December, 2004
Joys of the Dark
I spent four hours drinking porter at Liberty Brewery in Myrtle Beach
on Thanksgiving Eve. It was the most porter I’d had in years, and
it was good. Okay, it didn’t hurt that it was happy hour and we were
getting it in $6 pitchers (real pitchers, too, the big 60 oz.
glass ones). We were sitting outdoors, watching the shoppers walk by,
and drinking porter,
and it was good. We could have had IPA, we could have had a spiced
holiday ale – not much chance of that happening – we could
have had a GABF medal-winning helles,
but after getting a pint of porter,
we decided to stick with it.
Porter’s one of those beers that usually gets a pat on the head
and a gentle kick in the butt. "Hey, you, porter,
good to see you, but why don’t you run on home, okay? We’ve got
better, bigger beers to drink. Hey! When you get home, send your sister
Baltic out. Yeah. We got something we wanna show her." Porter plays
second fiddle these days, or maybe even third.
And yet... I did a piece on porter back in 2000 and interviewed a
variety of New England brewers who made porter.
Almost all of them described the market for porter with the same word:
"steady." porter drinkers know what they like, they don’t
change their minds, and if they can’t get their porter,
chances are they’ll turn around and go home (where they’ll have a
few cases stashed for emergencies). These are the kind of guys who will
sit and drink porter for hours, because it tastes good to them, and
that’s what they want.
They know something. Porter was made, literally designed, for
quaffing, for the long haul, for drinking straight on ‘til morning
(Peter Pan porter,
anyone?). porter was the first beer brewed in mass quantities, which led
to the industrialization of the brewing industry and some spectacular
excesses. (A nice abbreviated history of porter was done in 2001 by the
talented Ed Westemeier for the Cincinnati Enquirer, you can read
that here.)
It was a hugely popular beer in the UK in the 1700s.
Coffee killed porter.
Not in the way you might think, by supplanting it as the buzz of choice.
To be precise, it was the coffee roaster that killed porter. Porter was made with "brown malt," a somewhat unevenly kilned
malt that had low efficiency in the mash tun, but apparently had a great
flavor and color in the finished beer. That’s what people loved and
drank for a century. Even after the spread of coke-fired kilns led to
the development of the more efficient pale malt, which soon supplanted
brown malt, porter was still popular. Then coffee came to England, and
someone developed a semi-automated roaster to prepare it more quickly.
Maltsters looked at the finished bean and quickly adopted the
roaster to roast their malts. "Black patent malt" was one of
the results, a very dark malt that let the brewer put back the color of
brown malt in their porter,
and cheaply. But the brewers didn’t taste their beer: using the black
patent malt gave porter a dry, smoky, burnt flavor. Sound familiar? It
should: this was the first step towards stout.
Stout eventually conquered porter in the UK. "Baltic"
porters and "Pennsylvania" porters continued to be made, but
they weren’t the same thing at all. It took American craft brewers to
bring it back (along with homebrewers: porter was one of the first beers
I brewed, and brewed again and again). Sierra Nevada, Redhook, and
Anchor all brewed porters, Deschutes made Black Butte porter their
flagship and successfully sold the hell out of it.
But I don’t want this to be a history lesson. This is in praise
of porter,
a happy song of the pure joy of beer drinking that porter can bring.
What's porter got going for it? Balance. The GABF judging
categories have two categories for ale-brewed porters: brown porter and
robust porter.
In the solidly certain words of Maine's pioneer brewer David Geary,
"That's horseshit. porter is porter,
and it's very specific. A 'robust porter' is a stout."
Porter
is not overly roasted, nor is it overly hopped, nor is it overly sweet.
But neither is porter bland. That's why I drank so much
of it last Wednesday. Porter,
ideally, is a beer in tension, where several flavor categories pull
harmoniously in opposite directions. None of them overwhelm, none of
them disappear. Malt, roast, hop, ester: they're all there, but none
dominate.
What is perhaps even more appealing is that porter doesn't awe the
drinker. Many beers can be so striking as to evoke constant comment
from geek and novice alike. Not a well-made porter.
Porter's along for your ride, not there to take you on one of its
own. I think in four hours the only things we said about the porter at
Liberty was "Damn, this porter's good," "Yeah, another
pitcher," and "Here, try some." I suppose you could say
that Bud drinkers say the same things -- except for "Here, try
some," maybe -- but there's a lot to be said for a beer that has
real taste but is not intrusive on a geek's conversation.
It's worth mentioning that Flann O'Brien's "The
Workman's Friend," which many seem to think is a salute to
stout is actually in praise of porter,
"plain
porter."
You always have to be careful with O'Brien, who was born with his tongue
firmly planted in his cheek, but this bit of poetry, assigned to a
fictional "Jem O'Casey" in O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds,
rings too true to be wholly sarcastic. The opening stanza is the one
most often quoted:
"When things go wrong and they won't come right,
Though you do the best you can,
Though life seems dark as the midnight sky,
A pint of plain's your only man."
Indeed, indeed, 'tis true. It's December, and
maybe I should have written about holiday beers, and how they aren't
quite as special as they used to be, and how much I despise spiced
beers, and all that. But I thought better of it. This month, I've no
point to make but this: porter is overlooked, stuffed in the back
of the craft-brew cupboard. Get yourself a driver, set aside four hours,
and get re-acquainted. Southern Tier makes a good one, David Geary's
London porter is excellent, Victory's draft-only Workhorse porter is
good, and Hugh Burns makes a great porter at Williamsburg Brewing. I'm
going to get some of Brian O'Reilly's porter at Sly Fox this weekend,
and I had a nice pint of cask Pig Iron porter at Iron Hill North Wales
last Monday. Get the conversation going, and just take the porter along
for the ride. Enjoy yourself. Happy holidays!
