Do you have any shillings?

As mentioned briefly in the newsletter last week Four Peaks has now brewed their 1000th batch of beer. I'd like to congratulate them on their success and their longevity. Recently I had a discussion with Andy Ingram, the head brewer at Four Peaks about modern brewing and the fact that more and more breweries are making "extreme" beers, highly hopped and high alcohol that stray from the norm. Even though every once in awhile Four Peaks takes off on a tangent (such as with their date or pumpkin porter beer), Andy is in the camp of keeping with tradition and brewing beers according to their traditional style and not in the extreme beer camp. But is he really only brewing traditional beers on a day to day basis? You see, one of Four Peaks best selling beers since they opened has been Kiltlifter, a Scottish Ale. Even though this beer is considered a "traditional" ale now, at one point in time it was an "extreme" beer of it's day.

So why do I think a Scottish Ale like Kiltlifter WAS an "extreme" beer. Well, for one thing someone had to break the mold and make a beer with peated smoked malt. I'm sure that broke with tradition and made it taste different than other beers. Just by doing so it made it an "extreme" beer. Later in time, Scottish Ale became a traditional family of beers and it developed a subset of "extreme" beers within it's style family, much like a Double IPA is an offshoot of an IPA. The entire family of Scottish Ales are often referred to by "shillings." The common shilling numbers are 40, 60, 70, 80, 90, 120 and 140. The concept of referring to the beers was a financial matter used sometime after 1880 when the previous tax on sugar and malt was replaced by a beer duty tax in Scotland. Under the new beer duty tax, ale was priced in shillings per barrel. Basically, the more alcohol the beer had, the more the shilling number was and so even though all Scottish Ales were are made basically the same way, the 120 and 140 shilling beers became the extremely "extreme" beers of their day by having more alcohol than the lighter, lower alcohol beers. Now Kiltlifter is by no means a 120 or 140 shilling beer but just being in the overall style of a Scottish Ale brewed with peated malt makes it qualify as an "extreme" beer in my opinion.
The "shilling system" started to die out some time after World War II. Scottish Ales began to be known as "Light", "Heavy" and "Export but every once in a while you'll run across a beer with the shilling number. When you do you'll now know that the bigger the number the more "extreme" that beer was in time over a century ago.