Any beer aficionado would identify the most significant events in brewing in the past three hundred years as the development of IPA by the British, and the introduction of Pilsner in Bohemia. The invention of Porter in the early 18th century was as noteworthy. It signaled a shift in brewing practice, drove the industrial revolution relative to brewing, and sired one of the most-beloved modern beers, stout. Porters birth can be pinpointed precisely, for it was concocted for a specific reason. Porter rose to dominance, was supplanted by its opposite, then its offspring, and eventually disappeared altogether. Given up for dead just three decades ago, it has been resurrected by the current proclivity for historical beers.
Porter was created specifically to lessen the load on London publicans who served legions of thirsty laborers.
Birth of a Style
Most beer styles have a seminal quality to them, having arisen through local agrarian custom, raw materials, and environmental conditions, sometimes fine-tuned by technology. Porter was created specifically to lessen the load on London publicans who served legions of thirsty laborers. They served a blend of beers of various strengths and maturity, usually three, known as “three threads,” but sometimes even more. A mash was saturated and drained three separate times to produce three different worts, with the resultant beers known as strong, middling or common, and small beers. The strong beer was for keeping, and used after a period of maturation during which it developed lactic and musty cask character from resident lactobacillus and Brettanomyces organisms. Small beers were fermented and consumed quickly. Middling beer was somewhere in between. The variety didn’t stop there however. Pale malt, produced around London, and the beers made from it were referred to as “twopenny.” Pale malt, and hence twopenny, were expensive but it nevertheless was a common “thread.” The majority of the beer was some shade of brown, produced by the cheaper amber and brown malt.
It was the brainstorm of Ralph Harwood in 1722 of the Bell Brewhouse in Shoreditch,, and perhaps a few other less famous brewers, that altered London pub culture. Rather than putting the publicans through the rigors of mixing stale, brown, and pale beer, he brewed a beer from pale and brown malt, combining worts previously fermented separately. A measure of stale beer in the cask provided the expected lactic/Brett tartness. The result was a reasonable approximation of the three threads and probably resembled the middling beers mentioned above. Harwood named it “EntireButt.” The sobriquet of porter was adopted because of its immense popularity with the porters who comprised a good portion of the workforce. Not mahogany-black beer as modern drinkers are familiar with, porter was instead brown, a bit rough and smoky, and generously hopped, as hop usage was blossoming as a way to spice and preserve beer.
Industrial Porter
The popularity of porter during the 18th century coincided nicely with the groundswell of the Industrial Revolution. Brewing moguls emerged and built massive breweries to slake the thirst of the burgeoning and, relatively speaking, well-off workforce. Steam-powered engines provided obvious advantages to the mega-breweries. Other, more obscure improvements in brewing technology, also contributed to the bloated nature of the industry. Coopers designed gargantuan aging casks, crucial to the character of porter, capable of holding 20,000 barrels or more of maturing beer. Skeins of these massive vats allowed some brewers to produce over 200,000 barrels of beer per year. Innovative copper cooling systems allowed year-round brewing and storing of beer.
Brewers took advantage of the improving trade routes, and porters popularity, to send their brew throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland. To the disdain of the brewers outside of London, the imported porter was putting many on the verge of bankrupcy. The solution was to make porter themselves. By copying the London brewers, or hiring London-trained brewers, they were able to stay afloat in a very competitive endeavor. Guinness was brewing only porter early in the 19th century, became well-known for its stout, simply a strong version of porter, and eventually exported to England. Within a century, Guinness became the largest brewery in the world.
