Brown ale breweries, such as Whitbread, introduced a second weaker and cheaper brown ale that was sometimes just a sweetened version of dark Mild. These beers had an original gravity of around 1.037. After World War II, most breweries stopped producing these stronger brown ales, with the exception of some breweries in the northeast of England. The majority had an OG in the range 1.030–1.035, or around 3% ABV, much like Manns Brown Ale today. North American brown ales trace their heritage to American home brewing adaptations of certain northern English beers, and the English influence on American Colonial Ales. English brown
Burton Ale Ale was brewed by collecting the first and richest wort and fermenting it separately to make strong ale... [It] would have been brewed from malt paler than the brown high-dried malt used for porter, but one that was still much darker than modern pale ale malts." It was "the original dark, rather sweet beer the brewers of Burton upon Trent made and exported to Russia before they started brewing even paler, bitterer India Pale Ales in the 1820s". "Burtons vary in flavour, some are quite strongly hopped, others retain the bitter-sweet flavour of mild beer." Burton Ales were generally aged