More dry stout and sweet stout

Here’s a use of the term “dry stout” in the 1969 International Brewers’ Journal, to follow on from the 1956 usage I noted last month. It’s looking like Michael Jackson didn’t invent the term off his own bat after all. According to the Journal, a typical UK brewer’s range would include

a cheap as well as a premium brand of pale ale, a brown sweet ale, a sweet stout and in many cases a proprietary dry stout, self maturing in bottle, of another brewer.

I suppose we can all guess what the proprietary dry stout was – bottle-conditioned Guinness.


I’m quite interested now in why sweet stout declined in popularity. These adverts make it quite clear that it was still part of Scottish breweries’ core range in the late 1960s. Tennent’s even had two: their own Tennent’s Sweet Stout (third from the left next to the Carling), and the Sweetheart Stout acquired through the merger with United Caledonian Breweries just a couple of years before this ad.


Did sweet stout drinkers just die off in the 70s like drinkers of mild?

One more thing. Note the absence of anything called “Scottish 80/–”, or anything involving shillings from the ranges of beer.

Credit to www.cannyscot.com for the advert images. It’s a great site.