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21-08-2011, 08:05
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I've reached another milestone. After just two and a half years I've extracted all the data from volume one of the Whitbread Gravity Book. My ridiculously large spreadsheet of beer details* has grown even more ridiculously large. But I've noticed a slight problem.

The spreadsheet covers around 200 years: 1804 to 2005. The 19th century details come mostly from brewing records with a few from chemical magazines. I've the most information for the years 1920 to 1960, courtesy of the Whitbread and Truman Gravity Books. There are a few odd entries for the later 1960's and odd analyss from newspaper articles of the 1970's. After that, the Good Beer Guide is my main source.

And that's where the gaping hole emerges. Because the Good Beer Guide doesn't cover all beer. Just cask beer and the odd bottle-conditioned beer. There's a whole world of British beer that suddenly slips from view. I can tell you next to nothing about Brown Ale after 1965. I don't have any data.

While I know all about the cask beers from a mayfly micro of the mid 1980's, British bottled Stouts of the same period are a total blank. It's frustrating. The Good Beer Guide let's me track changes in strength of cask beers because it was published annually. Each edition is a little time capsule of the beers as they were in a specific year.

I'm working my way around to a request. An appeal. Does anyone know of another source of British beer gravities of the last 40 years? Especially of bottled and keg beers. Without them, I can only see half of the picture.

It's weird that the 1980's should be more problematic than the 1920's.



* It hit 20,000 entries later this week.https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5445569787371915337-598785708964205713?l=barclayperkins.blogspot.com


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