Porters: why bother?

Obviously there's a great bit of overlap and it's hard to draw a clear distinction, but anyone saying that stouts and porters are exactly the same needs to have their taste buds examined. Stouts taste stoutier and porters taste porterier. There's your difference. No need to really go beyond that.

 

I recently posted in a "What's in your fridge right now" thread and thought that, with plenty of beer presently on hand, I shouldn't have any (good) reason to visit a bottle shop for a couple of weeks.

Now this thread reminds me that I'm lacking Mayflower Porter. This shortfall must be redressed!

 

I used to think the same about most porters until I started drinking them with steak. The thinner mouth feel and body pair better with fatty meats. Give it a try.

 

Smutty Baltic and lil b

 

The yeast strains that are labeled as Kolsch yeast by Wyeast and White Labs are ale yeasts.

Cheers!

 

I heard Hill Farmstead is coming out with a Baltic Porter Ale that uses White Labs 007 ale yeast. They're calling it Tautology.

 

I think this may be my all-time favorite response to a thread like this. When I crack open my first beer today, I will raise it to you.

 

Breckenridge vanilla porter...just sayin

 

What he said.

 

Ill be glad to take the sugary messes of your hands.

 

I think we all need to have our worm turned now and then. ;-) Mine loved Northampton Brewery's guest beer at the time last summer, (somebody's) Marzen. My youngest (30) daughter loved it too. The reason I can't recall its name right now is, I'm 67, and just finished a wonderful pint plus of (9% ABV) Zywiec Porter, which I would recommend as well.

If I were to make a distinction between a stout and a porter, it would be smoke. Porters almost invariably taste smoky. Stouts, not necessarily so much. Like some have noted here, the most popular stouts these days tend to get loaded up with all sorts of additive flavors which overpower any smoke, like coffee, or from barrel aging. Porters are not fooled with as much as stouts, BP Victory at Sea Vanilla, Breckinridge Vanilla and a few others aside...

I personally prefer milk stouts and oatmeal stouts. I'm half Scottish and half English, so I tend to like Swedish - er sweetish. Show me a few milk porters or oatmeal porters and then tell me again how there is no difference between a porter and a stout. Smoky milk and oatmeal anyone? Pass the Brown Shugga, please!

OK Randy Mosher says "Dark brown ales were brewed for a generation before the name 'porter' was applied to them sometime around 1725. 'Stout' was a term generaically used in England for strong beer as early as the late seventeenth century, but it didn't find common use until a generation later, when it came exclusively to mean a strong porter." (TASTING BEER p.133). Later he notes that "Porter is considered the first industrialized beer; stronger versions are called 'stout.' (p.162). In my 20th-21st century experience, however, there IS a difference, and its name is "smoke." But perhaps it's the dark-smoky-malt-masking adjunct flavors so often found in today's stouts which help give that impressioon.

Remember too that there is no Irish Porter category. Irish Stouts are usually referred to as "Dry Stouts" due to the use of "roasted barley rather than black roasted malt...(which imparts) a unique, sharp, coffeelike roastiness." (Mosher, p. 163) Something to do with dodging taxes on malt in the nasty old British Empire days...

 

You are doing exactly what I mentioned in an earlier post, taking experience of a limited sample and assuming it to apply to the whole.
Randy Mosher is not a beer historian, it's better to stick to one of these for accuracy in these matters.
As for the use of roast unmalted barley, no British brewer would ever risk even having the stuff on the premises-they were inspected regularly- and in any case Guinness is on record as having adamantly refusing to even contemplate its use because it was regarded as inferior to roasted malt.It did not appear until about 1930 in its products.Nothing at all to do with dodging taxes,it just wasn't in any case worth the risk for a relatively tiny saving.
Dry so-called Irish Stout doesn't date very far back, and then the names Porter and Stout were used indiscriminately, in fact much Porter had been rebadged as Stout.

 

You get bonus points for taking the time to experiment. Good for you!

Porters ARE stouts. Stouts ARE porters. They're the same F===ING word!!!!!!!!!!! How the hell is this so hard???

The best beer I've tried in 11 months in the 21st Century's awesome craft beer world: Cherries of Fighter, an over 10% ABV porter barrel-aged and tricked up.

a PORTER

Second best beer .... : (512) Pecan PORTER

call them whatever the hell you want ... stouts ARE porters/porters ARE stouts. sure "stout" sounds cooler, but it's not. it's just a porter.

 

shame on everyone here for not mentioning duckrabbit baltic porter.

 

Porter and Stout are the Rorschach Blot test for the beer nerd. One person insists it's a flower. Someone else sees a bunny. A third person sees a dog with its head split open by a cleaver (... keep an eye on that one ).

Everything else is personal preference and experience.

 

The nerd stares agog. Pensively. Disgusted.
Tearful; yet vendettaish. But.
So many emoti... WTF. "Oh noes...." He goes.
A bunny wielding a cleaver that killed his Old Dog Blue is now looking at him.
Porter versus Black IPA.
discuss.

 

I am not sure it does. According to the University of Michigan:



We measured viscosity
using a calibrated
Cannon-Fenske viscometer.
The viscosities of (1) Budweiser
beer (containing CO2), (2)
White Star Moet & Chandon
Champagne (containing CO2),
and (3) Guinness beer (containing
N2) are, respectively,
1.44, 1.67, and 1.40 times that
of water.

 

Silly post. I don't see that you have presented an argument at all. You personally prefer beer with larger amounts of darker roased malt and roasted grain? Maybe more alcohol in some cases?

I have noticed that new craft drinkers gravitate to extremes. I personally love stouts and imperial stouts, but there excellent porters that appeal to me also. I choose them often.

 

Because Black Butte Porter, that's why!

 

Except for the book quotes cited, I never suggested I was doing anything other than commenting according to my own experience. But that experience was not drawn from a particularly "limited sample." I had by first Guinness in a London pub in 1965. Untold numbers of different porters and stouts have coursed through my alimentary canal since then.

I assume you are suggesting that Randy Mosher is wrong and that is what takes him out of the beer historian category. What qualifies a person to be a beer historian? I taught American and European history for 34 years with a specialty in British history, and consider myself an Anglophile. If I need to use a secondary source to learn more about the history of British beer, who are the Great Unassailably Accurate Beer Historians on porters and stouts?

Your comment about "Dry so-called Irish Stout" (do I detect a bit of resentment that it is called Irish?) seems to miss the point. It was not that British producers used "roast unmalted barley," or that it was universally used even in Ireland, but that because some Irish did use it in order to avoid a malt tax, the result was a different flavor which Mosher suggests distinguished Irish Dry Stout. And no matter how "tiny" the resulting sale point price difference, like the British tea tax imposed in the colonies before the American Revolution, the very idea of being taxed on something as vital as your drink and the money collected then used to help support a system for your own continued subjugation would have been odious.