Poll: Stouts or Porters?

No roasted barley in the stout, just black patent. But it's a fairly high percentage of the grist. And thrre is a west coast hop profile. Nowadays it's the classic example of a West Coast Stout, but we're talking about the days prior to that substyle really being recognized.

(Another classic West Coast Stout, Rogue Shakespeare, did use roasted barley, fwiw)

The porter was just chocolate malt, translucent, and used Willamette hops, which swing more in the English 'spicy' direction.

Eta: there were always clear differences between the two beers, imo.

 

SN is using roasted barley in their stout these days anyway.

https://sierranevada.com/beer/stout/

Not in the porter.
https://sierranevada.com/beer/porter/

 

Cool. They've been refining the recipes for a while now. Iirc, some time in the early 2000s they added Munich malt to the porter.

I only wish that they were as easy to find these days.

 

Somebody posted this was a “troll poll” but I just gotta say this thread may be in the running for most entertaining thread of 2020.

It seems like the Stout vs. Porter thread debate never goes away.

I look forward the to the 2021 thread on this topic (or maybe just a few months from now?).

Cheers!

 

I guess you can't be blamed for thinking that something that isn't minor to you is also not minor to the overwhelming majority of beer people in the entire rest of the world. I know people who think Grateful Dead defines everything about music.

Cheers!

 

And based upon you selection of an avatar I suppose I 'know' one of those persons too?

Cheers!

 

Nope. I like Grateful Dead. I like the general style of jam band music. I will leave it to the musicians to define and name their own music styles based on their own needs to do so.

Cheers!

 

Maybe they just swapped the labels?

 

I hope you don't take this as ganging up on you. You are making a declarative statement on porter and stout today, but I would guess that you are making a large assumption based on articles you've looked at and a couple of modern recipes as opposed to really knowing what the wide landscape of modern recipes looks like. I could be wrong. One can cherry-pick different bits of info instead... like how Edmund Fitzgerald (the "American porter" with the highest amount of reviews on BA) is made with roasted barley. I'm not claiming that Edmund Fitzgerald is gospel, but I'm not claiming that the opposite is gospel either.

 

I'm still partial to the (often) bottom-fermented w/adjunct (and sometimes, Porterine-brewed) US Porters.


Of course, the manufacturer also recommended using Porterine in stouts, too...

 

I think that when SN decided to brew a Stout they couldn't make a pick between their 2 best recipes. Therefore they brewed them both and called one a Porter and the other a Stout. Tasted side by side they are slightly different. Not enough different to be 2 styles.

 

There isn’t a declaration that says a porter can’t have roasted barley, it says in many different definitions it is not usual or used as much as say a stout and their definitions. We have a ‘robust porter’ style here that says roasted barley is allowed, but half of you don’t think Robust Porter should be a style, so where do we lay?

 

Rats! And here I ran out of popcorn two pages ago!

 

I don't think anyone is saying that all stouts and all porters taste the same, rather that the two styles are so broadly overlapping that there is no practical difference between the two. I (and I imagine all/most of us) have my conception of what each style describes. But I'm regularly surprised by what's in the bottle.

One example I can think of from this winter, Founders Porter and Redwood Curtain Dry Irish Stout. The porter is much more sharply roasted to my palate than the stout.

All I'm saying is we have clear evidence that the styles were one style originally, and it seems the changes in the style(s) over the centuries are so varied that a hard porter/stout line seems in possible. At best it seems you could carve out a dozen distinct(ish) sub styles and still be left with a lot of grey area.

Now, have we all realised yet that things would be a lot simpler if we just used MY style guidelines?

Nothing goes better with beer than semantics. May we never complete the taxonomy! And I'll take one more chance to revel in/boast about my recent consumption of a case of SN porter and stout. Such good beers. I probably won't be back by the store that sells them until after the quarantine times but I'll always have these memories

 

Founders considers their porter a Robust Porter. The styles definitely overlap and I’ve said that, but there is a difference, they are not the same today. The key difference known to most brewers is the use of more roasted malts and roasted barley in a typical stout. There are blonde stouts now too that taste like chocolate even though they are yellow. It’s not a big deal, I’m just trying to show people the difference, mainly the use of roasted barley in stouts. Because we allow creativity and interpretation of styles, there are stouts with no roasted barley, and some porters that have more roasted malts and maybe roasted barley. They came up for a style for the latter though, robust porter, because original porters weren’t suppose to have roasted barley. Most people can’t differentiate the taste though, which is the big reason why the line is blurred and people think they are the same. Well they both taste like chocolate and coffee and they’re both dark, but stouts are usually more roasted too, but they don’t have to be, thus interpretation and confusion.

 

So isn't a robust porter just a stout then? The existence of the style demonstrates that whatever difference brewers perceive in the styles it isn't the roasted barley component (or else brewers wouldn't have added roasted barley to a porter and still called it a porter).
I agree with you as far the difference i expect between the two labels. Unfortunately, since you all haven't agreed to the great idea of using my perfect taxonomy I'm stuck with the real world where I need more info than just the word stout or porter to know what to expect from a beer

Luckily, as a respite from this storm of conclusion, there's a tasting today of that simple, straightforward style, saison

 

I like it when they use Brettanomyces.

 

Lagered. Lagered Stout is good.

:-D

 

I'm gonna have to buy a 6pack each of Deschutes Black Butte Porter and Obsidian Stout. Drink them side by side. Too bad they are still bottled and not canned.

I see the Stout is 6.4% abv vs 5.2% abv for the Porter. In my reviews, I gave the nod to the Stout. Which could mean nothing since my mood, what I ate before, temperature of the beers could have had a big influence.

 

As luck would have it I just got back from grocery shopping and I bought some peanut oil (my preferred oil for making pop corn).

Time to pop some more!

Cheers!