Think these dark beers are all the same? Think again.
Going by chronological order, let’s start with porter. First brewed in London in the 18th century, this beer gets its name from the porters who ferried goods around the city. Unlike most beers of its time that required a little extra barrel-ageing in the pub, the porter was designed to be ready to drink from the moment it arrived. A working-class brew through and through, its hallmark features are its dark colour and slightly sweet, malty flavour, which it gets from the use of roasted malts and brown barley.
Over the next 100 years, however, successive booze taxes and grain shortages in England drove the average alcohol content of the porter down from around 7% to as low as 4%, opening the door for a little bit of creative accounting and, eventually, its successor – stout.
By the late 1800s, with the roaring popularity of porter showing no signs of slowing down despite the dwindling ABV, brewers began experimenting with new ways to produce a stronger beer. Labelled as ‘Single Stout Porter’, these were the prototype for what we now call just ‘stout’.
Over in Ireland, which was less affected by grain shortages, one Arthur Guinness identified a clever loophole in the tax law, which he exploited to great success. As legend has it, Arthur discovered that brewing stronger beers with unmalted and roasted barley would earn him a worthwhile tax concession. The rest, as they say, is history.
Today, porter and stout happily coexist. With an entwined yet divergent history, the differences between them remain slight yet significant all the same. Modern porter is still made with brown barley and typically sweeter and milder than stout, with a smooth and creamy mouthfeel. It has a slightly bitter finish but retains a certain ‘sessionable’ quality.
Stout, on the other hand, remains unmalted and employs roasted barley (but no brown barley, unlike porter) to achieve a more bitter and robust character, with a bold and complex flavour profile.
