Victoria brewing volumes by region, 1863

I'm still mining those articles from the last few posts and today I've got something pretty cool. Although I guess that may stretch commonly accepted definitions of cool.

I've got the weekly production numbers here for a whole bunch of regions in Victoria. It's a real luxury to have this kind of information because we're relying so heavily on newspapers rather than official reports. This is from 1863, well into the gold-rush and the population of the colony had grown from 76,000 to over 500,000 in the previous 12 years.

Region	Hogsheads/week	Hectolitres/week
Bendigo	640	1568
Ballarat	500	1225
Castlemaine	500	1225
Talbot, Carisbrook, Daylesford, Lamplough	250	612.5
Inglewood, Newbridge, Loddon, Rushworth	125	306.25
Kyneton, Gisborne, Malmesbury, Kilmore	90	220.5
Geelong	100	245
Beechworth	250	612.5
Portland, Warrnambool, Port Fairy	125	306.25
Gippsland	50	122.5
Melbourne	1500	3675
Total	4130	10118.5

I guess all those miners were a thirsty lot. Over 1,000,000L a week! And that's not counting all the imported beer and ale which were really taking off in Victoria at this stage.

The brewers were brewing ale and porter and Thomas Moulden, the author, notes that the brewers in Bendigo tended to brew stronger ale than in the other regions.

1860s Australian pale ale recipe outline

I’d been sitting on yesterday's post about wheat malt and the beginnings of a distinctive Australian beer for a few weeks. I was hoping to find information about hopping rates to go with the information about malt and sugar so that I could produce a recipe outline. So of course the day after I gave up and posted it I stumbled across exactly what I had been searching for. I don't know how I managed to miss it but only two weeks later the same author wrote about the use of colonial hops. So much for my searching skills.

Anyway, now I've got enough information to sketch out a 1860s Australian pale ale. There's lots more to the article and I'll try to get back to it soon but the snippet below contains the gold for my purposes today:

The Star (Ballarat),  31 December, 1863

4 pounds per hogshead is described as the ‘low average’ hopping rate, that's about 7.5g/L or 170g in a 23L batch. We’re not given any details on how or when these hops were added but from the 8-10 homebrew recipes I've found from the time, the hops were often added as one giant first wort hop addition and that's exactly how I would do it here. Whenever I've used the FWH technique I've found that it has given a softer bitterness which would probably be a good thing when making such a large addition of hops. We're talking about roughly 90 IBUs by my calculations. That might sound excessive but if you've seen some of the recipes on Shut Up About Barclay Perkins, you'll know that it's not unusual. There's not enough information to be dogmatic about it though so add the hops as you see fit.

So based on that and the information I posted yesterday, if you want to brew a reasonably authentic mid-19th century Australian pale ale:


Fermentables
A starting gravity in the range of 1.045-1.055 made up of:

• Australian barley and/or wheat malt in any combination up to 100% wheat
• Sugar worth up to 25% of the gravity points

Hops
7.5g/L of hops, both colonial and UK hops were used so go with East Kent Goldings. Unfortunately I think Tasmanian Goldings are a thing of the past so until I can grow my own, the UK ones will have to do.

As discussed above, it's probably worth making it a first wort hop addition but the lack of specific information means you should use your own judgment. You might also want to adjust for the age and lack of cold storage of 19th century hops but I'm not sure how to go about that.


Yeast
It seems that Australian brewers were using yeast from imported beers and ales so the best way to go would be to use something descended from a Burton, London or Edinburgh brewery or use the Coopers strain. You can probably get away with any UK strain though.

My shortlist would probably be cultured up Coopers dregs, WLP009 or WY1028.


So there you have it, I just need to find the time and energy to get brewing. I'd love to hear from anyone else who gives it a try.

Colonial-style Australian pale ale

I've been getting hints at what some of the colonial ales and beers looked like through homebrew recipes and comparisons made in newspapers but most of the time they were either nasty bran & molasses affairs or otherwise very similar to the Burton and pale ales being imported into the country. Our national inferiority complex was in full effect even then and meant that very often our colonial ales and beers were attempts to mimic British beers.

But I found an article which shows something else emerging in Victoria & South Australia in the mid-19th century, something uniquely Australian. It's agenda is to argue for prioritising the use of the abundant colonial wheat in brewing instead of spending money on imported British malt. In the process gives heaps of interesting details about the practice of breweries in the area. I think we're getting an early glimpse of the Australian pale ale, an ale more appropriate to our climate and available ingredients than most of the imported stuff.

The Star (Ballarat), 15 December, 1863

The first gem is an outline of the standard grist used by brewers in the region: the equivalent of 4 bushels of malt per hogshead made up of 3 bushels of malt and sugar equivalent to 1 bushel of malt. 3 bushels of malt/hogshead is, if Wikipedia can be trusted, around 190g/litre. In a 23L batch of homebrew that's 4.35 kilograms of malt. Exactly how much sugar they were able to extract from that malt is not clear up my hunch is that it would be more comparable to homebrew systems than the high efficiency of today's commercial breweries. Assuming 70% efficiency, we're talking about an original gravity of around 1.048 of which 1.036 is from the malt and 1.012 is from sugar.

Use of sugar deserves attention. As I mentioned above, the article suggests that around 25% of the fermentables came from sugar. There were plenty of reasons for colonial brewers to use sugar and I’ll probably have a post up about that soon. Even more than the presence of wheat, the use of sugar was a distinctive of early colonial brewing while the the use of sugar was illegal in Britain until 1847 and only seems to have become popular through the 1870-80s. The use of sugar in these Australian pale ales led to a lighter bodied, more refreshing ale than the majority of the imported ales that were available.

The Star (Ballarat), 15 December, 1863

It's worth noting that they were often using a large amount of wheat. I already posted about Tasmanian homebrewers using wheat in times of plenty but above we've got a report of a brewery in Bendigo relying on wheat malt and only turning to barley once there was no more wheat available. There's also mention of a brewery in Adelaide using wheat when there was a shortage of barley and several others in the Beechworth district and Melbourne were also using it. It doesn't seem like everyone was using it but it sounds as if it was common enough and hints at the beginnings of a unique style of beer – the Australian pale ale.

There's some more gold to be mined from the article as well as more about wheat malt and sugar in colonial brewing that needs to be pursued. Each post leads to way more questions. Well, for me at least.

Van Diemen's Land brewed IPA

The other day I posted about the imported IPA that was available in Tasmania during the 19th century. While it might not have been the most popular drink in the colony, it was certainly readily available from the 1830s through to Federation.

This time I want to explore the evidence for local breweries trying their hand at the style. As far as I could find there is only evidence in the newspaper archives for two Tasmanian breweries producing IPA, Walker's in Hobart and Ditcham, Button & Co. in Launceston. The difficult thing with this kind of search is that it's only possible to find positive evidence and finding that evidence depends on whether the brewery advertised or not. It looks like only the bigger of the local breweries spent much money advertising their beer and ale.

The first example I've been able to find comes from a puzzling ad for walkers XXX Ale. I'm no expert on brewery abbreviations but I thought that the ‘X’ labelled beers referred to milds. While the milds of the 19th century were very different to those of the 20th century, I was surprised to see the XXX label used interchangeably with India pale ale. I'm sure there's precedence for this that I'm just ignorant about though.

Colonial Times (Hobart), 13 August, 1852

Whatever the story with the XXX/IPA, Walker's brewery seems to have been highly regarded through the mid to late 19th century. Below is a snippet from a report on a Hobart regatta. It includes a nice little reference Peter Dudgeon (who was in the last months of his life at that stage) and the author sharing a glass of Walker’s ale. Also see how important it is to Tasmanians even in the 1850s to compare their produce to the rest of the world.

Colonial Times (Hobart), 6 December, 1850

The other point that is worth noting is that it was made expressly for bottling rather than for cask sales. This seems to be a trend with both imported and locally made IPA.

Walker’s continued to produce an IPA at least up to the 1880s. It also seems to have been the more expensive of their ales based on the ad below.

The Mercury, 27 February, 1879 

In Launceston, Ditcham, Button & Co. were also producing an IPA by the late 1870s if not earlier. Charles Button was an member from an important family in the North. His father was William Stammers Button - what a great name - the first mayor of Launceston and a brewer himself. He ran the Launceston Brewery in partnership with Waddell after William Barnes retired. Charles brewed with his father in the early days, spent some time in New Zealand and then returned to Launceston, overseeing the brewery operations for Ditcham, Button & Co.

Launceston Examiner, 16 October, 1877

Ditcham, Button & Co. produced an East India Pale Ale and a No. 3 strong ale, a lineup which sounds very similar to the Younger and Bass brews that were being advertised in the colony at the time. The IPA was bottled and have a blue label and seems to have been known by that mark. As far as is possible to tell they seem to have been quite successful in imitating the well-known imports.

While there isn't a huge amount of information about local breweries producing IPAs, I think that what we’ve got here is the tip of the iceberg. Walker's Brewery was producing IPA for at least 30 years yet there are only a couple of mentions of it in advertising. This raises the question of how many other breweries with producing IPA (and other styles for that matter) but weren't advertising in the newspapers. The existence of their IPA is just assumed in that 1879 ad. Hopefully I'll be able to discover a bit more over time.

While the full extent is difficult to work out with the available information, at least a couple of Tasmanian breweries jumped on the original IPA bandwagon and seem to have produced quality versions of the style. However, as with so many other aspects of the brewing industry in colonial times, imitation rather than creation seems to have been the main concern.

The gold standard and Australian ale

The little editor's note is what caught my eye: "fully equal to the best V. D. Land ale." The beers and ales of Van Diemen's Land were the standard by which Australian brews were judged at least through the first half of the 19th century. I get the impression that this had changed somewhat by the time of federation and I'd like to try and figure that out sometime.

The Sydney Monitor, 25 August, 1830.

It's also an early indication of brewers successfully adapting to Australian conditions. It understandably took time for Australian brewing to develop an identity of its own but it's useful to have a hint of it happening in 1830.

I haven't been able to find out anything meaningful about Eveson and this is the only mention of his brewery. With death and financial ruin pretty constant realities to be contended with, many breweries popped up and then vanished again very quickly.

The tradition of Tasmanian stingo

One of the popular ales brewed in Hobart was Tasman Brewery's Stingo, a Tasmanian take on the aged Yorkshire strong ale. It was only brewed for a short time before the owner and brewer, James Whyte, died in a pretty dreadful way. His brewery was continued by his wife but the stingo seems to have disappeared.

Check out the Don Draper-esque ad:

Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen's Land Advertiser,
2 August, 1823

The hyperbole of that ad aside, it was a very popular brew in Hobart. Even in 1829 there was a newspaper article complaining about the absence of Tasman's stingo from the market. It didn't end there though, Tasman's stingo was something like a cult classic.

So in 1835 the Tasmanian Brewery, run by the new owners of the original Tasman Brewery, decided to relaunch the stingo. It not clear how the relaunch was but the absence of further mentions in newspaper advertising is not a positive sign. I've also found a mention that Noake's Brewery in Longford was also brewing one in 1852 and presumably earlier since at that point it already had a good reputation.

There were very limited quantities of the real deal Yorkshire stingo imported into the colonies but that local versions were produced over several decades is a fun little distinctive of Tasmanian brewing.