History of Beer: English Porter
The origin of the English Porter began somewhere in the early 1700s in Great Britain. According to popular legend, the origins of “Porter” were in a beer cocktail that mixed a portion of old beer with a portion of fresh beer that was done in order to achieve a certain flavor at a reasonable price. A London brewer then supposedly combined fresh and aged beer in a barrel at a brewery and the blend became known as the Porter.
By the year 1726, Porter was already prevalent throughout the city of London. THis style of beer became popular amongst the laborers who were coming to he city during the early English Industrial Revolution. The beer’s development and surge in popularity coincided with the enormous urban expansion of London during the Industrial Revolution. These workers were known as “Porters” and the beer’s popularity helped the beverage to take on the same name
Porter was originally made with cheap brown malt, which made the beer inexpensive to produce, and thus, affordable to the average working man. The malt was dried directly over a wood fire, which would burn or char a significant portion of the malt. This imparted a smoky flavor similar to that of coffee to the Porter. By the 1770s, technological advances in brewing made it more cost-effective for brewers to use pale malt when making Porter. Brewers then shifted the recipe to a blend of mostly pale malt with a small portion of brown malt, it made the beer cheaper to produce, however it had the unfortunate side effect of making the beer more pale in color, which led people to believe that the beer had been watered down. To combat this, brewers in the late 1700s added things such as opium, hemp, and sometimes the juice from an unspecified berry in India that was used by fishermen to stun fish for easy netting to their beer in order to darken the Porter. By 1780, some of the largest businesses in all of England were Porter brewers, some of them were even as valuable as banks.
By the 1800s, Porter was the first beer to be industrially produced in large breweries for a mass market and brewers took advantage of now-commonplace marketing strategies, such as product lines and brands. In 1817, Porter brewing was revolutionized in a big way with the introduction of “Black Patent Malt.” Daniel Wheeler invented the malt roasting drum that same year. This invention allowed for the production of very dark malt without risk of the grain catching on fire. This new system created what is known as “Black Patent Malt,” which is a phrase still used today.
This new type of malt solved the brewers’ dilemma. The new black malt allowed for the brewers to keep using the inexpensive pale malt that the recipe called for and retain the Porter’s dark color by using a small portion of the new black malt, and the recipe has stayed the same since then, and Porter to this day is the predecessor to many styles of beer popular throughout all of England.
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