The UK’s favourite brew in the 18th century survives to delight today
For more than 130 years the most popular beer in Britain was the dark, strong, roasty, bitter brew known as porter. It won a following far beyond its birthplace in London, with porter drunk from the taverns of New York, the palaces of St Petersburg, the foothills of the Himalayas and the shores of Botany Bay. Then, in Britain at least, it crashed out of favour, until revival in the late 1970s. Martyn Cornell traces its rise, fall and rebirth.
Porter was originally developed by brewers 300 years ago to satisfy the desire of the working classes in London for a cheap, refreshing, rejuvenating, energy-filled beer to keep them going through the day. Sales grew to volumes never seen before, the makers of porter became rich, as was said of one brewer in Southwark, London, “beyond the dreams of avarice”, and the size of the big London porter breweries was one of the marvels of the world.
From the end of the 19th century, however, porter began to lose sales in Britain, replaced in favour by other styles. The last porter was brewed in Britain early in the Second World War. The style hung on in Ireland, where it was still drunk by workers in the shipyards of Belfast until the early 1970s, but the shutters went down on Irish porter in 1973.
Porter continued to be brewed elsewhere: exports of strong London porter to the Baltic in the late 18th century had stimulated a taste for the style in countries such as Poland and Sweden which continues to this day. German brewers had also begun brewing the beer from at least the 1820s, and after the end of the Second World War “deutscher Porter“, “German porter”, remained in production in many of the nationalised breweries in communist East Germany. In the United States, and Canada, a few brewers still had porters in their portfolios in the 1970s: the style had always been popular in the coal-mining districts of Pennsylvania.
However, it was not until the publication by the British beer writer and journalist Michael Jackson of his World Guide to Beer in 1977, in which he called porter “a lost, but not forgotten beer”, that brewers here woke up to what they were missing. The following year, 1978, the first porters to be brewed in Britain for almost 40 years appeared, from the Yorkshire family brewer Timothy Taylor, at an original gravity (OG) of 1040, and from the Herefordshire-based Penrhos, one of the first of the new wave of microbreweries, at an OG of 1050. Today there are probably more than 300 different porters being brewed in the UK, at a wide range of strengths.
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