More barrrel-sized fun

I just remembered something. William Younger always recorded what they racked into in their brewing records.

Which means I can see exactly what sized of barrels they used. The last William Younger logs I have are from 1949-1950. What sorts of barrels were they using? You can probably guess. But here they are:

It says something that the pre-printed form includes butts, but nothing smaller than a quarter hogshead (18 barrels) of half barrel (also 18 barrels). You can see that XXP, a Bitter of 1032º, was only filled into hogsgeads and barrels.

The second beer in the image is No. 3 Bottling. That is, the bottling version of their No.3 Strong Ale (or Scotch Ale, depending on which side of the border you were). It's no conicidence that it was mostly racked into hogsheads. Most wouldn't have been bottled by Younger themselves, but by third party bottlers. Beer was usually delivered to these in hogsheads.

XXPS, a stronger Bitter of 1037º, wasn't filled into hogshead, but barrels, kilderkins and half hogsheads (27 barrels). Logical enough. As a draught beer you'd expect less to have been filled into hogsheads.

The last beer in DBS, Younger's Stout, was racked into a wide variation of cask sizes. They didn't brew a huge amount of DBS, so it might seem strange that some went into hogsheads. But this was another bottled beer. I'm more surprised at the small size of some casks. Presumably relatively low demand meant bottlers took smaller casks than with more popular styles.

Where are all the effing firkins?

I was glancing through my Boddingtons records yesterday and spotted something. One of the handy totals you sometimes find at year or month end.

It's of their stock of bee in casks at the end of 1984:

H = 54 gallon hogshead
B -= 36 gallon barrel
K = 18 gallon kilderkin
F = 9 gallon firkin

The fact that they only had a single firkin in stock says everything about the change in barrel size over the last 30 years.

Almost half of the stock of Bitter was in hogsheads. I have heard rumours that Holts still use them, though I haven't had that confirmed. I doubt very much if anyone else still bothers with them. I'm sure there are still regional breweries using barrels. I'd put money on Sam Smiths. But the vast majority of casl beer now comes in kilderkins and firkins.

Boddie's pubs must have still been shifting Mild quite quickly, given the majority of it was in full barrels. I doubt anyone fills anything larger than kilderkins with Mild any more.

One last point pops into my mind. How long would that stock have been intended to last?  If it were a week's stock, that would mean Boddingtons were only brewing around 35,000 barrels a year. But I'm pretty sure that they brewed at least 200,000. Divide 200,000 by 700 and you get 285. It looks like they didn't have much more than a day's supply of draught beer in stock.