Whitbread Trophy Bitter is one of those beers. I remember drinking Trophy back in the 1980s, although the recipe below actually goes back rather further than that, to 1965.
It's taken from Ron Pattinson's excellent Shut Up About Barclay Perkins blog, where he reconstructs old British beers from historic brewing records.
There's an interesting wrinkle with Trophy because it wasn't necessarily one single beer. As Whitbread acquired breweries around the country, it often renamed an existing local ordinary bitter as Trophy. At one point there were apparently more than 20 different beers carrying the Trophy name, so the pint I remember from the 1980s may well have been quite different from this 1965 Whitbread W.
The beer I remember from my early drinking days in Yorkshire is likely to have come from the Whitbread East Pennines Trophy, I'll have to track down that Trophy Bitter Recipe! And I think I have!
Still, this feels like a very good place to start the journey.
The interesting part about this recipe is the use of nearly 12% flaked barley was a calculated commercial move. It allowed Whitbread to brew a highly attenuated, cheap-to-produce session beer (dropping all the way down to a thin 1.007 FG), while using the heavy beta-glucans and proteins in the unmalted flaked barley to artificially restore the mouthfeel and "chewiness." It literally built "the body that satisfies" out of thin air, ensuring the beer didn't taste like watery dishwater despite being highly fermented.
1965 Whitbread Trophy Bitter
The recipe is for approximately 23 litres, or 5 Imperial gallons.
| Ingredient | Amount | % |
| Pale malt | 7 lb / 3.18 kg | 82.35% |
| Crystal malt 60L | 0.5 lb / 227 g | 5.88% |
| Flaked barley | 1 lb / 454 g | 11.76% |
Hops
| Hop | Amount | Addition |
| Fuggles | 0.75 oz / 21 g | 75 minutes |
| Goldings | 0.75 oz / 21 g | 40 minutes |
| Goldings | 0.75 oz / 21 g | 20 minutes |
| Goldings | 0.25 oz / 7 g | Dry hop |
Numbers
- OG: 1.0365
- FG: 1.007
- ABV: 3.9%
- IBU: 29
- SRM: 6
- Apparent attenuation: 80.82%
Method
- Mash at 148°F / 64°C
- Sparge at 165°F / 74°C
- Boil for 75 minutes
- Pitch at 64°F / 18°C
- Yeast: Wyeast 1099 Whitbread Ale
What catches my eye is the 11.76% flaked barley. Trophy's advertising made quite a thing of the beer having body, with the old jingle talking about having "the body that satisfies" alongside the much better remembered line, "the pint that thinks it's a quart".
For a beer with an original gravity of only 1.0365 and an ABV of 3.9%, that's quite a claim, but suddenly the amount of flaked barley in the recipe becomes interesting. Nearly 12% of the grist should give the beer some extra body and mouthfeel, as well as helping with head retention, without needing a higher finishing gravity or more alcohol.
The hopping looks spot on for what I'd expect from an old-school British bitter too. Fuggles for the main bitterness, Goldings later in the boil and just 7 g of Goldings as a dry hop. At 29 IBU against such a modest gravity it shouldn't be bland, but neither does it look as though the hops are supposed to dominate.
Whether this tastes anything like the Trophy I remember drinking in the 1980s remains to be seen, but that's part of the fun. It's a genuine historical Trophy recipe, it's only 3.9%, and there's nothing particularly complicated about it. Definitely one for the brew list.
Recipe adapted from Let's Brew - 1965 Whitbread W (Trophy) by Ron Pattinson.
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