Lovely day for a porter

Art Culinaire, Spring, 2007

at the height of the British Empire, porter was the king of ales. By the 1970s, it was nothing but a fond memory for those old enough to recall its WWII-era demise. Reviving the style and generating interest has been a goal of craft brewers in the U.K. and U.S. ever since.

Porter is a type of ale, a top-fermenting style of beer that gets its dark ruby to black color from roasted malted barley. That porter was invented in London is undoubtedly true; that it is so named because it was the preferred tipple of the city's hard-working shipyard men is probably not. Beyond that, its origins are shrouded in uncertainty as dark as the drink itself.

Porter begins to appear in written sources as early as the 1720s although no clear definition of it is given. By anyone's best guess, porter seems to have developed out of the aging of brown ales, a process conducted at the breweries in large vats. The result was a ready-to-drink ale that was more convenient for the tavern owners who had previously been responsible for aging their own. To make the new arrangement more practical, brewers took to aging a small amount and blending it with two parts young porter. "It will produce a beverage of uniform strength, having the flavour of age, fine in summer, and full of tone in winter," William Loftus noted in his 1863 treatise The Brewer.

The first porters were brewed entirely of brown malt and were the strongest of their kind, weighing in with an alcohol content of about 6.6%. It seemed the ideal beer to brew, since brown malt was cheaper than the pale malt used to make other ales. But scientific inquiry around 1770 proved it to be a false economy. It was found that in the brewing process, brown malt creates one-third less fermentable material than pale malt. This in combination with a malt tax elevated by the Napoleonic Wars convinced brewers to find ways of using pale malt to produce their signature porters. The first step was making them weaker, bringing their strength down to about 5.5% ABV, where it stayed for many years. Beyond that, solutions included combining the malts; scorching a small quantity of malt; adding molasses-like evaporated wort; or incorporating burnt sugar. Then in 1816, when brewers were forbidden from using anything but malt and hops in their recipes, one desperate brewer found an inspired solution. In March 1817, Daniel Wheeler received British Patent No. 4112 for a roasting device that could deeply darken the malt without burning it, allowing brewers to use a combination of 95% pale malt and 5% "Patent Malt" to fashion tasteful porters once again.

All the fooling with the original recipe did nothing to diminish its popularity with the people. By the early 19th century, porter had become so popular, brewers were hard-pressed to produce enough. At the Meux & Co. Brewery in London, meeting the demand turned deadly. The brewery was famed for the immensity of its porter vat, which was built larger than prudent. On October 16, 1814, a crack in one of the massive, one-ton iron bands on the vat gave way, unleashing an alcoholic tide that claimed eight lives among the citizens of the surrounding neighborhood.

In its heyday, porter could be found wherever the British were and new styles appeared as interest grew throughout the empire. They were stronger, known as single, double and triple stout porters. Guinness, when it was first made in the late 18th century, was a double, or extra stout porter that eventually mellowed into the single stout porter, or stout, the world is now familiar with. The strongest porter spin-off, Russian imperial stout, was so made to survive the longest journeys. Russian imperial stout in turn inspired the creation of Baltic porters, porters made in the Baltic Sea region. Originally top-fermenting ales, Baltic porters came to be made with local brewing techniques in a bottom-fermenting lager-like style.

No one can say for certain why interest started to wane in the mid-19th century. Some feel it was the introduction of lagers from Germany and eastern Europe that spelled the end for porter. They were lighter, crisper and more appealing in the glassware that was becoming more widely used at the time. But the final blow surely came during World War I, when restrictions on grain usage pushed the strength of porter down further to about 4% ABV. Ireland, which did not have the same restrictions imposed upon it, was able to make stout porter for the British market that came to be preferred over the lightened London brews. Eventually there was no longer enough of a demand for old-fashioned porters and London brewers ceased their production altogether during World War II.

Over the past thirty years, interest in porter has ever so slowly risen on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1974, Anchor Steam Brewing in San Francisco released a porter as one of five beers created to revitalize the 19th-century company, a move that helped bring the craft brewing industry to life in the U.S. In Britain, the Samuel Smith brewery was the first to resurrect porter in its homeland, hitting the history books to make their modern Toddy Porter in 1979. Porter, once so commonplace, became a symbol of a craft rescued from extinction.