What Was Porter?
Over the centuries, porter has gone through several transformations. Martyn Cornell broke it down a the recent Recreating Old Beer Styles conference. Hat tip to Ed’s Beer Site for actually attending the conference.
In the beginning, porter was brewed with brown malt and tasted quite sweet fresh and downright sour with age. By the mid-eighteenth century, brewers were adding more hops and aging the beer longer to mellow out the acidic bite. It also became a little smoky.
To keep the product consistent, breweries installed larger and larger maturation tanks. The thick walled, oaken tanks kept oxygen out of the finished beer, making it less sour, but introduced Brettanomyces and other bacteria that gave a beer a rich, dry flavor.
In the early nineteenth century, brewers using new saccharometers realized they could extract more sugar from pale malt than the traditional brown malt porter was brewed with. To save money, brewers switched to pale malt and added all sorts of illegal adjuncts to make the beer look right. Everything from black licorice to coal dust was added to porter.
But with the introduction of black patent malt, brewers could legally darken their porter and still use the more efficient pale malts. The beer was more bitter than sour, and some people began to yearn for the old strong stuff. Over time porter got weaker and weaker, from a peak of seven percent to something closer to three percent.
Of course, all these porter developments took place in Britain, but across the globe, people developed a taste for the stuff. Carrie Ladd from Double Mountain is a recreation of a steamship porter, a beer brewed with lager yeast but fermented like an ale.
The beer is immediately recognizable as a porter. It has that iced coffee flavor I find myself craving in the warm weather. Roasted and bitter and removed of all sweetness. It’s got a much cleaner finish than most porters, making Carrie Ladd especially refreshing this time of year.