Visit the Shut up about Barclay Perkins site

I've decided to make May Watery Mild Month here on the blog. I'm sure you're all pretty excited.

They certainly liked their Mild watery in the 1950s. Or rather, drinkers had no choice as that’s just the way it came.

Elgood’s Mild, X, makes their Light Ale look headily alcoholic. Which is quite an achievement. X was brewed at around the effective minimum gravity. No matter how watery your beer was, you paid the tax for a beer of 1027º. So there was no real economic point in brewing anything much weaker than that.

The grist is, er, interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen flaked barley and flaked rice used in the same beer before. Obviously, there’s the malt extract Elgood threw in all their beers. Then there’s a sugar just described as invert. And another called carmose. I’ll go out a limb here and guess that’s some sort of caramel.

The hops were all English and all quite old. This beer was brewed in October 1953 and the hops were all from the 1950 harvest.


1953 Elgood X
Mild malt 4.50 lb 76.14%
flaked rice 0.25 lb 4.23%
flaked barley 0.33 lb 5.58%
No. 3 invert sugar 0.33 lb 5.58%
malt extract 0.25 lb 4.23%
caramel 1000 SRM 0.25 lb 4.23%
Fuggles 95 mins 1.00 oz
Fuggles 30 mins 0.25 oz
OG 1026
FG 1006.5
ABV 2.58
Apparent attenuation 75.00%
IBU 20
SRM 20
Mash at 153º F
Sparge at 176º F
Boil time 95 minutes
pitching temp 61º F
Yeast WLP025 Southwold


More...