The King’s Taxes and the Scottish Brewing World

Welcome Back!

At some point, rest assured there’ll be a two-paragraph post describing which brushes/techniques I use to clean my homebrew grain mill (it’s this one and a tool with a fairly sharp point), but for now my coworkers and supervisor are watching, so I thought I’d keep the topic on MacLeod’s beers for a while longer.

So this week we’re taking a look at the Scottish Brewing world, and absolutely roasting our first head brewer for calling The King’s Taxes a 60 Shilling (feel free to scoff now, you’ll know why you scoffed by the end of this piece).

Why This (Kind of) Matters

So who cares, right? I mean, Scotland is somewhere between 3,000 and 20,000 miles away, and its beers are relatively hard to find in LA, aside from the odd Scotch Ale in cold weather. Well, yeah I mean from a relativistic position none of this matters, so I’d recommend developing a healthy Stockholm sensibility if you plan on reading more of these posts.

But to the point: the reason we’re talking about this is that MacLeod sells a popular cask beer (call back!) called The King’s Taxes, which is a lush 4.7% Scottish beer of ~some description~, in which I get flavors ranging from plums and dried fruit, to very mildly sweet Egg Cream, to toffee, and I think that’s neat-o. Further, I wouldn’t mind being able to buy more Scottish ales in LA, and I expect to brew a few myself at some point, so I’m proselytizing - we beer-drinkers should all care a bit more on average, in other words.

And I think some context is called for in order to justify my adoration of Scotland’s second-most-important alcoholic export (third if you count Rabbie, hey-o!), so let’s talk a bit about two such facets: the gist of Scotland’s brewing process, and the infamous Shilling system

Scotland, i.e. Little Germany

As Greg Noonan points out in the wonderful Scotch Ale, Scotland’s brewing traditions make it startlingly similar to Germany’s lager brewing practices, to the point that it’s far closer to that than it is to England’s brewing practices of the period. He outlines the following:

• The use of sparging as opposed to England’s double mashing

• Boiling for 1.5 hours instead of 3 (they really did that; it’s still semi-common in traditional Kveik brewing, in part to concentrate the wort/develop Maillard products)

• Fermenting at 50˚F instead of ~70˚F (Scotland’s cold!)

• Storing in cellars for up to 6 months (i.e. lagering)

  • This was common for Old Ales in England, but not at all common for Mild Ales, hence the name, which is, as Alton Brown would say, another episode

• They didn’t “skim” (top-crop) the yeast, which could have led to bottom-fermenting strains (by not selecting top-fermenting ones)

• Brewing took place during cold months, which was Germany’s trick before refrigeration, which was interestingly enough invented for brewing

• The careful use of soft water; breweries were actually built around known good wells

So yeah, they were basically brewing exactly like the Germans (with the exception of the wheat beer and sour beer brewers of Germany). Also of note: Scottish beers made use of extraordinarily little hops, which is still largely true; Scotland made plays for market share in the 19th century with more mainland styles, and thus have definitely made hoppy beers, but these were, again, basically just for export. 

There are more such parenthetical notes, like the current market share that lagers have in Scotland and what the war did to beer gravities (read: strength), but you’ll just have to read the book for that (though I’m likely to talk about the wars’ effects on beer at some point).

The Shilling System

The Shilling System is so dumb and esoteric that I often forget its most basic definition/origin, and had to look all of it up, again, for this. The story is actually quite simple: for some reason, the brewers in Scotland decided to describe beer by its pre-excise price per barrel and Guineas Per Hogshead (don’t even...just drop it, I’m not explaining those), but this was dumb because, obviously, both taxation and the strength of Scotland’s currency relative to England’s varied over time, and with them the strength of the beer described by, say, 90 Shillings (the symbol for Shilling being /- by the way). For example, per Noonan:

“A 90 shilling ale in the early 19th century had an OG as high as 1.125, and a final gravity (FG) of 1.055. It consisted of approximately nine percent alcohol by volume.”

For comparison, a modern Scottish Export, or 80 Shilling, is 3.9%-6% per the Cicerone Flashcards I’ve yet to memorize. And for reference, we called The King’s Taxes a “60/-” for some time, which brings me to the last point:

Twin Gifts from our First Head Brewer: A Great Recipe, and Nits to Pick

If you haven’t had The King’s Taxes, what are you waiting for? Bitters are fine and all, but this is the beer that justifies the existence of cask ales for me. And while the recipe’s been tinkered with over the years, if it hadn’t been quite freaking good out of the gate I doubt it would have survived so long, so a deep debt is owed to our first head brewer for the gist of a killer recipe.

And before roasting his choice of vernacular, I’ll make a historical defense: a recipe for a 68/- from Usher’s in Edinburgh, 1885, has an OG of 80, so extrapolating that down to 60/-, we’d expect an OG of ~71, which is well above ours in the 40s (I had to sort out payment via email with a dude in a homebrewing club in the UK to get the book containing the source to that - knock yourself out).

But today, a Scottish Light or 60/- is a beer in the 2.5%-3.2% ABV range, with a color in the 17-22 SRM range (which is to say, no worries there, The King’s Taxes is almost certainly under 22 SRM), as per those same Flashcards. Even the Scottish Heavy, per the BJCP, is 3.2%-3.9%. So The King’s Taxes, at 4.7%, is definitively a Scottish Export or 80/- (3.9%-6%) by modern standards.

So, thanks for reading, and we’ll see ya next week!

Cheers,

Adrian