WRONG answer, by more than 100 miles and just under 100 years.

In 1838 John Grattan Guinness junior had been sacked from the brewery business in Dublin started by his grandfather for drunkenness and “mixing with degraded society”. His uncle, Arthur Guinness II bought him a brewery in Bristol to try to give him another chance. Unfortunately John Grattan Guinness does not seem to have been a businessman, and the Bristol brewery went under in 1845. Much later, after he fell into poverty, John G tried ungratefully and unsuccessfully to sue his cousin Benjamin Guinness for wrongful dismissal from the Dublin brewery.

While John G was still running the brewery in Bristol, however, he was evidently visited by the brewer and writer George Stewart Amsinck, who was shown several different brews, all apparently based on St James’s Gate originals. Amsinck eventually printed the recipes for the beers as part of Practical Brewings, a manual of 50 different brewings published in 1868.

Their interest comes from their being the closest we have to genuine Dublin Guinness recipes of the late 1830s, showing us brewing methods and, in particular ingredients and proportions of different grain types.

Guinness had been among the first porter brewers to seize upon Daniel Wheeler’s “patent” malt for colouring porters and stouts when it appeared in 1819. This was the first properly legal beer colouring (because tax had been paid on the malt before it was roasted into Stygianity) to let brewers make really black beers, which is what the public expected in their porters and stouts, while using almost entirely pale malt, which gave a much better extract of fermentable sugars than the high-dried and “blown” malts the original porter brewers had used. An advertisement for Plunkett Brothers, the Dublin makers of patent malt, dated 1873 quotes a letter from Guinness saying the St James’s Gate brewery had used its products for “over fifty years” – in other words, since at least the very early 1820s.

The recipes Amsinck recorded at John G Guinness’s Bristol brewery included a Dublin stout of 1096 OG, using 96.8 per cent new pale Suffolk malt and 3.2 per cent “black” (that is, roast) malt; a Country Porter (the name Guinness at St James’s Gate gave to the beer delivered outside Dublin) of 1067 OG, brewed with the same ratio of black and pale malts; and a Town Porter (the name Guinness gave to the beer brewed for sale in Dublin) of 1061 OG, ditto for the grain bill but with half the hops of the Country Porter. This last, Town beer was kept for only a day after fermentation was finished, before being mixed with 10 per cent fresh wort (a technique called gyling) and put out into the trade for consumption within a fortnight, making it truly a mild porter, in the proper sense of mild as fresh beer made for quick consumption.

The particular point to note today about all these beers is that they used roasted malt, not the roasted barley that commentators such as Roger Bergen, writing in Brewing Techniques in November 1993 say is “critical” to the Guinness palate. In fact Guinness could not have used roasted barley when John G was working there, because it was illegal: no grains could go into the brewing of beer that had not been malted, and paid the malt tax.

That only changed with the passing of the Free Mash Tun Act of 1880. But there seems to have been no rush by Guinness to use (cheaper) roasted barley in place of roasted malt. The experts seem to have been against the idea: Henry Stopes, writing in his 600-page bible Malt and Malting, published in 1885, insisted that roasted barley did not give as permanent a colour as roasted malt, and “the flavour is also very inferior; and the aroma can bear no comparison.”

So when, as Ron Pattinson has been asking, did the roasted malt change to roasted barley? Alfred Barnard, when he visited St James’s Gate in 1889, still found the brewery using “patent” malt. But opinion on roasted barley was shifting away from Henry Stopes’s dismissive view: Alfred Henry Allen wrote in Allen’s Commercial Organic Analysis in 1912 that: “Roasted barley is now largely taking the place of roasted malt, the latter being used mostly in the brewing of export stouts.”

All the same, Guinness looks to have held on for a couple of decades more. A guidebook for visitors to the St James’s Gate brewery published in 1928 said: “The chief difference between Ales and Stout are … in the use of roasted malt, which imparts both colour and flavour to the stout.” In the 1939 edition, however, the copy had changed to read “… the use of roasted malt, or barley” (my emphasis). It looks, therefore, as if Guinness began using roasted barley only in the 10 years between 1928 and 1938.

By now, it appears roasted barley was replacing roasted malt generally: Herbert Lloyd Hind’s Brewing: Science and Practice, published in 1938, says: “There are a number of distinct types of stout and porter, for which different blends of materials are used. On the one hand, are the stouts brewed from malt only, or from malt and roasted barley, On the other are the sweeter stouts, for which a fairly high percentage of sugar is employed … Roasted barley gives a drier flavour than roasted malt and is preferred by many.”

There is, I believe, a 1932 edition of the Guinness guidebook, which I don’t have, which may narrow this timespan down. The 1952 edition repeats the words of the 1939 one, but the 1955 edition has an additional significant change. Under “malting” a sentence has been added which reads: “Some of the barley is roasted before being used for making Stout, a little is now used in the form of barley flakes [my emphasis, again], but much the greater part still goes through the traditional malting process.”

So: it looks like Guinness only started using roasted barley to make “Irish stout” in the late 1920s or 1930s, and began using flaked barley in the early 1950s. Expert commentary suggests roasted malt Guinness would have tasted very different from roasted barley Guinness – did anybody notice?

2 (Different article) (Stout v Porter: a northern perspective, -Partial)

Eleven years later, in 1832, T Trenbath of the wholesale ale and porter vaults, 71 High Street, Manchester was selling not only bottled London porter from Barclay Perkins and Truman Hanbury, but also bottled Guinness’s porter from Dublin and bottled porter from a couple of obscure breweries in Clonmel, Tipperary, Greer and Co and Moreton and Co. Another decade further on, and in 1843 the columns of the Manchester Guardian were carrying advertisements for Beamish & Crawford’s “celebrated Cork porter”, D’Arcy’s Dublin porter, from the Anchor brewery, Watkins’s Dublin porter, “Guinness, Sons & Co’s celebrated Dublin bottled porter” and Reid & Co’s London porter,

What is noticeable about the Manchester Guardian ads, compared to those in contemporary editions of the London-based Times, is that the Mancunian ones offer porter, while the Times’s ads are always for stout, and never, or very nearly never mention the weaker drink:

The edition of The Times for September 5 1842, for example, has advertisements mentioning Lane’s Cork stout and “London and Guinness’s Dublin Stout”, Other ads from the same year include Abbott’s Extra Cork Stout; Barclay’s stout; and only a very occasional mention for “Barclay’s best bottled porter” at four shillings a dozen (quart) bottles, against Barclay’s extra stout at five shillings a dozen.

(The prices of other beers being advertised, for comparison, were Guinness stout and East India pale ale at six shillings, and Burton ale, clearly super-strength, at eight shillings and sixpence; this last is presumably the same as the “Bass and Co’s Burton ale, three years old” advertised at eight shillings a dozen quart bottles in the Manchester Guardian in 1845, a sign that bottle-aged strong beers were not unknown in Victorian England.)

So was the much greater number of advertisements in the Manchester newspaper for porter compared to the London paper, where the ads were more often for stout, a symptom of local preference, with Mancunians preferring the weaker porter while Cockneys preferred the stronger stout, of was it, rather, a difference in terminology? Did the London advertisers use “stout” to mean the strong drink and “porter” only to mean the weak one, while the Manchester advertisers used “porter” to cover both strengths?

The answer, I suspect, is a bit of both: differences in taste and differences in terminology too: it is most certainly true, though, that in Lancashire in the 1840s, “porter” as a term still covered stout as well. An ad headed “Whitbread and Co’s London Porter” from the Manchester Guardian in 1845 only lists prices for stout, brown stout and double brown stout. Another from the same year says:

“Dublin Porter – John D’Arcy and Co beg to inform the Innkeepers and bottlers of porter that Messers MacGowan and Co, Market-street, continue Agents for the sale of their celebrated Extra Stout, where it may be had in hogsheads, barrels and kilderkins.”

So in Manchester, stout was still seen as a subset of porter, while in London stout and porter seems generally to have been seen as separate categories. But not always: an ad in The Times in 1842 inserted by Guinness’s wonderfully monikered London agent declared:

ARTHUR GUINNESS SON & CO’S EXTRA STOUT – Notice – SPARKS MOLINE, the sole consignee for the eastern division of the kingdom, respectfully informs the public that in consequence of the extensive and increasing use of forged labels, and the extreme difficulty which has been found of preventing such frauds, he has been instructed by his principals to withdraw altogether the signature of their firm from bottle labels used in London, and for the same reasons to state that the persons undernamed are those who in London are alone supplied with this porter [my emphasis] for bottling …

followed by a list of 10 names. So: porter, as Ron Pattinson says, encompasses or embraces stout: and stout (as generally understood by Victorian brewers), was a type of porter.

From the Beer hunter: 1991

When Guinness launched its draught stout in Britain in 1961 it realised that a little nitrogen in the dispense system would ensure a creamy pint.The filling system for bottled beers does not easily accommodate nitrogen, but Guinness found a way of introducing it into cans.

Its canned Draught Guinness, launched in 1988, contains a capsule of a nitrogen-and-stout blend. This is filled on the canning line, and the contents of the capsule are released automatically when the package is broached. The opening of the can releases the pressure, and this causes the capsule to "blow." The stout inside the capsule helps to diffuse the nitrogen. This device, which won them a Queen's Award last month, is being employed in a canned ale, Guinness Draught Bitter, being test-marketed in the Anglia, Central and Granada television regions.

Not only does the nitrogen make the beer more creamy, and produce a better head, it also protects against oxidation. The brewer can therefore permit the beer to be less carbonated. The "canned draught" products have levels of carbonation similar to those in cask-conditioned ales, and less than half those in some bottled beers.

Guinness's rival, Murphy's, will soon be entering the market with its own "canned draught" dry stout, but using a slightly different system. This method - also employed by Whitbread for its newly launched canned ale, Boddington's Draught - uses only nitrogen in the capsule. It is also unusual in that the capsule is filled before the beer is put into the can.

The third Irish stout, Beamish, receives its dose of nitrogen on the canning line. So does Courage's canned ale Draught Directors'. One or two regional brewers are also using this technique. Two nationally famous ales, both from Burton-on-Trent, are getting a dose of nitrogen in a tank before they are canned. These are Draught Burton Ale, from Ind Coope, and Traditional Draught Ale, from Bass.

Timeline from Guinness website

3 1759

Arthur Guinness signs a 9,000 year lease on a disused brewery at St. James’s Gate, Dublin for an initial £100 and an annual rent of £45.

4 1799

The last Dublin Ale is brewed at the brewery of Arthur Guinness - and the decision is made to concentrate solely on the production of porter.

5 1936

The first GUINNESS® brewery overseas is built at Park Royal, London. William Sealy Gossett, the father of modern statistics, is appointed Head Brewer

6 1940s

The brewery is gradually converted to Sterile Plant, moving production from wooden to metal vessels

7 1988

The first "widget" beer, GUINNESS® Draught in cans, is launched. Three years later it wins the Queen’s Award for Technological Achievement.

8 1999

GUINNESS® Draught in a bottles is launched

9 Pale Stout

Published September 6, 2007 Beer styles

Tags: Bavarian beer, Beamish & Crawford, Justus von Liebig, Stout, Strong ales

Plugging different beer-related key words into the search facility in the Times newspaper archive 1785-1985 is continuing to turn up gold. In June 1843 a series of small ads began to appear in the newspaper for Bavarian Pale Stout – put that one in your BJCP guidelines – brewed, not in Munich, but by Beamish and Crawford of the Cork Porter Brewery in Ireland

… under principles personally explained by Professor Liebig to the manufacturers, and is remarkable for its purity and agreeable flavour, and produces a grateful and cheering effect, without exciting any irregular actions in the stomachs of persons even of the most delicate constitutions, or inducing the least drowsiness in those of sedentary or studious habits.

This is a late mention for pale stout, but it would not have seemed as surprising to early Victorian beer drinkers as it does to us. For 150 years or so after the word stout first began being applied to beer it was used simply as an adjective to mean “strong”. A poem from Scotland in the latter half of the 18th century called “The ale-wife’s supplication”, which urged George III to cut the taxes on malt and ale, included the lines:

Here’s to thee neighbour, ere we part

But your Ale is not worth the mou’ing

You must make it more stout and smart

Or else give over your brewing …

… Cries Maggy then, you speak as you ken

Consider our Taxations

And brew it stout, you’ll soon run out

Of both your Purse and Patience.

London porter brewers certainly made pale stout right through the period they were also making stout porter, the dark beer that gave us what we think of today as the typical stout style. Truman’s brewery in East London had both brown and pale stout in stock in 1741, for example. Whitbread was selling pale stout in 1767, at a third more per barrel than regular porter. Barclay Perkins of the Anchor brewery in Southwark was still brewing pale stout in 1805, made from 100 per cent pale malt, at an original gravity of 1079. Barclay Perkins had apparently given up making pale stout by 1812, but a brewer’s manual published around 1840, called Every Man His Own Brewer still referred to “stout ales”, meaning strong beers in general

The existence of pale stout is the reason why Guinness’s “trade mark label”, the one with the harp on, was issued to bottlers “who sell no other BROWN stout in bottle” (my emphasis), with those words appearing on the label along with the harp – bottlers who did sell another bottled brown stout were not permitted by the Irish brewer to use the harp trademark on their bottled Guinness

Professor Liebig, mentioned in the Beamish and Crawford ad, was Justus von Liebig, 1803-1873, and clearly famous enough in 1843 to not need an introduction to Times readers. He was then of the University of Giessen in Hesse, Germany, and is now regarded as one of the great pioneers of biochemistry (he also founded the company that invented the Oxo cube). However, he believed firmly that fermentation was a chemical reaction that did not involve living organisms, and resisted for many years the discoveries of Theodor Schwann, the man who, in 1837, coined the name “Saccharomyces”, sugar fungus, for brewing yeast.

The ad does not say, sadly whether the “personal explanation” he gave to Beamish and Crawford about the principles behind Bavarian Pale Stout was given face to face in Cork, or in Germany, or through letters. Nor, of course, does it say what the principles under which it was brewed were, or how it differed from other pale strong beers: one might speculate that with the name “Bavarian” it involved Bavarian-style decoction mashing, and possibly even Bavarian-style cold lagering and Bavarian bottom-fermenting yeasts, but without any evidence to go on except the name, this is a guess too far. Beamish and Crawford still exists – I wonder how extensive their archives are, and if they say anything about Bavarian Pale Stout and Herr Professor Liebig?

-----------------------

pre-1700 to early 1700’s

Stout used to describe the stronger beers.

early 1700’s

Porter style becomes hugely popular

1914 to 1918.

World war I

Guinness begins to use the word “Stout” for specific styles

1799

Last Dublin Ale made by Guinness so as to focus on dark beers

1880

Free mash tun act

1930-ish

Guinness is exclusively using Roasted Barley at all breweries

1988

Widget introduced in cans

1961

Nitrogen appears in drafts

1999

Widget in Bottles

1977

New Albion re-introduces Stout to the USA

1789

Guinness sign 9,000 year lease at St. James Gate facility

1819

Patent Malt appears

1974

Guinness drops Porter (single X) from their lineup

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