Well, Porters and Stouts are two very different beer styles. My preference is the Porter style. To make a good porter, I like to use Maris Otter as my base Malt with about 10% Brown Malt and 2-3% chocolate malt and about 1/2 pound of Carafoam for a 5 gallon batch. I like to use challenger for my bettering and flavor hops. But you can always Bing or Google: “Porter Recipes” to come up with many.
Tough question because there are many different Stouts (sweet, oatmeal, dry…) and Porters (English, American, Baltic…). Plus, as you make your decisions it will force you into a choice: play it safe for the judges or play it fun for yourself.
For either beer, I like to blend ‘pure’ MO with standard American 2-row Pale as my base at ~60/40 or 50/50 just to help the MO along a bit. I do the same with Golden Promise. Some don’t, I do.
I say ‘pure’ MO because some maltsters sell MO as a blend already and I’m looking for the 100% MO to start with so I can blend it myself. Which is kind of strange because most standard American 2-row Pales are blends themselves (unless you specifically source single variety 2-row). Anyway…
Palmer has some generic advice for recipes that actually work pretty well:
For a Porter, add half a pound each of med crystal, dark crystal, and chocolate malt. I’ve also tried a pound each of light crystal, chocolate rye, and brown malt. I’ve even read some who split the brown with a bit of smoked malt.
For a Stout, add half a pound each of med crystal, dark crystal, chocolate malt, and roasted barley. To that I have added half a pound of flaked oats and barley, and/or lactose, etc. depending on what I am shooting for. Here’s one of my favorite recipes: Left Hand Milk Stout Clone - Beer Recipe - American Homebrewers Association
During the heyday of Porter and Stout, the largest breweries (and most breweries) in England partigyled them both from the same recipe. If you preferred Porter in the late 1800’s because you didn’t like Milk Stout or Oatmeal Stout… surprise! Your Porter would have been made from the exact same grist as those Stouts. Whitbread Brewery, one of the largest producers of Porter in the world, didn’t end the practice of partigyling the two until 1940 or '41. That was when they stopped producing Porter altogether so for the first time in their history, Stout was made single gyle.
That being said, I made a lot of (single gyle) Porter this past year and the very best one I turned out and made the most of was a recipe from the record books of Whitbread Brewery in London from 1880 courtesy of the book: The Home Brewer’s Guide to Vintage Beer: Rediscovered Recipes for Classic Brews Dating from 1800 to 1965.
As you have found, it’s complicated, you first have to define what a stout or porter is. Yes, originally stout porter and porter were just different strength partigyles from the same mashes, so used identical grists, but they have evolved since then. Just within the British Isles, Dublin stouts are very different to London stouts (which are sweeter and don’t use roast barley as a rule), and other Irish stouts are somewhere in between. And the pervasive influence of 4.2% Guinness means that British commercial stouts on average are now weaker than porters, which makes no sense historically.
And then you have all the variations that have happened outside the British Isles.
But here at least, the benchmarks are Guinness and Fuller’s London Porter. Although everyone thinks of roast barley as the defining ingredient of Irish stouts, Guinness didn’t start using it until the 1930s, although others had started using it before WWI. Typical Guinness clone recipes are 70% pale, 20% flaked barley and 10% roast barley, but you can play around with other unmalted and roast ingredients, US recipes tend to use a bit less flaked.
We have a pretty good recipe for Fuller’s Porter (and the new imperial version with glucose + treacle) - 75% pale malt, 14% UK crystal 60L, 10% brown malt, 1.5% UK chocolate to 1.056, with 37 IBU from Fuggles or similar. Use a characterful yeast that doesn’t attenuate too much - Imperial Pub is ideal, or something like WLP041.
Brown malt is the defining ingredient of London porters but some people appear to not get on with it - I’m not sure if that’s personal taste or reflecting differences between maltsters. Personally the Fuller’s porter is one of my absolute favourite beers, it’s one I will go out of my way for if it’s on cask.
Historically the fancy ingredients like Otter and EKG would be saved for the premium pale beers so dark beers (in the UK at least) would be made with second-line ingredients - ordinary pale malt or worse, lesser hops like Colgate and Grape etc. So don’t sweat the ingredients too much - Nugget will be fine for bittering.
You end up in the “normal” range for mashing, the point is that dark malts are more acidic than pale malts so if you have soft or RO water then you can end up with a mash pH below the optimum for mash enzymes.
Thank you, very informative.
Will use 70% pale, 20% flaked barley, 10% roast barley, as a baseline to make my first Stout.
Basement fermenting environment is upper 50’s, Nottingham is used.
In an article about Courage/Barclay Perkins Imperial Stout in 1920, Ron Pattinson says of the ingredients used… “Barclay Perkins did seem to fairly randomly swap between black malt and roasted barley.” So it appears that not always did Stout have roasted barley. Don’t forget England’s free mash tun act of 1830. It would have been illegal for brewers to use anything unmalted up to that point.
Good point, but I don’t make or drink historical British beers, so I guess I don’t think in those terms. I was speaking in a contemporary context, since that’s what I assumed we were talking about.