One of the things I love about making my own beer, is I can make any beer I want, any way I want it!
I guess I just always thought a stout was a porter all grown up. Heavier, more alcohol. You know, “stoutier”. (I think I just made a new word.) Then again, there are breakfast stouts, which I guess would be a porters little sister. huh… :-\
I find it really amazing that this is so complicated! It is my opinion that porter is THE most written about and researched “style” ever! It seems almost ever brewing book I have read has something about porter in it. Off the top of my head I think all of the following Classic beer style series books have at least some mention of the influence of porter. Barley wine, Mild ale, Pale ale and Scotch ale and of course Porter. The last one is the only one I have not actually read! Some of them have rather extensive passages about the popularity and rise and fall of said “style”. There loads of historical info on the style in Radical Brewing as well. How can something so well documented be so contentious?
Could be because it came about when “styles” were really beginning to be documented? Or rather when breweries/brewers were really beginning to market there beer and they threw names around willy nilly?
I agree with the folks who mentioned the use of black malt (patent) as a distinuisher of at least modern day porter vs. a stout which uses roast barley.
[quote]And Guinness Stout is a good example of how things evolve and mutate…evidently roasted barley wasn’t even part of the grist until well into the 20th century.
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Don’t forget that Guiness was originally known for their porter which they discontinued sometime in the early 20th century iirc. What I recall is that they started brewing a “Stout porter” which was a variation on their porter. Stronger? I dunno. Blacker? I dunno. Stouter? uh, sure… Whatever that means. Marketing term to mean more special therefore cammanding a premium price??? :-X
If you look at early 20th century beer ads and marketing they used not only the terms stout and porter, but also beer and ale interchangeably. No wonder it gets so confused.
Perhaps I missed it but I do not seem to recall anyone in this thread or the article linked mentioning the much documented theory that porter itself was not actually something brewed as is but rather a blend of beers. Also a likely early marketing ploy. A way to use up beer that had gone by with beer that was not quite ready to drink. ;D
If you accept that then really no one is making “authentic” porter anymore. It would not make much sense on a commercial level.
It is also my understanding that when the beer that came to be known as porter which was now being brewed “whole” rather than blended used a variety of substances to darken it; including some rather dubious ones, until a reliable method for making roast malt (black “patent”) was developed.
Sierra Nevada Stout has no roasted barley and Sierra Nevada Porter had no black malt.
I guess a little alarm goes off in my head when the definition of a modern or American style is wildly inconsistent with what Sierra Nevada does. It would be like saying American Pale ale is defined as not having cascade hops.
I’m not sure I believe the BJCP guidelines support this porter = black malt and stout = roasted barley idea. The only porter style that the BJCP describes as requiring black malt character is Robust Porter, then several of the commercial examples listed are beers made without black malt (Sierra Nevada and Meantime off the top of my head). The only stout subcategory that mentions specifically roasted barley is dry stout. That’s fine since that category is narrow and the commercial beers it describes do all or mostly use roasted barley these days.
At the end of the day it shouldn’t matter to anyone that isn’t operating a beer competition. All a consumer needs to know is that if a brewery has a porter and a stout, the stout is probably more strongly flavored.
For beer competitions we can get a feel for “this beer is what we call Robust Porter and this is what we call American Stout” or whatever but, as always, the impression of the beer is king and what ingredients or processes were used to achieve that character are not of primary importance to taxonomy.
Pretty much what I think. Weaze gots it. Stouts are just “stouter” porters. They used to be called Stout porters, right? Then they just dropped the porter part and called them stouts…
Porter is different from ale and lagers are yet still differnt–if you live over 100 years ago. It probably depends on who you asked too.
Hummm, I use a bunch of of chocolate in my stout and a little black malt in my porter. For me the difference is that I add coffee or vanilla to my porters and oatmeal to my stouts.
Tubercle always thought that a “porter” was a stout that was served at a porter house.
or maybe with a nice juicy porterhouse
The steak got its name the same way the beer did, didn’t it?
I heard they were pissed.
That was always my understanding.
maybe going back to the origin of calling steak houses “porter house”, but from wikipedia …
“The origin of the name ‘porterhouse’ is the subject of much conjecture but very little knowledge; it has been claimed that the name derives from a Massachusetts stockman and proprietor of the now defunct Porter House hotel in Porter Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Zachariah B. Porter,[1] or from a New York City porter-house proprietor, Martin Morrison.[2] The Oxford English Dictionary suspends judgment, observing that the cut is “freq. supposed to derive its name from a well-known porterhouse in New York in the early 19th cent., although there is app. no contemporary evidence to support this”. Yet another theory is that the name arose from the Porter House Hotel, situated in the city of Flowery Branch, Georgia, just northeast of Atlanta, on what was, in the late 19th century, a new railroad that connected New York City with New Orleans.”
also turned up this fun little fact… when Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) toured Europe in 1878, he didn’t think much of the cuisine. He requested that a “pan-fried porterhouse steak with mushrooms be ready for him upon his arrival back home.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think it’s as complicated as you guys are making it out to be.
First of all, porter and stout are relative. I don’t think all porters and all stouts have a lot of overlap. I think we’re talking about what the BJCP calls a robust porter, and its relationship with what the BJCP calls a dry stout or an American stout.
Just to get it out of the way, brown porters (e.g., Fuller’s london porter, Sam Smith Taddy Porter) are different beasts all together. They’re more like roasty english brown ales, than they are like stouts. We’re talking about beers like Anchor Porter, Edmond Fitzgerald porter, Deschutes Black Butte, Bell’s Porter, and Founders porter. I say these beers because I think they are very illustrative of the style. Again with stout, we’re talking about dry stout (Guinness, Murphy’s, Beamish, Victory Donnybrook) and American Stout (Sierra, Deschutes Obsidian, Shakespeare, etc.,). I don’t think we’d thnk that porter is close to a milk stout, and imperial stouts are kind of their own beast altogether.
Now that I think I’ve defined the area of confusion, I think that we can really talk about what the basic difference is between the two. In the modern world, not based on any historical definition, I think there’s really a single factor that defines the difference between porter and stout. It’s not the use of a single ingredient, but rather it’s the balance of the ingredients used. Stout is a roast dominated beer with a supporting malt character The upfront and principal note in a stout is the roast. Typically you’ll see robust barley, but it’s not necessary. Shakespeare stout is primarily chocolate malt. The roast malt is always in high %, and it’s the dominant flavor of the beer. On the other hand, porter is a malty beer with a significant roast character. In porter the roast is one player among many flavors, and while prominant should always be well balanced by a strong malty note, usually from crystal or mellanoidin rich malts. I see a lot of homebrew porters that are just all roast. That is a bad porter.
Take sierra, deschuttes, and many other good breweries and you’ll see that balance defines the difference between their stout and their porter. I think that’s what has lead to the black malt / roast barley differences between stout and porter. Black patent, when used in the same amounts as roast barley, has a much milder taste. As a result its easier to get a supportive role with it than with roast barley. However, roast barley needn’t be excluded from a good porter. Edmond Fitzgerald, which is arguably the best robust porter in the country, uses roast barley (see December 2009 issue, no longer online).
I haven’t played with brown malt a lot, though my friend Ken, who is probably the best porter brewer I know, is in love with the stuff. From what I understand, is that the reason it helps to brew such a nice porter is precisely because it captures the qualities which I spoke of. It has a mild roasted character and a toasty biscuity character. When used it adds roast blended with a complex mellanoidin-rich maltiness that makes a porter. If you used it in a stout, it might distract too much from the upfront roast that dominates the style.
So where does this put us? I’ve been to plenty of breweries where they have a porter that’s really more like a stout, and occasionally, a stout that’s much more like a porter. Just because these examples exist, doesn’t mean they’re good examples. If a small brewery served you beer they called an IPA that wasn’t bitter and barely had any hops (yes I’m speaking about your Fire Island Beer Company) most of us wouldn’t accept that its an IPA. Doesn’t mean its a bad beer, it’s just not an IPA. Same goes for these beers.
These is my understanding of these styles. It’s not as simple as a lot of disctinctions I’ve heard, and there probably is a narrow style space where there is some signficant overlap between a very roasty porter and a very malty stout. However, I’ve yet to have a good example of stout or porter that has changed the way I think about it.
Ah, but 18th century brown malt was “blown malt” - I imagine it was something like brown malt but popped like popcorn. It was apparently quite tricky to make; a lot of malt kilns burned down as a result.
My opinion is that the porter vs. stout debate is specious. Yes, stout originally started out as a strong porter, but both stout and porter have evolved so much over the last 300 years that the exact definition of porter/stout depends on which brewery you’re talking about and which year. Martyn Cornell (writer of Zythophile blog) describes four variants in his book “Amber, Gold and Black.” Personally, I think he’s wrong; there are more likely 6 or more historical variants in England alone. If you want raw data (e.g., grist bills, hopping rates, pitching temperatures) for 19th and early 20th century English porter/stout, so you can make up your own mind, check out Ron Pattison’s “Shut Up About Barclay Perkins” blog.
In any case, modern porter (with the exception of Baltic porter) is a revival of an extinct style. In England and Ireland, porter died out in the 1940s or 50s. In the U.S., it mostly died before Prohibition, with the exception of oddities like Yeungling Porter. It was then revived by American homebrewers and craft brewers like Anchor and Boulder, in the late 1970s, then revived in the U.K. by English brewers like Fullers and Samuel Smith in the early 1980s. IIRC, Taddy Porter was specifically created for the U.S. market after Samuel Smith joined forces with Merchant du Vin (its U.S. importer). So, the BJCP guidelines and whatnot are perfectly correct in breaking it out into its own category, since modern brewers deliberately made the distinction between porter and stout. “Robust Porter”, for all that it is a modern invention, is a valid description of U.S. revivals of porter, while “Brown Porter” represents U.K. revivals.
If you’re brewing for your own pleasure, porter/stout is whatever you want it to be. If your brewing from a historical recipe, it’s what the recipe writer claimed it was. If you’re brewing for competition, it’s what the style guidelines say it is.
Well said.
I use Black Malt in my porter. I was trying to duplicate Founders Porter. They use it.
I use 1-2 oz. of black patent in my porter to give it just a bit of a bite.
I use roasted barley and chocolate malt in stouts, and chocolate malt with some black patent in robust porters.
I use 1lb of chocolate, 6oz of black, and 1.5 of roasted barley in my Porter. Last brew I accidentally doubled my roasted barley. That was very evident in the taste. haha