Double Brown Ale

Forget about Northern and Southern Brown Ale. A much more fascinating type of Brown Ale lurks in the shadows of the past: Double Brown. Historically, Brown Ale wasn’t split between North and South, but between Single and Double. Think of them like Bitter and Best Bitter. I’d put the dividing line around 1042º Plato, though, just like with Bitters, it’s impossible to pin down an exact figure.

Why do style guidelines lump Mild in with Brown Ale? If anything, it should be other way around. (Remember, Mild isn’t necessarily brown.) Blame probably lies with the final few twitches of Brown Ale’s broken body in the 1960s and 1970s, when a separate brew of Brown Ale wasn’t worth the trouble and British brewers just bottled their Mild with extra sugar thrown in. But it hadn’t always been like that.

Brown Ale’s time was short. The public went from love and adulation to scorn and rejection in only 40 years. The first modern Brown Ale, brewed by Manns of London, appeared just before 1900. Only after World War I did the style really take off. In the 1920s, most other London brewers introduced their own. By the 1930s, pretty much everyone in Britain brewed at least one.

What were these early Brown Ales like? Remarkably diverse. No one told brewers what a Brown Ale was supposed to be like. They just made it up themselves. I’ve studied details of 300-odd Brown Ales brewed in the 1920s and 1930s. The weakest have gravities below 1030º, the strongest over 1060º. To put this into context, the average gravity of all beer brewed in Britain varied between 1040º and 1043º in the interwar years.

Manns Brown Ale—the original—was about exactly average strength, 1042º. Yet its imitators varied wildly above and below this strength.

That some brewers produced more than one Brown Ale is a sign of its popularity. Whitbread was one of those breweries. Their first was called “Double Brown,” and, at about 1055º, it was a strong beer for its day. In terms of recipe, it was like a cross between their KK, or Burton Ale, and their Pale Ale; however, unlike KK, it contained no dark malts and derived all its color from sugar. The hopping is perhaps the most surprising attribute of Whitbread’s Double Brown. With 2 1/4 pounds per barrel, it was 50 percent more heavily hopped than either their Pale Ale or IPA.

After buying the Forest Hill brewery, Whitbread began producing a second Brown Ale, Forest Brown. This was much more modest in strength—just 1038º—and more lightly hopped.

Here are some other brewers with more than one Brown Ale in their portfolio. All of these brewers were from the south of England, with the exception of Vaux, who was from the North. Yet all are brewing beers that resemble both “Southern” and “Northern” styles of Brown Ale.

After World War II, Brown Ale went out of fashion. Many were discontinued, leaving Michael Jackson with a few remnants to try to classify. It’s no surprise that, without historical perspective, he struggled. Of the few left, all the strong examples were brewed in the North.

Double Brown Ale: another lost British style. I wish someone would brew one again. If any brewers are interested in giving it a go, I’ve got plenty of recipes. ■