Eatdrink #68 November/December 2017 "The Holiday Issue"

46 | November/December 2017
Beer
Porter’s Rest
A Beer for Winter
eatdrink.ca |@eatdrinkmag
by AARON BROWN
When it comes to wintertime
beer recommendations, I think
you have two options. One is
to pretend that you are in a
warmer time, and attempt to evoke
some kind of cottage nostalgia. Grab
a beer you tend to love during the
hot weather and just pretend, right?
My preferred choice is the other
option: accept the situation and
settle into a beer that is rich,
warming, and that would do well
alongside a good book. Porters and
stouts go great with a wintertime
read. They improve as they warm
up and can be sipped slowly over long
periods of time. (A porter and book pairing
is especially great if your topic is
history.)
You might need two or three beers
to properly dig into the words “porter”
and “stout.” You’ll be going a long way back,
ending up in the time of Defoe, Swift, and
Hogarth. The era of Charles Dickens is still a
century ahead and, compared to the eighteenthcentury
world, will look like the Jetsons.
Early History
It was a brutal and physically grinding
time, and the porters were an important
piece of the sweat-driven economy.
Porters were people tasked with
unloading and delivering the cargo of
the Thames River docks trade. Special
rests designed for porters to drop their
loads were installed across the city. A
load temporarily at rest in front of a pub
populated with refuelling porters was a
common sight. Eventually their drink of
choice bore the name of their trade.
Today only a single porter’s rest
remains preserved in London. The word
“porter” is practically all that is left of this tribe
today. Even the beer with their name is not
something their taste buds would recognize
today. They might not have exactly recognized
it even a generation later. Over time,
the words stout and porter have stuck
while the methods and ingredients
that brewers use have shifted
constantly, driven by customs,
politics, and technological change.
The terms have somewhat
converged, but in the mid-1700s
porter was a beer that was made
with brown malt (a standard
ingredient of the day) while the term
stout was more of an adjective than a
defined style name. Stout applied to higher
strength beer — even pale beers. A
“stout porter” was a strong porter.
These days it seems to me that
the word porter is increasingly out of
fashion and has effectively been replaced by
the nomenclature of stout.
The brown malt of the time meant that
porter was a dark brown colour. It was a
relatively low quality and inefficient malt.
Malt kilns were dangerous and prone to
Drinking stout on cask in Manchester (2008)