Porter carries on through ages

On October 17th 1814, 196 years ago, a giant vat of maturing beer burst at Henry Meux's Horse Shoe Brewery in London's Tottenham Court Road, sending a tsunami of more than a million pints of beer bursting through the wall of the brewery out into the nearby streets.
 
The resulting wave partially demolished four houses and killed eight people. The beer was porter.
 
According to English beer historian Martin Cornell porter evolved as "a stronger, more hopped, more aged version of the heavy, sweet brown ale that was a staple product of London's brews in the late 17th and early 18th century". Strong, bitter and dark, it was the city brewers' response to increasing competition from heavily hopped pale ales from the country brewers.
 
In his definitive and mythbusting book" Amber, Gold and Black" Cornell informs us that the first porters were made with "highly dried brown malt, known as "blown", "snap" or porter malt, which had popped like popcorn after being dried very fast in an extra-hot kiln, heated with oak or beechwood faggots" . As you might imagine, this wood-fired kilning process produced very dark, smoky malt.
 
Cornell then gives us an insight into how the brewers toned-down that smokiness: "The new beer, which was fermented out as far as possible and therefore comparatively unsweet, was also aged until it lost the flavour of smoke from the wood-dried malt used to make it..." That ageing, or 'vatting' as it was known, took many months during which the beer gradually oxidised and soured. As a result porter had a distinctive sharp, quenching tartness.
 
 
Porter's ability to slake the thirst appealed to the men who unloaded ships on the River Thames and distributed goods throughout the city. They were called porters and the beer style soon became known by their name. The style was enormously successful and came to dominate the British brewing scene for a century. Porter was also widely exported and was emulated by brewers around the world, making it the first truly global beer style.
 
Most beer styles have evolved since their earliest days but none more so than porter. While the malts used in the original porters were exclusively dark wood-dried examples, smokeless fuels and improvements in the malting process saw brewers gradually using increasing quantities of new, more attenuative, pale malts in porters. The patenting, in 1817, of a new method of roasting malt at in excess of 200 degrees Celsius to produce a deep black "patent" malt allowed brewers to make even the darkest porter using almost all pale malt. As the old wood-dried malts were slowly abandoned the extended (and expensive) ageing process became unnecessary and porters lost their tartness.
 
Today, almost three centuries after it the style was first brewed, the name porter is usually associated with a dark beer of moderate strength, body and bitterness, with prominent coffee and chocolate flavours. It's interesting to note that those mocha-like flavours - which are produced by roasting the grain gently in modern, temperature-controlled drums similar to coffee roasters  - would have been absent in early porters.
 
Here in New Zealand we're lucky to have access to some excellent modern porters. Brewers such as Emerson's, Three Boys, Tuatara and Renaissance offer delightful examples, while 8 Wired's award-winning The Big Smoke brings a whiff of wood smoke to the equation. By cranking up the hop aromas and flavours, Yeastie Boys' Pot Kettle Black echoes an altgether hoppier 'New World' style of porter which has emerged from US West Coast brewers in recent times. With its delightful chewy brown malt character, Fuller's London Porter would be my favourite imported example of a modern porter.
 
If, however, you're keen to sample something vaguely akin to those early vatted porters I heartily recommend Greene King Strong Suffolk Ale from England (which is widely available), or any of the delightful dark ales from Liefmans or Rodenbach of Belgium (try beerstore.co.nz).
 
Cheers!
 
 
SOURCE
Geoff Griggs, The Marlborough Express