Another Reading…

…from the Holy Book of Beer by Garrett Oliver.

Thought I would interrupt this tale briefly to see what the good book has to say about the beer style I spent a month tasting.  It didn’t occur to me to check out the entry on Porter while I was in the middle of the fast, but am kind of glad I didn’t so I wouldn’t be led to interpret it on anything but my own naked opinion.  We scientists are big on non-biased data collection.

“Today the best renditions of porter are well balanced and aromatic, with predominant notes of rich chocolate as well as hints of coffee, caramel, nuts, and sometimes faint smokiness, combined with an often dry, even slightly acidic, finish.”

Well, that general description is pretty much spot on from my experience, although I would say *most* of the porters I tried had that little bit of acidity on the back end.  It is definitely more prevalent in the English versions, where it is almost a musty acidity, like it’s been sitting in the back of a 500 year-old church for awhile (maybe it has?).

I have heard most of the background on porter before, supposedly invented in 1722 in East London, and named after the working class dudes who carried heavy stuff and therefore needed to drink away the lower lumbar discomfort.  By some accounts, it started as a blend of “threads”, casks of “brown beer” of varying age, strength, and quality custom blended by the master mixologists of the age.  Eventually, the “inventor” (Ralph Harwood) started making it easier for the publicans and blending it prior even to delivery.

Or not.

Apparently, the history books are murky here…a deep mahogany perhaps.  History is written not only by the victors, but the sober too?  What does seem consensus is that porter started as a blend, perhaps as an aged version of brown beer, and it was this aged character (“stale”, a good term – like bad means good now) that made it prized.  Several beers were made from the same mash, and these were blended either together or with older batches to create the desired porter-y-ness.

Eventually porter became (arguably) the most popular beer style in the history of the world up to that point, with its fortunate timing with that whole industrial revolution and advent of mass production thing, peaking around 1820.  There were HUGE breweries throughout England making only porter, and a lot of it.  In almost cartoon-like fashion, perhaps the symbolic culmination of this porter boom came in October 1814 when a huge aging vat burst (this particular brewery had the record wooden porter vat of 27,750 bbl capacity), creating a river of porter that crushed houses and drowned several people.  Not the best way to go out (I would prefer a nice suffocating IPA personally).

Porter’s dominance started changing around 1820 when the technology of malting changed, and black malts without the scorch and smoke of the old brown malts (kilned on straw or wood) allowed the addition of color to the beer with less dark malt, therefore enabling increased use of pale malts with much better sugar extraction (efficiency) as the base of the beers.  Porter gave birth to many popular progeny, including robust porter, baltic porter, and the stouts – kind of the Rick Barry of the beer world.  But unfortunately, the same thing (technology advance) that put porter on the throne, also led to it’s eventual downfall (how Shakespearean).  By the late 19th century, malting techniques and refrigeration technology were leading a revolution in lightening of beer…to pale ales in the British Isles, and lagers like the famous pilsner of Bohemia (born 1842) that spread throughout continental Europe, a beer that was shockingly light and clear and refreshing and a paradigm shift in the beer world at that point.  By 1920 or so, ding dong porter was dead, but fortunately has found a renaissance here in the last 15-20 years starting primarily in the U.S.  It is now identified almost as purely a craft beer, and for me personally as that style of beer that I never would have tried or really appreciated if I hadn’t had such a delightfully weak will to resist my own insanities.