Porters and Stouts

Then
I grew up and had a beer, and ran into porters and stouts.
The relationships of these beers makes for one very, very
messy Venn diagram, with more circles than a UFO nut’s
cornfield, a lot of scratched-out lines and erasures, and
some really odd intersections. Porter definitely came first,
and stout came later, but the two have been quite prolific,
with multiplying sub-categories. Grab a pencil and let’s
figure this out, because one of the enduring questions
newly-minted specialty beer aficionados love to ask is
“What’s the difference between porter and stout?” You’ll
need an answer for them.

There’s an easy
answer, and it’s pretty easy to nail down. Just go to the
Brewers Association website, www.beertown.org, click on the
Great American Beer Festival button and start going through
the brewers’ information. You’ll come to the GABF Styles
List for the beer competition. This year’s category
descriptions include Robust Porter, Brown Porter, Classic
Irish-style Dry Stout, Foreign (Export)-style Stout,
American-style Stout (essentially Foreign Stout with a
barge-load of hops added), Sweet Stout, Oatmeal Stout, and
Imperial Stout. Just read the descriptions and check out the
differences.

Too much work?
Okay, there’s another easy answer, and the one that most
brewers will give you off the cuff. “Simple answer to that
is porter is all malt,” said David Geary, founder of D.L.
Geary in Portland, Maine, “versus stout, which is made from
malt and roasted barley. True stout has roasted barley as
well as malted barley, which gives it the chewiness that
makes it stout. That’s about it.” But it’s not that simple,
either. There are stouts that don’t use roasted barley,
there are a few porters that have it (or enough heavily
roasted malts that they develop that chewiness independently
of the barley), and who’s to say that the labeling is
wrong?

Dave Howard, at
Wachusett Brewing, laughed, and indicated that it’s a
vanishing difference these days. “It’s very, very close,”
Howie said. “If you had a lighter porter and a really big
stout, it would be clearer. But we like to put more stuff in
it, there are so many good malts out there now. Porters have
become the steroid-pumped athletes of the beer world. You
can stand by and brew by tradition, and feel good, but
you’re not going to look too good compared to the big boys.
Everyone’s trying to be the big boy on the block today, and
a porter just doesn’t make it unless you beef it up.” Howie
freely admitted that he was guilty of beefing up Wachusett’s
Black Shack Porter.

Jeff Coleman,
head of importer Distinguished Brands, brings in O’Hara
Stout from Ireland and Fuller’s London Porter. He stuck
tongue in cheek and came up with this difference. “In
America, most people would say a porter is a British version
of a stout,” he said, ” if their name’s O’Malley. If it’s
Churchill, they’d say it was an Irish version of a porter!
It’s pretty close: if you taste a porter and a stout on two
different evenings without being told what you’re drinking,
you’d think probably it was just two different brands of the
same kind of beer. Side-by-side, I think anyone could
recognize the difference.”

Jim Dorau, who
brews both at Mercury Brewing – Ipswich Porter and the
mighty, celebrated Ipswich Oatmeal Stout – thinks there’s
even less difference than that. “They’re actually one and
the same,” he said. “After they started brewing porter, some
people wanted it more stout, bigger, stronger. So they
started making it bigger, heavier. It’s a stout
porter.”

One and the
same? Dorau’s answer puts porter and stout where they
belong: on a continuum of very dark ales. Porter is on the
dark side of brown ale, the classic Guinness is black, and
Dorau’s Oatmeal Stout, like most imperial stouts, is
positively inky, opaque in any thickness over one
inch.

Craig Hartinger,
who works with Merchant du Vin bringing in the well-known
Samuel Smith Taddy Porter, Oatmeal Stout and Imperial Stout,
gave that as his first difference. “With a stout, you really
can’t get light through the glass,” he said. “With a porter
you should see a deep red color.” This idea of porter and
stout as degrees of darkness among beers that are
intrinsically related makes the most historical sense, too,
when you consider how the two beers came to be. Porter and
stout are two of the earliest invented beer styles, beers
that were purposely designed for particular reasons. Porter
was a London beer, and is traditionally dated to 1722,
though beer called “porter” is older than that. “The origins
of porter were in Shoreditch, in London,” says Geary, whose
Geary’s London Porter is a carefully researched re-creation
of an old London recipe. “It was a dock area, and the
longshoremen were called porters. There’s been some nonsense
about them being railway porters, but it was way before
railroads. They liked the beer, and that’s what it became
known as.”

Porter was
originally a mixed beer, made by mixing two or more
‘threads’, as they called the pouring stream of beer from
different taps. Surprisingly, one of the “threads” in the
more complex three-and-up threads beers was stale ale, aged
ale that was left to go somewhat sour by intent. Mixing the
threads was profitable, but time-consuming.

“Porter served a
bunch of functions,” Geary said. “It was a beverage to be
consumed by the workers and their families; there was no
pure water to drink. Milk, as a beverage, was probably
unheard of. Wine, cider and beer were the only safe things
to drink. They were traditionally low in alcohol. As near as
I can tell, it looks like porter was about 3% by volume. The
little storefront restaurants, if you could call them that,
served huge quarters of beef made in cauldrons, essentially
pot roasts with porter, and they were called porterhouses.
That’s where “porterhouse steak” came from.”

In 1722, an
enterprising brewer/tavern-owner (there were quite a few
brewpubs in those days) named Ralph Harwood got the idea to
brew a single beer to simulate the mixed threads of porter,
what he called “entire porter”. He brewed with a common malt
of the time, brown malt, that was kilned over wood fires and
added a brown color and a bit of a smoky flavor to the beer.
By and by, he invented a way to brew a single beer that
embodied the entire essence of porter in one barrel. One
barrel, one beer, one pull: one drink was ready.
Genius.

Partly genius,
anyway. In a way that prefigures an unfortunate number of
the past decade’s microbrewers, Mr. Harwood was evidently a
beer genius but a business idiot. After his invention of
brewed porter, Mr. Harwood quickly disappeared into complete
obscurity as ever-larger brewers took his idea and flooded
(in one instance, quite literally) the market. In fact, Mr.
Harwood’s disappearance was so sudden and total, that some
scholars believe his story to be too pat. Mr. Harwood may
have been only a story, and porter a product of some
unknown, unsung brewer.

However and
whoever, entire porter (quickly shortened to be once again
simply “porter”) took London by storm. As the Industrial
Revolution gathered speed, porter became the first
“industrial” beer. Brewers became fantastically wealthy by
the standards of the times, and were some of the first rich
‘arrivistes’ to come knocking on the doors of the
aristocracy, demanding entrance on the strength of their
money and power.

David Geary took
much of the basis for his Geary’s London Porter from a
booklet of 35 pages, called “Every Man His Own Brewer”,
which was written in 18O2 by a disgruntled Shoreditch porter
brewery employee who was giving away the secrets of the big
porter brewers. “It describes porter in great detail,” Geary
said, “what it was, how it was made, who drank it, and what
it was like. The interesting thing is the various
combinations of ingredients. It’s remarkable what they’d put
in it to achieve different results. They would put capsaicin
in it in the winter, and put laudanum in it for sleepy time.
We, of course, don’t use any of that. But it makes for
fascinating reading!” Porter breweries grew larger and
larger, with 5OOO-barrel vats ribbed with cast-iron
supports, big enough spaces that brewers threw launch
parties and served dinners for 1OO in the vats before their
first use. And the bigger they grew, the more porter people
bought. As Samuel Johnson famously noted to a friend at the
public auction of a porter brewery, “We are not here to sell
a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of
growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.” In this era,
Arthur Guinness opened a porter brewery in Dublin, probably
dreaming with a bit of his own avarice. But while Guinness
had craftily secured stupendously cheap land and water
rights, he still had to make his porter with malt, and the
British government had steeply raised the tax on malt.
Guinness, in a stroke of genius, decided to replace some of
his roasted malts with roasted barley not taxable under the
law.

Not only did he
save a few pennies on the barrel, Guinness invented a new
beer: stout, or stout porter, as it was originally called.
Stout was popular almost immediately, a hit with a nation
already accustomed to dark beer.

In the second
decade of the 19th century, another invention would cause
stout’s popularity to increase even more: the patent coffee
roaster. Coffee was all the rage in London, and coffeehouses
sprang up like well, like Starbucks. Again, in the spirit of
industrialism, someone invented a coffee roaster to save the
time of hand-roasting coffee beans in a pan on the
stove-top. Brewers, or more properly, maltsters, saw the
possibilities of this device immediately, and soon had a
variety of deeply roasted malts on the market. They had also
switched fuels in the malthouse, and were kilning their
malts with coal and coke for a more controllable and precise
heat.

Porter brewers
were still using brown malt. But a couple fellows
experimented, and found that although brown malt was cheaper
by the ton, pale malt was so much better made and more
efficient in the brewkettle that it was actually cheaper by
the barrel. All that was needed was to darken the beer it
made, and you’d have porter and the patent coffee roaster
became the patent malt roaster, and delivered chocolate malt
and black patent malt, just the thing for making this new
pale porter dark. The brewers were ecstatic, and visions of
hefty savings poured through their heads.

Classically,
however, no one had thought to taste the beer or see what
the consumer thought of it. Mostly, the consumer didn’t
think it tasted like porter, and porter sales went into a
slow decline. There was also a roaring demand for the new
pale ales. Ironically, the pale beers made from the new pale
malt became very popular without the dark coloring, probably
due to another benefit of the Industrial Revolution: cheap
and plentiful glass drinkingware, which made a pale,
sparkling beer an appealing vision to behold.

Porter, like the
formerly dominant dark lagers in Germany, just couldn’t
compete with pale beer’s beauty. Stout had become entrenched
in Ireland as an Irish product different from the English
beers, and the coffee roaster revolution made the roasted
barley even better. A couple strong stouts lingered on
elsewhere as curiosities, but almost everywhere porter had
held sway turned to sparkling pale ales. By the 196Os,
porter had all but disappeared from English pubs, an
astonishing turn of tastes. The only porters left were the
massive, largely lager-brewed Baltic porters of central
Europe and Scandinavia, and the lager-brewed “Pennsylvania
porters” made in the US by regional brewers Yuengling and
The Lion in Pennsylvania.

It was the
microbrewery revolution that brought porter back. The first
real microbrewer in America was Fritz Maytag, who bought the
Anchor Brewery in San Francisco and dedicated it to creating
what he called real beer. The first new beer he made, after
perfecting the brewery’s Anchor Steam, was Anchor Porter in
1972.

“I wanted to
make more than one beer,” Maytag explained, “partly out of
pride and enthusiasm for the idea of brewing, and partly
because I had knowledge about brewing and equipment that I
liked, and I was like an artist with his materials all
together. I could see that the American brewing industry,
and I soon realized the world brewing industry, was dying
for validity and variety. I wanted to make various things,
and a Porter – a really rich, dark beer – was the obvious
first choice, because it was radically different from our
regular beer.”

Maytag started
something with Anchor, but he also started something with
Anchor Porter. The growing trickle of microbreweries that
followed in his pioneering path – New Albion, Sierra Nevada,
BridgePort, Boulder – also produced porters. They never were
huge, but porter was reborn, and survives. It’s even made a
triumphant return to the UK, where Fuller’s London Porter
holds a restored place as a brilliantly brewed
example.

Stout always had
Guinness, but even there, the micros often made a stout, at
first just to prove they could, then branching out into the
wilder varieties that had been lost and forgotten like
porter. Imperial stouts are popular with the geekerie in
America these days, or a nice oatmeal stout, or a shockingly
hopped stout that adds that Pacific Northwest hop steroid
tang to things. There are even other Irish stouts available
now: Murphy’s, Beamish and the stronger, creamy
O’Hara’s.

One thing these
beers continue to have in common, unfortunately, is that
they are rarely huge sellers for brewers. “We’d never pay
the bills on them,” Wachusett’s Howard said. “The other
beers pay the bills. Financially, porter would kill you.”
Then why, if porter or stout never really sells that much,
do so many breweries produce one?

Howie continued,
“It shows you have the ability to do it, and we like them.
It’s a beer for people who are educated beer drinkers.
You’ve got a more educated, more prosperous set of customers
as they convert from wine or move out into new markets. We
make it because we want to make it, same reason we’re making
the Green Monsta. That’s what this used to be about:
creativity.” Jim Dorau echoed that. “It’s just the love of
the craft,” he said. “We sell X amount, and we’re happy with
that amount. Brewing the Oatmeal Stout is a pain, it’s a
huge mash, and it gets stuck. But it’s a great beer and
we’ll keep making it.”

Jeff Coleman
thinks it’s all relative. “The breweries that do a nice job
with them tend to be niche marketers,” he said, “and that
‘little’ volume is important to them. Volume’s relative.
Stout’s a big brand for Seamus O’Hara – he makes his living
on it. Fuller’s hadn’t even made any porter in several
decades, and we were asking for one in the States. The
brewer, Reg Drury, said he’d love to make one, and the
brewery said, eh, go ahead. They just wanted to do
it.”

Hartinger will
make you drool a bit by noting that porter and stout are in
Merchant du Vin’s portfolio because they’re great food
beers. “How it pairs with food is the big difference,” he
said. “Porter works to balance rich foods. If you’re having
something with a lot of fat, or a cream sauce, it can
balance that. An excellent match with Yorkshire pudding or
prime rib. Oatmeal Stout might be a better match for
spicier, zippy foods.”

Geary says he
makes a porter for one reason. “I make everything I make
because I like it,” he said. “No bullshit. I decided from
the very beginning that if I didn’t make beer I liked, I
wouldn’t know what I had. I don’t like hefeweizens, so if I
made one, how would I know if it was good or
not?”

He thinks that’s
why these beers don’t sell that well. “Porter? The customers
don’t know what the hell it is,” he said. “We put an
explanation on the six-pack, but that assumes people will
read it.”

To cut right
down to the heart of the matter, these beers are not going
to sell on definitions, or differences, although knowing
more about them will give you some great talking points for
a sale, or answers for that eternal question. What’s really
going to sell the beer, porter, stout or “really dark ale”,
is the beer’s individual merits.

That’s what one
transplanted New Hampshire brewer I know, Brian O’Reilly of
Sly Fox Brewing in Pennsylvania, said when I asked him this
question. “Really, what’s the difference in what it’s
called?” Brian finally said. “If you like it, drink it.”
Couldn’t have put it better myself.