HomoEccentricus gave me some brown malt to try in a porter.
I have a copy of Ron Pattinson’s Homebrewer’s Guide to Vintage Ales, and dragged out a recipe for Barcaly Perkins’ 1821 TT porter.
Original recipe is 86% pale, 12% brown and 2% amber for a 1055 OG porter with 77 IBUs (90’ and 60’ gifts of Goldings).
When I run this through my brewing software, it ends up somewhere on the pale side of 23 SRM (45 EBC) which is way paler than what is now considered to be a porter.
1821 is just around the corner of the invention of black patent malt, which does not feature in the original recipe.
I decided to slightly tweak the recipe, trying to imagine the mindset of a 19th century brewer who’s just setting out to begin using this new black malt everyone’s talking about.
Seems like, the way I understand porters, black malt is kinda mandatory in contemporary (read: post-1820) recipes. After all, that’s what black malt was designed for at the time.
Historic porters require brown (and lots of it), and London porters (be they old or new) require at least a bit of brown.
How much black malt a contemporary porter needs, may be up for debate. I settled on 5% for various reasons.
One is colour: 10% brown malt yields, well, brown beer. Decidedly un-porterish. I could have gone for chocolate or carafa but then I’d need to invent a time machine to introduce those malts to 19th century London and my weekend was busy enough as it was.
Another reason was speculative in nature: how much black malt would an actual 19th century porter brewer have used in initial test batches? My guess would be “a tad much”, seeing as how used they were to liberally using brown malt. Granted, that’s pure and unadulterated speculation from my part.
Cara-amber…yeah I know. That time machine will need to get built after all.
Brewers Gold is, of course, historically bollocks, but it was the only UK pellet hop I had on hand and it’ll give me a comparative foothold next to HomoEccentricus’ version which got this ball rolling in the first place.
Pellet hops were important because the original recipe calls for a 90’ boil of over 100g of vegetable matter, and a 60’ boil for another 100g. Made me wonder if those early porters (and IPAs for that matter) didn’t all taste like a boiled grass to some extent. I contacted Ron Pattinson to ask his opinion about this. I’ll make sure to follow up with his reply.
Racked to secondary one week after pitching. SG levelled out at 1.014 after two days, with super-smelly yeast fumes.
Left it to sit on the cake and floaters for the rest of the week, then (un-historically) cold-crashed by moving the fermenter outdoors to 2-4°C. Superfloccy yeast, which settled nicely on the bottom.
Fairly thinnish body, which makes sense given the OG and the low percentage of Cara.
Nose is light roast and distinctive chocalte with a whiff of coffee and a bit of yeasty fruits. Taste is toast’n’roast with a touch of chocolate at the end. Definitey a brown porter both in looks and flavour.
I’m going to let this sit in the cellar for a couple of weeks to settle and clear and then it’s bottling time
I lugged a couple of bottles to a British beer festival on the Tilquin premises last week. Where better to get some meaningful feedback on my porter than from the Brits themselves, eh?
General consensus was that is was good. Not stellar, but good. Good balance between the sweetness (which I attribute to cara-amber) and bitter (which I think comes from both the hops and the brown & black malt). Good body, which one brewers reckoned deserved a bit of barrel to give it something to play with.
HomoEccentricus even shot a rare compliment my way, stating I should “give up on brewing anything blond and hoppy and focus only on black stuff”.
Regardless of any of the above, this baby (the beer, not HomoEcc.) took a long time to carbonate, and may need even more time to mellow out.
Next porter I’m brewing will be vatted, or will at least spend some time on wood.
searched the forum for somehting related to this. essentially what could easily be labelled the “pattinson porter”, a pattinson style porter/stout
76% golden promise
13% brown malt
5% black malt
7% non-bleached cane sugar
1.073 og, surprisingly high FG of 1.025 (66%AA) tho it was 1 windsor, 1 bry97 mixed.
65 IBU all EKG
as the above poster said its good, fairly unique but not earth shattering. im happy i made it, and it was a good learning experience, but i would definitely attempt to modernize this recipe with crystal malt and less brown malt. i just finished the pint and decided to post this so can post better tasting notes tomorrow, but it has rough notes and the brown malt is clearly standing out way in front of any other flavours. body is surprisingly thin for the FG. a lot of aroma of coffee, toffee maltiness. interplay of herbal, bitter, astringent and a limited sweetness.
the way that so many people are trying these what are essentially pattinson promoted grist porters, ive already labelled them as such in my mind rather than some specific “1850 style” or 1890s style with relatively more or less brown malt and sugars added.
I often wonder why some recipes stand the test of time and still exist while others were relegated to historical brewing records. Sounds like you found one.
Long diseased thread and the OP is probably not going to see this but… his numbers do not match the recipe as printed in the book. When I run the published percentages through Beersmith I get exactly the SRM as stated in the book… if not a touch higher. The OP and others new to his recipes also should be aware that Ron takes these recipes directly from the original brewery logbooks. He may guess at a few things that aren’t specifically named in the logs, like where they sometimes just jot down “sugar”, he may take an educated guess and include an invert sugar… or if they wrote down “American hops” he will suggest a hop that was a popular import at the time but he mostly indicates those guesses in the recipe description. However if the records don’t say black malt then he is not not going to just include it for no reason.
ron has been improving (or uh changing at least) his sugar, sucrose, invert etc approximations over the years. so any older recipes without revisions will be very different from his new, and presumably better research backed suggestions.
i love the guy, hes one of those characters i could listen to talk about anything, and imho what he’s doing has done more than people know for contemporary brewing, but he does have quirks and fixations on things that take some grains of salt to interpret.
im personally going to start saying “pattinson porter” in a broad sense of these kinds of recipes of his. i appreciate his mild, ak and other stuff but dont focus on them.
I submitted a Porter that was straight outta Ron Pattinson, and all the judges said it was too roasty for a Porter. So either old skool black malt was somehow less roasted or that’s just how Porter was in the late 1800s.
How many judges? Two judges? Four judges? I’d argue that you need at least 6 or 7 certified judges for any meaningful result. And even then…
What did YOU think of the beer? If you were drinking this 150 years ago, do you think YOU would have enjoyed it? That’s all that really matters, if YOU brewed it.
i would guess that the judges were using guidelines from contemp “robust porter” (lol) and other judging tables and/or had most if not all of their experience being modern style porters with lots of crystal malt, modern chocolate/paler roasted malts and so on, so didnt expect it at all.
the one i made i would describe as very malty with deep roast undertones. if i did it again i would reduce the original gravity a fair bit to end up with around 5.5 abv
I just bottled a batch of the porter recipe that I developed for an online extra for a Zymurgy article on trying to recreate 1800s porter. In three gallons I used 1.5 lbs brown malt and 4 ozs black patent.
Oh, that’s 100% what it was. I had to pick the best match I could find for the style to enter in — I don’t fault them for it at all. I just cite it as evidence that the style has drifted over time.
