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and then recreating old brewing recipes as accurately as possible, even working with craft maltsters to reproduce historical malts. On our brief visit, we sampled a duo of porters – one based on a recipe dating from the 1870s, another that harked back to porter’s swansong years, the 1950s. I won’t lie and tell you that I loved the 19th century reincarnation, even though it might make me seem like an intelligent and sophisticated drinker. e beer was tart and woody, a little smoky and a touch astringent from its lengthy stay in a barrel. Other than its mahogany hue, it was a long way from any pint of porter I had previously met. But then this was not meant to be a modern day porter and I have a feeling this beer would have nailed it in some 19th-century precursor to the BJCP. It also got me thinking about the beers of yore and how much they would di er from their current counterparts. BIRTH OF THE PORTER Despite an oft-repeated tale crediting one Ralph Horwood of London’s Bell Brewery with the invention of the style, porter wasn’t so much an invention as an evolution. e story begins in the English capital in the early 1700s when brewers favoured brown malt, despite its poor e ciency. ose early forebears to the porter were, according to reports, murky, muddled and with a distinct smokiness. Brown malt did not make for great beer, SIX OF THE BEST: SOUTH AFRICAN PORTERS TO TRY Aegir Project Midnight Porter Afro Caribbean Brewing Co. Pirate Porter Copperlake Breweries Robust Porter Doctrine Brewing Twisted Talisman Drifter Brewing Co. The Stormy Smoked Porter Nottingham Road Brewing Co. Pickled Pig Porter THE 1814 PORTER FLOOD As porter reached the apex of its popularity, brewers were building larger and larger wooden vats in which to age their beers. Some were recorded to be as huge as 20 metres in diameter. Luckily the tanks in our tale weren’t quite that big, or the ending would be far worse. It was October 17, 1814 when an iron hoop slipped off a tank containing some 500,000 litres of beer at Meux’s Brewery in London. The wood gave way and the beer escaped in a tsunami that took out other vats, smashed through the walls of the brewery and ran in torrents through the streets killing eight people and soaking everything in the vicinity with brown, partially aged beer. but early London brewers came up with a way to smooth out the harsh avours – they began to age their ales. Several months – or sometimes up to two years – in a vast wooden vat would help the beers mellow out, the harsh smokiness giving way to a softer character – and a pronounced tartness. e barrels would likely have contained Brettanomyces, whose name – meaning British fungus – was coined by scientists who isolated the wild yeast that gave British beers their characteristic tang. is aged, brown beer was a hit, not least with the working class. Most notably it was the drink of choice for the ticket porters who worked on the ames - kind of an early version of the Courier Guy. e beer became known for the profession of its most avid imbibers and within a decade or two, porter became the most popular style in the city. BOOM AND BUST e blossoming popularity of porter coincided with the industrial revolution, with technological developments ensuring that porter became more popular than any beer style that had come before it. First came the hydrometer, which showed brewers how ine cient their brown malt was. e bulk of the grist was swapped out for pale malt, with dark malts added to retain the beer’s trademark avour and colour. In 1817, Daniel Wheeler invented a kiln that allowed maltsters to roast grains without them catching re and so black patent malt was born. Soon, porter was no longer another brown ale, but a dark, dark beer that bordered on black. A major change was the advent of the steam engine, which meant bigger batches could be produced much faster and soon, brewing changed from a cottage industry to something far, far bigger. Porter is considered to be the rst industrial-scale beer. It was the rst beer to be shipped around the world on a large scale and by the middle of the 19th century, it accounted for 75% of the London market. But palates change and trends move on. Add to that the corners that some porter brewers started to cut and you begin to understand the slow demise of the style. Brewers stopped ageing their porters – a process no amount of industrial machinery could speed up – and began to use sugars and colourants instead of quality malts. The first beer to be shipped around the world on a large scale Gradually, porter’s popularity waned, with pale ale ready to take the stage. By the 1950s, porter was all but extinct and it would take a craft beer revolution to revive it. THE FIRST GLOBAL BEER Today, the porter family counts on members in various countries. e name Baltic porter seems to have emerged in Poland in the 1990s, but the concept dates back a couple of centuries before that. It wasn’t necessarily porters that were being enjoyed in Russia and the Baltics – in fact much that is written references double brown stouts. But whatever they were called, they were dark beers and over time, local brewers wanted to cut out the middle men that exporting employs and started recreating the beers in their own breweries. As well as being much higher in alcohol than other styles of porter – anything up to about 10% ABV – there is a crucial di erence in ingredients, speci cally the yeast. Rather than use the top fermenting ale yeast popular in the UK, these versions favoured the bottom fermenting yeasts of Bohemia and so the Baltic porter is actually a lager. A complex and rich beer, it champions the sweeter characteristics of the malts used, showcasing plums, to ee, molasses and a clean roasted avour that is more pronounced than in its English counterpart. ese strong porters also go by a more descriptive name in some parts: robust porters. Hopping across the Atlantic to the USA we nd a version that was born in the craft beer era. Stronger than English porter, the American porter is also generally more bitter, but the focus here is on malt, not hops as you might expect from an American craft beer. While American hops are used, big citrus or tropical fruit avours and aromas are not part of the style. Probably the least well-known member of the family is the German porter, which emerged in the mid-19th century. It’s a true sign of porter’s global dominance that these ontapmag.co.za | Autumn 2021 | 45