Welcome to Porter History.
This ongoing blog aims to share with you the rich history of Porters, from its humble origins in London to the beer as we know it today and everything in between.
In collaboration with renowned beer historian Martyn Cornell, we aim to give you something of more historic value and intrigue (with source materials!) than what you can find on wikipedia or hear from your mates down the pub, with this blog being updated every Tuesday.
If this blog makes you thirsty head to our London Black map to get your hands on a pint of our smooth, creamy and independent Nitro Porter.
Table Of Contents (Click To Proceed!)
1) Why is it called Porter?
In the 18th century, thousands of men worked as porters in London, mostly divided into two sorts, the Fellowship porters, who loaded and unloaded vessels anchored in the river, and the Ticket porters, who carried parcels, letters and messages about the streets, transported heavy items from warehouses to shops, and so on.
In the decades that porter-the-drink was being developed and refined, there were at least 5,000 men working “more or less” full-time as porters in the capital, and many thousands more scraping along as casual porters, meaning that between one and two per cent of the entire population earned a living from portering.
Theirs was a strenuous job, requiring lots of calories to keep going, and to get those calories they consumed huge volumes of the beer that took their name as a result, porter. Eventually the porters’ jobs were taken by others – postal workers, dockers and so on – and by the end of the 19th century the only porters left in London were those working in the markets of Covent Garden, Smithfield and Billingsgate.
Source: https://zythophile.co.uk/2007/11/02/the-forgotten-story-of-londons-porters/
2) What was Porter made of?
London’s first Porter brewers, in the reign of George I, made their beers for the people of the city from brown malt produced in the town of Ware, 20 miles to the north, and then the biggest malting town in the country, which was shipped by barge down the River Lea to the Thames. Ware still has plenty of malting buildings left, though malt is no longer made there.
Their hops came from the hop gardens of Kent, 25 miles to the west, dried in the hop kilns that are still a familiar part of the Kentish countryside and sent to London in ships called hoys, or by wagon, where they were sold at the great hop market in Southwark, just south of London Bridge. In the days of “named” telephone exchanges, the three-letter code forSouthwark was HOP, and many telephone numbers in the area still begin 7407, for 7HOP.
The water, impregnated with calcium carbonate from the chalk that underlies much of south-east England, and thus perfect for brewing dark beers, as it aided colour extraction from the brown malt, came from the Thames – not as filthy then as people today suppose – or the New River, built in the early 17th century to carry water from Hertfordshire to Islington, or from wells dug into the London Clay.
The Hop Exchange, Southwark
3) High cask and low cask
Nobody knows who invented the high cask and low cask method of serving stout and porter, but for at least a century, and probably longer, it was a common method of achieving the iconic pint of black beer with the white collar on top.
Brewers would supply publicans with two casks, one quite flat and the other very lively, having had a shot of still-fermenting beer added to it just before it left the brewery. The barman would fill a pint glass with foam from the 'high' cask, let it settle slightly, and then carefully top up the glass with beer from the 'low' cask, scraping excess foam from the top of the glass with the back of a knife, before handing the drinker their beer.
The 'nitro-serve' method of serving stout was invented in the 1950s by a man named Michael Ash to speed up service at the bar and reduce the amount of beer being wasted with the two-cask method, which was last in use in Northern Ireland in 1973.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8EOXDI2ULQ&t=25s
4) Porter’s first mention
Porter as a name for a type of dark beer first occurs in a pamphlet beating up Jacobites, supporters of the Pretender, for wanting to see the Stuarts restored to the throne. It was written in 1721 by Nicholas Amhurst, a young writer and supporter of the Whigs, those who supported the Hanoverian George I. Attacking the perceived despotism of the Stuarts, Amhurst said that Whigs would rather be poor than in chains:, "think even poverty much preferable to bondage; had rather dine at a cook's shop upon beef, cabbage, and Porter, than tug at an oar, or rot in a dark stinking dungeon."
Amhurst's statement shows that porter was seen as a poor person's drink, for those who could only afford the cheap fare sold at cooks’ shops, 18th century London's downmarket eateries. But it also shows that Porter has been associated from the beginning with hearty, simple, filling food: steaks (the porterhouse steak, a larger version of the T-bone steak, was a speciality of porter houses), boiled beef and carrots, Welsh rarebit, oysters and the like.
The traditional English celebratory feast in the 18th and 19th centuries, for royal birthdays or victories over the French, consisted of roast beef, plum pudding and a pint of London Porter. In 1858 Meux's brewery in Tottenham Court Road presented the St Pancras workhouse with 72 gallons of double stout for the poor inmates to enjoy with their Christmas dinner.
Source: https://zythophile.co.uk/2011/12/23/roast-beef-plum-pudding-and-ale/
5) How Porter was born
At the start of the 18th century the brown beer brewers of London came under increasing pressure from higher taxes on everything from malt, beer and hops to coal, as the government sought to finance Britain’s war against Louis XIV of France over the succession to the throne of Spain. At the same time raw material costs were rising. To try to keep costs down, and their beer affordable, brewers lowered their beer’s strength, adding more hops to compensate for the loss of alcohol and stop the beer going sour too quickly. At the same time they began using the cheapest wood-dried malt. Unfortunately this gave their beer a smoky tang, so they stored it for longer until the taste of smoke faded.
Serendipitously this long ageing of a well-hopped beer, the hops guarding against souring bacteria and the like, gave other organisms, such as Brettanomyces yeasts, the chance to go to work, adding flavourful esters, and a little extra alcohol. The result was a full-tasting, invigorating, smooth, creamy dark beer that quickly proved very popular with London’s working classes.
The brewers themselves had no idea, or understanding, of what was happening in the casks as their beer aged – that would take another two centuries to work out. As this improved London brown beer took off, the larger brewers, who could afford to tie up capital ageing their beer for a year or more, roared ahead of their smaller brethren, becoming specialists in what was soon called London Porter.
Source: https://bit.ly/porterhistory
6) Butts and bloodletting
For the first 40 years or so of its existence, porter was matured in large casks, called butts, and brewers hired cellars across London to store the casks in. The slowly fermenting beer gave off carbon dioxide gas, which could be deadly in an enclosed space.
Brewers did not know this: it was only in 1756 that the Scottish physician and scientist Joseph Black had shown, with an experiment in an Edinburgh brewhouse, that fermenting beer gave off the same “fixed air” – CO₂ – that other experiments had shown was “deadly to all animals that breathe it.” Two years later a cooper employed by Robert Huck, brewer by appointment to George II, went into a store cellar at the back of the Eagle and Child alehouse in Pall Mall in London to sort out 40 butts of beer that had been put in there and left unstoppered. When he failed to come out, “one Wat Bailey, a chairman [that is, sedan chair porter], went down and found him lying on the ground, and in endeavouring to help him up, fell down dead by him.”
The bodies of the two men were drawn up by hooks, and the cooper found to be not quite dead, whereupon he was blooded (bloodletting being the 18th century doctor’s answer to everything) “but expired immediately.”
Eventually brewery workers learnt to place a lit candle in spaces where they suspected carbon dioxide might have gathered. If the candle went out, they knew not to enter.
Joseph Black
7) The Great London Beer Flood
The Great London Beer Flood of October 1814 killed eight people in the slum housing behind the Horse Shoe brewery on Tottenham Court Road, but the toll of death could have been much higher. The 128,000-gallon vat that fell apart after one of its giant iron hoops dropped off did so at 5:30 in the evening, when most inhabitants of the St Giles rookery had not yet arrived home from work. The only people to die in the disaster, either drowned or crushed under falling masonry, were three children under five, four women aged 27 to 65 and a 14-year-old servant girl.
The brewery, which had been in existence since at least 1746, had been bought by Henry Meux, son of Richard Meux of the Griffin Brewery in Clerkenwell, in 1809. The vat that collapsed was actually one of the smaller ones of 70 inside the brewery: the largest held 18,000 barrels of porter, worth £40,000 then, perhaps £2.8 million today.
The falling staves of the collapsing vat knocked the cock out of another vat and smashed several hogsheads of beer, so that in all 7,664 barrels of porter were lost. The owners of the brewery managed to get an Act of Parliament passed giving them back the £7,250 they had paid in duty on the lost porter. The Horse Shoe brewery continued brewing until 1921, when production was transferred to Nine Elms. The Dominion Theatre was built on the site in 1927-8.
Horse Shoe Brewery, Circa 1800
8) Oak vats
London’s Porter brewers began switching in the 1750s from maturing their porter in casks to maturing it in ever-larger vats, with capacities rising from 1,500 barrels – 54,000 gallons – in the 1760s to one of 10,000 barrels by 1792, a vat so large it would take 33 barrels of porter to raise the level inside by one inch. Before it was filled with porter, two hundred people were entertained inside this giant vat, built at the Griffin brewery in Clerkenwell, owned by Richard Meux (pronounced “Mewks”). Three years later a vat twice the size, called the “XYZ”, was unveiled at the Griffin brewery. It cost £10,000 – perhaps £1 million today – to built, and was made of 314 staves of 2½ inch thick English oak, held together by 56 iron hoops weighing from one to three tons each.
Brewers considered the cost of these huge vats was worthwhile, because the porter stored in them, often for two years or more, was superior in flavour to porter matured in casks. The giant vats became tourist attractions, and in 1790, the Welsh travel writer Thomas Pennant declared that “The sight of a great London brewhouse exhibits a magnificence unspeakable.” Richard Meux’s giant vats certainly seem to have given his sales a boost: output at the Griffin brewery rose from 57,500 barrels of porter in 1786 to more than 180,000 in 1798, when his was the second biggest brewery in London – and thus the world.
Source: https://bit.ly/thomaspennan
9) The difference between Porter and Stout
Today, there is no real difference between Porter and Stout. In the past, however, Stout was simply the stronger version of Porter. Stout, in English, originally meant ”proud” and gradually widened its meaning to cover “strong”. It was being used to describe strong beer by the 1620s. Stout beer could be pale or dark: Truman’s brewery in Brick Lane, East London, for example, had both Brown and Pale Stout in stock in 1741.
“Brown Stout”, or “Stout Porter” was brewed with exactly the same grain bill as ordinary Porter, but with more malt in the mash tun, to give a stronger drink. The retail price of stout porter was a third more than ordinary London Porter, at 5½ (old) pence for a quart pot of Stout and four pence for a pot of Porter.
Gradually the name was shortened to just “Stout”, though Stout stayed stronger: by the start of the 20th century Porter was 5½ to six percent alcohol, single Stout seven per cent, double Stout eight per cent. Then the First World War came, and beer strengths plunged under the weight of higher taxes and restrictions on raw materials. Porter fell to 3½ per cent alcohol and stout to 4½ or five per cent. Within 20 years Porter had disappeared.
When it returned, in the 1970s, some brewers made it to the post-First World War strength, others to its 19th century strength, the same strength as modern Stouts. At this point the different between Porter and Stout disappeared.
Source: https://zythophile.co.uk/2009/03/19/so-what-is-the-difference-between-porter-and-stout/
10) The world’s first world beer
London-brewed Porter was the first beer to be widely exported, reaching Ireland by the 1730s, North America and the Baltic lands by the 1740s, Northern Europe by the 1760s, and India around the same time.
In North America, the first successful Porter brewery was opened by Robert Hare, the son of a London Porter brewer, in Philadelphia in 1774, when he was only 22. His Porter swiftly became popular with leading Americans, including two future presidents, George Washington and John Adams.
Russia’s Empress Catherine II was very fond of the strongest form of Stout Porter, but she also ordered large amounts of London Porter to be supplied to her Baltic fleet in 1789. About the same time and an English merchant and entrepreneur named Noah Cazalet opened a brewery making Porter in St Petersburg.
Vast amounts of Porter were exported to India for the troops of the East India Company’s three private armies, who much preferred the dark brew to Pale aAe (only the officers drank IPA), and highly hopped East India Porter was being brewed in London by 1797. Eventually breweries opened in India to supply porter to the troops, most high up in the Himalayan foothills, above 6,000 feet (1,800 metres), where it was cool enough to brew without refrigeration.
Porter was also one of the first beers to be drunk in Australia: when the First Fleet arrived, carrying prisoners and guards, at Botany Bay in 1788, the drink used for loyal toasts and toasts “to the Colony” was Porter that had been brought from London.
11) The power of London Porter
By the 1750s London’s big Porter brewers were becoming enormously wealthy and influential, buying large country estates, becoming members of parliament, marrying into the aristocracy, entertaining royalty at their breweries and having their portraits painted by the most fashionable, and expensive, painters of the age, from Thomas Gainsborough to Sir Joshua Reynolds. A brewer was elected Lord Mayor of London six times in the 18th century, and between 1700 and 1830 there were at least 35 partners in London breweries who were also MPs.
The big Porter brewers acquired large country houses within an hour or two’s commute of London by coach along 18th century roads. Sir John Parsons of the Red Lion brewery at St Katharine’s, just to the east of the Tower of London, bought the Priory estate in Reigate, where he bred horses. Samuel Whitbread, founder of the Chiswell Street brewery, lived at Bedwell Park, Essendon, Hertfordshire, 17 miles from his brewery. Nearby, at Pope’s Manor, close to Hatfield, lived Sir Benjamin Truman of the Brick Lane brewery: he is buried in the churchyard at Hertingfordbury.
Among many aristocratic tie-ups, the daughter of Edmund Halsey of the Anchor brewery, Southwark married Viscount Cobham, Samuel Whitbread II married the sister of Earl Grey, and Henry Meux of the Horse Shoe brewery in Tottenham Court Road was a cousin of Lord Brougham, Lord High Chancellor. George III and Queen Charlotte visited the Chiswell Street brewery in 1787, and their son, the Prince Regent, dined at Harvey Combe’s brewery in Covent Garden on steaks cooked at the brewery boiler stoke hole, accompanied by tankards of Porter.
Source: https://zythophile.co.uk/2013/03/14/when-brick-lane-was-home-to-the-biggest-brewery-in-the-world/
Brick Lane Brewery 1842
12) Oysters with - and in - Stout
Who first thought of drinking Porter or Stout while eating oysters is not known, but the combination of salty bivalves and dark, dry, smooth, creamy, roasty beer was a big favourite in 19th century London. The Victorian journalist George Augustus Sala wrote in 1862 of visiting the Haymarket oyster-shop at midnight, “with its peaceful concourse of customers taking perpendicular refreshment at the counter, plying the unpretending pepper-castor and the vinegar cruet with the perforated cork, and, calling cheerfully for crusty bread and pats of butter, and tossing off foaming pints of brownest Stout, contentedly wipe their hands on the jack towel on its roller afterwards”
The association of oysters WITH Stout eventually persuaded brewers to put oysters IN Stout. The first Stout with actual oysters in was brewed by a brewery in Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island, in 1938, using concentrated oyster essence made in a town called Bluff, at the very bottom of New Zealand, in the heart of the country’s oyster fishing industry, to give the equivalent of one oyster in every pint.
A brewery in London experimented with using the concentrated oyster essence to make its own Oyster Stout around 1940. But it was only after the Second World War that Stout made with oyster essence took off in Britain, with one brewery in Portsmouth and another on the Isle of Man making the beer. Production of Manx Oyster Stout, which was exported as far away as California, continued until the late 1960s.
An illustration of The Whistling Oyster, a popular Oyster House near Covent Garden.
13) London’s Big 12 Porter Breweries
By the end of the 18th century London's brewing industry was dominated by 12 giant firms, with around 150 more much smaller brewers also operating in the city.
The 12 biggest, all Porter specialists, were the Anchor brewery, Barclay Perkins (formerly Thrale) in Park Street, Southwark; the White Hart brewery, Whitbread, in Chiswell Street; the Black Eagle brewery, Truman, in Brick Lane; the Griffin brewery, Meux Reid (later Reid) in what became Clerkenwell Road; the Hour Glass brewery, Felix Calvert, in Upper Thames Street; his cousin John Calvert at the Peacock brewery in Whitecross Street, near the Barbican; the Red Lion brewery, Goodwyn (earlier Parson, later Hoare), at St Katharine's, Lower East Smithfield; the Woodyard brewery, Combe, Long Acre, Covent Garden; the Barley Mow brewery, Hare (later Taylor Walker), Fore Street, Limehouse; the Horse Shoe brewery, Stevenson (later Meux), Tottenham Court Road; and the Cannon brewery, Dickenson, St John Street, Clerkenwell.
The mantle of biggest brewer in London changed back and forth between the biggest of the Big 12: at one point it was Felix Calvert, then Whitbread, then Barclay Perkins and later Truman.
The last one still brewing was the Truman brewery in Brick Lane, which closed in 1989. Others that survived through to the 20th century were Whitbread (closed 1976); Barclay Perkins (closed 1962), Taylor Walker (closed 1960), the Cannon brewery (closed 1955); the Red Lion brewery, East Smithfield (closed 1934) the Hour Glass brewery, Upper Thames Street (closed 1922); and Meux's brewery in Tottenham Court Road (closed 1921, brewing transferred to Nine Elms).
Source: https://zythophile.co.uk/2011/11/03/londons-brewing-londons-brewing/-