Traditional Porter

[LegTaste]

The problem with attempting this is due to the fact that old style brown malt can no longer be found. Apparently this brown malt wasn't all that brown, and had a had a smoked taste.

I reckon Belgium diastatic amber malt at 50-60 EBC would do a good job, which according to brupaks is "Indispensable when recreating historic English beers".

They recommend to not use more than 80%.
With 20% pale it should still be dark enough, 100% would probably be too dark anyway. To get the smoked flavour, one could probably go for 20% Rauchmalz/Rauch malt, or pale malt with a small amount of peated malt, or even just smoke some of your own malt over wood and experiment until you can get a similar amount of smoked flavour in the finished beer compared to a 100% Rauchmalz brew.

A method mentioned by brupaks would be to just go for a 60/40 mix of Rauch and SPECIAL B.

So a a few recipes worth thinking about

80% Belgium diastatic amber malt
20% Rauchmalz (probably not smoky enough)

80% Belgium diastatic amber malt
20% Pale Malt, with a small amount of peated malt

60% Rauchmalz
40% Special B

I'm thinking 20-30 EBU (fuggles) and aim for a beer about 7.5% in strength, but you can go far higher, depending on how old a style you want to emulate, in the 1700s you could be looking at a 1.150 beer.

Ferment with yeast of choice (obviously an English one), when finished chuck in some WLP645 Brettanomyces claussenii, and either age in bulk, or bottle.

I'm not sure if Brettanomyces produces much CO2 so you might have to alter the amount of priming sugar.

Sample your beer every so often until it has the desired sourness.

Will probably take a couple of attempts to get it right, and most attempts will probably be more palatable than the real thing would have been, but you will want to use just the right amount of hops for the beer to need that bit of acidity.

You can of course skip the bacteria and add acetic acid to your finished beer and will at worst lose some aroma.

It will probably be far from being the real deal, but closer than anything else, and an interesting experiment.

This is based on information from various sources, much of it from Graham "I own copyright to everything" Wheeler