Home Brew

I’m such a populist. I should try choosing more obscure topics. Or you’ll start calling me the Daily Star of beer blogs.

I was much intrigued by the dropping round and settling square kept as a museum piece in the Fuller’s brewery. For one thing, it gave me chance to see exactly what an attemperator looked like. And the brewer, John Keeling, explained to me how it worked. He told me that the wort was usually dropped after 12 hours or so. The exact timing being determined by the type of head that had formed.

The Fuller’s logs are full of information. Including complete fermentation details. And they tell you when the beer was dropped. Looking at their bog-standard X Ale, that’s exactly what happened. It spent just 12 hours in the round. As did the Porter and Brown Stout. The PA stayed in the round longer, 41 hours. But the AK I have the log for was in the round 66 hours.

The fermentations for the PA and AK are quite different from those of the other beers. The majority took place in the round. About two thirds of the gravity drop was in the round. For the darker beers the fermentation had barely started when the wort was dropped into the square.

Could it be that time in the round was connected to the degreee of attenuation? The AK is the most fully-attenuated.

You’ll notice that the fermentation of AK took considerably longer, despite it having a lower OG. Thirty hours longer, to be precise. Before you ask, both the X and AK were brewed at the same time of year. The AK was brewed on the 14th March 1910, the X 10th March 1910.