I confess I love the opportunity to wax on about the history of beer, and I was delighted to be interviewed by the Cardiff home-brewer and podcaster Andy Taylor on the subject of porter, which ended up as 40 minutes of yakking by me. If you want to know the difference between porter and stout,… Read More Me talking about porter
When you’ve been working on a project for more than seven years, finally being given a finishing date is almost anti-climactic. I started writing what became Porter and Stout: A Complete History in January 2018. I’ve now been told it is due to be published on June 4. I feel I ought to be much… Read More Porter and Stout: The Complete History will be published on June 4
In October 1736, Jonathan Swift, dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, and the foremost satirist of his age, published an attack on English porter, which was made, he said, of “the worst Malt, which is sent from all parts of the Country for that Use, and consequently nothing but Gin exceeds it for Badness.”… Read More Why Jonathan Swift said English porter was only fit for swine
Descriptions of London’s big porter breweries in the 19th century by an actual brewer are exceedingly rare. One of the few such reports was made by a young Canadian named William Helliwell, who visited four of the capital’s big breweries in the summer of 1832, and left his impressions in a diary. William’s father, Thomas… Read More A Canadian visits four of London’s biggest porter breweries in the reign of William IV
In 1898-9, Canada’s Inspectorate of Foods and Drugs analyzed beers from 33 Canadian breweries in four provinces, of which 27 brewed a porter or a stout, and one stout brewer sold a half-and-half. They also analyzed the extra stout from George Younger’s brewery in Alloa, Scotland, to give historians a useful comparison with stout brewing… Read More So what’s the difference between porter and stout – Canada 1898-99 version
I’ve never met Larry Hatch, but I’m sure he’s a great guy: kind to small animals, regularly helps old ladies cross the road safely, buys great bagloads of girl guide cookies. However, he’s written some dumb nonsense about porter, and I’m feeling grumpy, so he’s going to get a kicking. I bought his publication Hatch’s… Read More Believing the name porter comes from the Dutch word ‘Poorter’ is only a short step from QAnon
Today is Baltic Porter Day, an event started by the Polish brewer and porter fan Marcin Chmielarz, and that gives me an excellent excuse to try to kill some Baltic Porter myths. A few facts: ● Baltic Porter, if you want to be historically accurate, should NOT be as strong as an Imperial Russian Stout.… Read More It’s Baltic Porter Day — a good excuse for punching a few Baltic Porter myths in the face …
The history of beer is largely working-class history, which means, given the status of working-class history, much of it is forgotten. When it’s black working-class history … Thus the long love of rural (and urban) working-class Jamaicans – and probably other West Indians as well – for draught porter is a subject you will struggle… Read More The forgotten love of rural Jamaicans for draught porter
Happy anniversary: 299 years ago today the word “porter” appeared in print for the first time (as far as we know) as the name of a type of beer. The passing mention came in a pamphlet dated Wednesday May 22 1721 and written by the then-23-year-old Whig satirist and polemicist Nicholas Amhurst (1697-1742). Amhurst implied… Read More Today is 299 years exactly since the first known mention of porter
It’s a huge thrill to uncover facts that totally rewrite history. You’ll read in a great many places – here, for example, in a book published in 2014 – that the first porter brewed in America was made by Robert Hare, son of a London porter brewer, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1775. So when in… Read More How I uncovered the long-forgotten story of America’s first porter brewery and then sat on it for three years
