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.
An internationally recognised expert on beer, beer styles and brewing history, a widely travelled beer writer, blogger and speaker. Author of four books and hundreds of articles and blogs at zythophile.co.uk
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.
This has led to some confusion, because porter’s originally stronger brother-brew, stout, had continued to be brewed, while porter disappeared. “Stout” was an adjective meaning “strong”, and “stout porter” was the name given to the strongest versions of porter, those above six or seven per cent alcohol by volume, with “stout porter” eventually shortened simply to “stout”. But the restrictions brought in by the British government during the First World War on beer strengths and the amount of beer that could be brewed, plus, at the same time, much higher taxes on stronger beers, mean that brewers lowered strengths to try to keep their beers affordable, and porter dropped from five or six per cent abv to below four per cent abv – a beer could now be called a “stout” even if it only had 4.2 percent alcohol. When porters returned, they were often as strong as, or stronger than, many still surviving stouts. Thus the answer to the question: “What’s the difference between porter and stout?” is: “There isn’t any, not today.“While stout was once the stronger sub-set of porter, even that is no longer true.
Wars and taxes were actually responsible for the birth of porter. The beer was named after, that section of the London working class known as porters, who loaded and unloaded ships anchored in the Thames, and carried goods, parcels, letters and messages about the streets of the city. Around 10,000 men worked as porters in London: theirs was a tough, tiring, strenuous job, carrying loads of up to 70 or 80 kilograms all day. They needed a lot of calories to keep going, and much of that came from beer. Porters might drink 14 pints or more of porter a day.
The beer they consumed in such huge quantities had developed early in the 18th century as a result of higher duties on beer, malt and hops and increased prices for vital materials such as coal. The most popular drink in London at the start of the 18th century was brown beer, made from well-dried malt. But brewers were struggling to keep the beer affordable. Britain was at war – generally with France – almost continually from 1688 to 1714, and to pay for a fighting army and navy, the tax on strong beer doubled, while in 1697 a new tax was introduced on malt.
To try to hold the price of their beer down in the face of these rising costs, London’s brewers lowered its strength. To stop it souring at the lower strength, they added more hops, the preservative effect that hops have on beer replacing the preservative effect of lots of alcohol. They also used cheaper wood-dried malt: but the problem with wood-dried malt was that it gave the beer a very smoky flavour that many drinkers did not like. To get rid of the smoky flavour, the brewers began storing the beer longer, up to 10 or 12 months, with the tang from the wood-dried malt disappearing over that time.
However, these two changes, more hops and longer storage, also brought about a miraculous improvement in the quality of the beer. The long storage meant that Brettanomyces yeasts, ubiquitous in the wooden vessels and wooden casks used in 18th century breweries, had the time to eat up the higher sugars that ordinary Saccharomyces cerevisiae brewer’s yeast leaves behind. This added flavourful esters to the beer, as well as a small increase to the alcoholic strength. Meanwhile the high hop rate meant that organisms such as lactobacillus and pediococcus, which give a tart, sour flavour to beer, were largely kept at bay. The result was a beer with a riper, roasty, more estery, less sweet flavour, just tart enough to be refreshing, at a price that kept it affordable for London’s working classes.
The name “porter” was in use for this new style of beer by 1721, three centuries ago. Significantly, the mention came in a comment about drinking porter and eating beef and cabbage in a “cook’s shop”, a type of cheap early restaurant, thus associating porter from the start with hearty, filling food. It is a link that we have largely forgotten, but porter goes tremendously well with all sorts of dishes, from roast pork to curry.
Fresh porter, slightly sweet, was known as “mild” porter, aged porter, more tart, as “stale”, in the sense of “having stood around” rather than “having gone off” – porter drinkers for many years would drink mixtures of “mild” and “stale”, drawn by bar staff to their preferred proportions.
London brewers originally aged their porter in big 108-gallon wooden casks called “butts”, which gave porter its alternative name, “butt beer”. They hired cellars all round London to store the butts of ageing porter in, and men named “abroad coopers” had the task of going around checking on the beer as it aged. It could be a dangerous job: in 1758 an abroad cooper employed by one London brewer went into a store cellar containing 40 unstoppered butts of maturing porter, and collapsed. A sedan chair man went in to rescue him, but collapsed as well. Both had been overcome by the carbon dioxide gas given off by the porter as it went through a slow secondary fermentation, and both died.
Eventually brewers worked out that it was better and more economical to mature the porter in large vats, rather than in butts. So then the big London breweries started to outdo each other with larger and larger vats: vessels holding 1,500 barrels at Thrale’s brewery in Southwark, on the south side of the Thames by London Bridge, in 1769; a vat holding 4,500 barrels at Richard Meux’s brewery on the north side of the City of London in 1790. Meux went on to build even bigger vats at his brewery in Liquorpond Street, culminating in one that stood some 25 feet tall, with a diameter of 65 feet, which held an alleged 20,000 barrels.
Inevitably it ended in tears: in 1814 a vat holding 3,000 barrels of porter at the brewery on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road in the heart of London, owned by Richard Meux’s son Henry, burst apart after one of the giant iron hoops holding it together fell off, and a wave of more than 500 tonnes of beer crashed through the back wall and into the slums behind. It was 5:30 in the evening, and the men who lived in the multi-occupation tenements around the brewhouse were all still at work, otherwise the death toll would have been significantly higher: even so, eight people, all women or young children, were killed in the disaster. Those living in cellars had to climb on top of their tallest pieces of furniture to save themselves from drowning in porter.
By now porter was changing its nature. In 1784 an English brewer named John Richardson had published a book describing how to measure the amount of fermentable material in wort, using a hydrometer, or as he called it, a saccharometer. The saccharometer showed what poor value for money the “high dried” brown malt the porter brewers used was: unlike modern brown malts it was still diastasic, that is, it still contained the enzymes to convert starch into sugar, but the heating it had gone through meant it gave almost a third less extract than pale malt. The porter brewers, always looking to keep their costs down, sought to use more of the more cost-effective pale malt in brewing porter. The problem was that this produced a paler beer, and the public wanted their porter to stay dark. Brewers tried various colourings to darken porters brewed with pale malt – liquorice, burnt sugar, molasses – but the tax authorities would not allow anything to go into beer that had not been taxed, and all these additives were ruled illegal.
Eventually, in 1817, a Londoner named Daniel Wheeler invented a way of roasting malt (on which tax had been paid, thus keeping the taxman happy) that produced a colouring which could be used in tiny quantities – less than 2½ per cent to an otherwise all-pale-malt grain bill – to produce a beer that had the colour and flavour the public demanded from a porter. Brewers quickly switched to using Wheeler’s roast malt, particularly in Ireland, where porter had become extremely popular. While most English brewers continued to use some brown malt in their porter, Irish brewers used only pale ale and roast malt, to produce a drier beer than the English version.
Porter was a popular beer in Britain’s colonies, and even when the colonists in America broke away to form the United States, they carried on brewing porter long after sales fell off in Britain. Exports of porter from London prompted brewers in countries around the Baltic, such as Sweden and Poland, to start brewing porter themselves, which eventually led to the development of the style known as Baltic Porter (actually a version of what was called in Britain Double Stout, with a strength of around 8 percent abv, and today brewed with lager yeasts rather than the original top-fermenting yeasts). It was also brewed in South America; in India, where it was more popular with British soldiers garrisoned there than Indian Pale Ale (it was the officers who drank IPA); in Australia and New Zealand; and also in South Africa.
In 1802 a journalist named John Feltham wrote an article in which he attempted to give the origins of porter. Unfortunately he badly mangled the job, misunderstanding his sources, and claiming that porter was invented by an obscure East London brewer named Ralph Harwood. Made to replace a popular mixed beer called “three-threads”, which, Feltham claimed, was made up of three different beers, and involved the landlord having to go to three separate casks in order to serve it. None of it was true: Ralph Harwood existed, but he had nothing to do with the development of porter, being a comparatively small operator. There was no one “inventor” of porter: instead it was developed over a decade or more by different London brewers refining their processes. Three-threads existed, but it was a mixture of extra strong and weak beer sold as a tax fiddle, not a blend of three different beers; and porter was not “invented” to replace it. However, Feltham’s story, though completely wrong, clearly appealed to people, with a lone hero solving a tricky problem to the public benefit, since it has been repeated hundreds of times in the past 220 years, and is still being repeated today, though debunked long ago.
The revival of porter since the 1970s has led brewers to experiment with the beer, taking the coffee, chocolate and liquorice flavours found in a good porter, thanks to the roast grains that go into it, and adding actual coffee, actual chocolate, actual liquorice, and also additives such as plums, vanilla, cherries, to heighten and enhance the porter experience.
At the same time brewers have looked to brew authentic porters as they would have been made in the past, even reinventing diastasic brown malt to bring back those original flavours. However, the long history of porter means that when you want to make an “authentic” brew, you have to decide what period in history you wish to be authentic to.
Style “Palaeo-porter”
Dates circa 1720-1750
● Brewed entirely from highly-dried brown malt; matured for a relatively short time in butts; strong and cloudy and probably with a smoky tang.
● Colour: dark brown
Style “Early meso-porter”
Dates circa 1750-1790
● Brewed entirely, or mostly, from brown malt; matured for a long time (up to two years) in large vats, when called “stale”; fine, clear and strong; some sent out as new, or “mild” porter for mixing in the drinker’s pot with stale, or matured porter.
● Colour: dark brown
Style “Late meso-porter”
Dates circa 1790-1820
● Generally brewed from a mixture of pale and brown malts, or pale, amber and brown malts; most sent out mild, the remainder vatted for up to two years before sending out to publicans as “stale” or “entire” for mixing with the mild porter. Often flavoured with liquorish or coloured with burnt sugar.
● Colour: variable but brown
Style “London neo-porter”
Dates circa 1820-1880
● Brewed from a mixture of pale malt, brown malt and black or patent malt. Still sent out as mild and stale, and mixed to the customer’s taste by the publican. Gradually as the 19th century continued, less and less “stale” porter was produced.
● Colour: brown to black
Style “Irish neo-porter”
Dates circa 1820-onwards
● Brewed from a mixture of pale malt and black or patent malt. Sent out as two versions, “low” (mature and nearly flat) and “high” (made lively and full of condition with an addition of fresh still-fermenting wort), with customers served their beer from two casks to produce a thick white head.
● Colour: black
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