Porter or Stout?

Stout Porter actually. That’s the term that some brewers used. But Guinness is stout, and it is in no way big, or intense. For the style anyway. The fact is, for all intents, and purposes they are indistinguishable from each other. It’s really just a matter of what the maker decides to call it. Think of it this way, all stout is porter, but not all porter is stout.

 

My own personal definition would be, in a nutshell...

Porter - Under 6% ABV.

Stout - Over 6% ABV.

Simple as that!

 

No real fundamental difference, only the differences created by the desire to differentiate beers in competition. If you compete with a dark roasted beer, you will do well to pay attention to whatever guidelines the competition has adopted and declare your beer according to where it best fits. I typically think of my porters as having a bigger chocolate malt focus and my stouts as having a bigger roast barley focus, and I think that is a prevailing mentality at least among some beer judges, so maybe it is a useful guideline, as far as guidelines go. If you are not competing, you can, of course, call your beers whatever you want.

 

Guinness draught is 4.2%.

 

So, sounds like the consensus is to be more particular about what you call it if entering in a competition, otherwise call it whatever you want (and make up a tale for your friends about why your porter isn’t a stout, or your stout isn’t a porter).

Dead-on 6% ABV - Pout?

 

Is that just "Stout" vs "Porter" or Dry Stout and Milk Stout vs Imperial Porter, Export Porter and Baltic Porter?

I guess what I'm getting at is that there are obviously loads of substyles of both which are wildly different, but in some places and times there's one dominant substyle that's just "stout" or "porter". So a stout in the UK twenty years ago would almost certainly have been sub 5% (because almost all beer in the UK twenty years ago was sub 5%) whereas in the US it would almost certainly have been more than 5%. It doesn't really make sense to ask whether there's a single defining difference between all the porter substyles and all the stout substyles, but it might be that in your place and time the default substyles are different...

 

I've spent 15 years researching this. Historically, Porter is merely the weakest in a range of Porters and Stouts. The recipes were identical, other than the amount of water used.

Baltic Porters confuse the hell out of people because they're actually Stouts (some even say so on the label). It all goes back to the way Porter was once used as a generic name for all Porters and Stouts. In continental Europe they tended to call everything Porter, even beers which were called Stout in London.

Two centuries of evolution around the world have muddied the waters considerably. But it's a single style, really. Like Bitter and ESB. Same style, different strengths.

 

Stout Porter. Stout just meant "strong" in old English beer teminology. Another old term was Brown Stout and there are still a few beers called this around the world. But you also had Pale Stout which was the same as Brown Stout but with pale malt rather than brown malt as the base malt.

 

BeerAdvocate has so mellowed out. This topic used to get people all angried up.