Drinkology Beer by James Waller

Author:James Waller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2011-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

PORTER

It’s a little-noted fact that civilization depends on there being a group of people—men, usually—who earn their living by toting things from one place to another: loading, unloading, delivering, taking away. In a world where transportation is largely mechanized, that class has shrunk in size. But in busy cities in the days before the Industrial Revolution, it was, of necessity, enormous. In eighteenth-century London there were thousands upon thousands of such men. And, as a group, they tended really to like a thick, robustly malty, highly nutritious, highly alcoholic, blackish-brown style of beer that first appeared in London sometime around 1720. They drank so much of it that the brewers who made it became very wealthy, and the beer style itself acquired the name of the workingmen who favored it. They were, of course, called porters.

The history of porter-style beer is complicated. Some credit its invention to a single brewer—a certain Ralph Harwood, of Shoreditch High Street, in the part of London known as the City. According to that—probably legendary—account, Harwood was trying to emulate a drink, then popular in London pubs, called “three threads,” which was a mixture, performed by the publican, of three different kinds of beer drawn from different casks. Harwood purportedly called his new brew by a name that strikes the modern ear as ludicrous, salacious, or both: entire butt. At the time, however, the name would have conveyed that the taste of the three-threads combo was reproduced, in Harwood’s brew, by one beer drawn from a single (“entire”) cask (“butt”).

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