seymour wrote:Is it? I've heard it's named after men who laboured as porters, the working class dock workers who favored it. I've heard elsewhere that's patently wrong, and numerous other explanations for the name.
The idea that Porter was named after street porters is based upon just one source, the famous Obadiah Poundage. Later sources, such as Feltham (1802), who many modern beer writers regard as a de facto historical source, is merely paraphrased Poundage with a few inaccurate embellishments. A single source is dangerous, and there is so much in Poundage that is of questionable accuracy that one has to be very careful in trusting any of it. In my view, the probability of Porter being named after street porters is about as likely as it being named after computer programmers. If porters had anything to do with it at all, it would have been the "pot boys" who, in the larger establishments, filled the tankards from the cellar and carried the beer to the customer and were also called porters in the parlance of the day. The little circumstantial evidence that exists supports the pot boys more than street porters, but there are other explanations that are just as likely.
seymour wrote:
I've heard it was always a blended style of old and new batches, of light and dark batches. I've heard elsewhere that's wrong, and that it was always brewed straight-up as it is.
By the time the term "porter" was adopted, porter was always a blend, and blended in the pub at that, because it would have been cost-ineffective to blend porter in the brewery or brew it "straight up". There are at least two reasons for blending; one is to improve the flavour of a cheap beer; the other is to reduce the cost of a draught. Porter was blended for both those reasons, but mostly to reduce the cost. The reason for this, as always, was beer tax.
A brewer was taxed on the wholesale price of his beer, but there were just two rates of tax; one for ale or strong beer and another for small beer. There was a four or five times difference between the ale rate and beer rate. At the start of the 1700s the duty on ale was four shillings per barrel and the duty on small beer was one shilling per barrel. As time went on this was progressively increased and by the late 1700s the duty was ten shillings per barrel on strong beer or ale sold at twenty-four shillings or more per barrel, and two shillings per barrel on beer sold below twenty-four shillings.
There were no intermediate rates of duty so, on the borderline of what was deemed to be an ale or strong beer and what was deemed to be a small beer, there was an abrupt tax bump where the duty suddenly jumped by five times. There was no sliding scale; no proportional relationship between duty and strength. This restricted the range of beers that a brewer could produce at a price that the public would pay. The brewer could supply a cheap and cheerful beer and also a strong beer that was somewhat expensive. However, if the strongest beer that a brewer could produce for less than twenty-four shillings per barrel was (say) O.G. 1.045, it would be difficult for him to produce a 1.050 or stronger beer because the sudden tax jump would make the beer poor value for money; the price of the beer would suddenly jump by about thirty-five per cent. The imbiber would expect a considerably stronger beer than 1.050 for such a price hike (not that they could measure O.G. in those days of course).
For a brewer to brew an affordable beer, he had to keep his wholesale price below that barrier of 24 shillings per barrel. Beers were aged for long periods (as opposed to ales that normally were not), and ageing costs money. To age even a weak beer in the brewery could push the wholesale price above that magic 24 shillings per barrel. One way round this was to produce a strong aged beer, sold expensively, and a weaker mild beer sold cheaply, and let the imbiber mix the two in his pot to suit both palate and pocket.
Any suggestion that Ralph Harwood, or any other brewer, made a beer to imitate three threads, or that porter was a partially aged beer, is sheer nonsense. It would have been impractical to do so, and would have made a brewer silly enough to attempt such a thing non competitive.
seymour wrote:
I've heard it was 100% brown malt, because that's all there was back in the olden days when they had to dry malted barley in wood-fired or inefficient coal-fired furnace rooms...
The original porter was 100% brown malt, kilned over hornbeam, not straw. After the late 1700s the percentage of brown malt was reduced progressively, being replaced with pale and amber malts, until the standard grist was equal parts brown, amber and pale. Eventually the amber malt was dropped, but 30% brown was still retained by the best brewers. This was not done because brown malt had a particularly low extract, as expounded by many, so-called, beer writers, but because it reduced the ageing time; the time from brewing to consumption, and proper pale malt was beginning to be produced cheaper on an industrial scale. Reducing the time from brewing to consumption lowered the price even further.
, but I guess maybe its trying to make ppl accept a beer that was once thought of as a MAN's drink.
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