Episode: 4483
Title: HPR4483: HPR Beer Garden 3 - Porters
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4483/hpr4483.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-11-22 14:54:18

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4483, for Wednesday 8 October 2025.
Today's show is entitled, HBR Beer Garden 3 Porters.
It is part of the series' beverages.
It is hosted by Kevin and is about 29 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
In the summer he is, Kevin and Dave talk about Porter Beer's.
Hello and welcome to Episode 3 of the Hacker Public Radio Beer Garden.
My name is Dave and I am joined this time as all three times so far by Kevin.
Hi Kevin, how are you?
Hello, hello, I am very well and after a comment we received on Telegram,
after we've released this one, I do believe we can call it a series.
We could have a burn there by saying, you can't call it a series until you reach three.
So we've reached three, yay!
We have arrived, well by the time it's released we will have arrived.
But that might not be for a couple of weeks, yeah.
Oh but there's future feeds so I mean they might get next.
Yes, very quickly.
But anyway, if you listen to this on the day it could release,
this is all rather pointless waffle.
But anyway, I'm actually in better form because we have passed session IPs
and we're looking at one of my favourites tonight.
Yay, we got poor burgers.
Oh okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So yeah, I'm good for them.
I'm looking forward to this.
So before we actually get on to this and I know that we're both actually
desperate for a beer but there's actually quite a nice history.
We've done two styles which have been very, very new and this is actually going
to go completely the opposite way.
I've been a fan of portraits pretty much since I started drinking especially darker beers
but I didn't actually appreciate quite how much history there was to them.
Now, I'm going to start by saying there are loads of theories about how
Porter came into being.
However, there's an awful lot of them uncredited and actually hold
any evidence at all based on anything recorded.
I mean, I know that doesn't mean they're necessarily totally false
but there just doesn't seem to be an awful lot of fact to back up a lot of the theories.
So the source I'm relying on quite heavily is by the camera beer writer Roger Prots.
He's one of highly respected for years and he's done loads of books and he did actually a book
called Classic Stout and Porter which I've read for this show in fact and I read another
couple of different books as well, not the whole book but sections of them that gave a few other
contradictory views but to be honest, I'm going to rely on his just purely because he's
a source that I find trustworthy.
Some of the theories, I'll just get some of them out of the way.
Some of them claim that it was made by a wrong delivery of moths to a brewer.
Given the time scale we're talking, you know, early 18th century, this is quite unlikely
because, you know, these ingredients were expensive.
They wouldn't just have said, yeah, yeah, we'll soak up the cost.
So that's unlikely.
There was again another one that says, oh, it was a brewery that just bottled up some beer and
forgot all about it.
And again, I just don't buy it given the timing for that because these were huge vats.
There weren't just a tiny wee bottle, you'd stick around the back of the brewery.
That could probably more likely happen today where we live and I throw a
society.
But being in mind, it was a very different time in the 18th century.
And, you know, a large wooden cask beer was not likely to be forgotten about,
as this would be hugely lost profits.
As I said already, it's a very old style.
History begins in London in the early part of the 18th century.
And London at the time was, it wasn't as city as we know it today.
It was a series of small connected villages and a couple of small townships that would
eventually become a city, but it was starting to become at the start at then more built up
because rural folk were coming together just down to the immense poverty and the hope of
actually gaining some work.
And of course, with a large number of people, a large number of,
a large amount of beer is needed.
And at the time, it was actually actively encouraged because it was considered safer than water
to drink. And of course, manually, but before mean the majority of employment, the workers needed
a refreshment with affordable prices because these were not high paid jobs as you may find in London
today. Now, transport at the time was extremely limited and the larger breweries would very often
own their own fields or buy directly from neighbouring farmers. And this resulted in the bigger
breweries actually being located outside of big townships.
Pale beer was brewed using the hops and this was sold to London at huge profits.
And the pale was actually known as two penny ale because at the time, that was a ridiculous
amount for one beer, but it was called, it was nicknamed two penny ale due to type price.
This was fine for the nobles, but it was something the working man simply couldn't afford.
So what the London brewers would do was they would make an unaged brown ale.
And due to the lack of storage, this was something that they couldn't really age themselves.
And it wasn't very palatable. So what they tended to do was they would actually sell it
to the larger breweries who would mature it for months in wooden casks. And this became known as
stales, what it actually known as a little, it actually made mature, but it was known as stale.
And then these were actually sold back to the London bars and the beer sellers. And what they
would also do is you'd have your pales and you'd have your mature. And in order to make the
investment go a bit further, the publicans would mix thirds with a third pale, a third stale,
and a third of the unaged London brown ale. And this is what would go on to become
porters. And it was well received as it was considerably better than the unaged brown ale sold
to the working class. With different beers being mixed, of course, the more corrupt
publicans would be doing the mixing. And the beer ended up being really inconsistent and
brewery started to get worried for their own reputation. Because they would say it would be
from this brewery or that brewery that the mix would be made from. So in order to keep up a good
reputation, some of the brewery started mixing up their own versions of this. So normally you would
get this kind of as I said, the thirds would be mixed, but the breweries who mixed the three together
would call it, it was called the entire but because their big battles were called buts. And
this was gradually shortened to entire so you could get a pint of entire. Now the first brewer
to actually produce the entire but was Ralph Harwood. And I have to confess even as a fan of
porter, I'd never heard of this name. I mean, he didn't actually invent the style himself,
but he was the first one to produce it as ready mixed and actually sell it. However, the high cost
of the pale ale and the stale kept the prices still too high. And he was keen to grab the London
beer drinker market. And by 1722, he was brewing the beers himself rather than simply blending them.
But despite bringing beer to the masses, I mean, the guy's name is hardly known at all,
even in both beer circles today. He had up about an East London and it's a Bides place which is
offshore ditch high street. I was, no, I don't know the serial myself. So that's me getting it
from a book. And the building itself is long gone. There's not even a plaque on anything
as far as I'm aware. However, the resulting beer was one that was based on a beer creating,
a containing two thirds of brown ale, one aged one unaged. So of course, this was produced a dark
multi with notes of smoke that was more subtle than what we know as stout. Interestingly enough,
stout was actually just initially a stronger version of porter, which was originally called porter
stout. And I was confused because I did read in a few books references to stout before the beginning
of the 18th century. However, before then, a stout was just referenced to a strong beer. It was
described as stout, not an actual style. There were a few different discussions about the name.
There's been some crazy theories actually made for the name, including that it was based off
some French word, some Latin words. However, the most likely one is that it was named after the
porter boys that was used to deliver the mixed beer into the barge. They would actually
take it in the cases. Now, I don't mean brief cases, obviously. This was more like, think of
what's the, oh, my mind's just gone blank. What do you call those? You see it in old time,
films, especially like in the Alps, kind of send a music either that can you see where you see
kind of them carrying the wooden crates with the buckets of milk attached to them. You're the one
I mean, the yolks. Yeah, like the big yolk. They went more like that. I don't know what the official
terms were. They would have the kind of keg mini kegs and things hanging off them. So,
and apparently they used to call the barman just always say porter when these guys came into the bar.
So it became, it's believed that that's how people referenced it to the beer rather than the
vodka itself. Now, we tend to think of porter today as black. However, the traditional porter
was actually much more brown and it wasn't until the 19th century. They are very early 19th century,
a man called Daniel Wheeler invented a roasting machine for grain that was just basically very
similar to a coffee roaster and this enabled brewersh to add deeply roasted black and chocolate
molts to their beers. And since then, it's given the stout and portage, the j-black appearance
that we still kind of believe we have today. So, for those of you who are really wanting the stats,
that was on the 20th of March 1817 Wheeler obtained a patent number 4-1-1-2 with a new or improved
method of drying and preparing of malt. So, actually, that was a patented then. This proved to be
actually very effective. It was far more economical and also gave a greater consistency to the beer.
And this was taken up very quickly by the British brewing industry and the first believed
Bain Brewer was actually Whitbread who used it, who was using this by the middle of 1817. So,
that was a very quick adoption. Yeah, so porter continued to be popular. However, it's actually
demise came after the First World War. In 1919, the government put tax on the ingredients and also
due to the effects of having a very outspoken T-total MP, whose name I know but I'm not going to
mention on this podcast. It's terrible. How cruel is this? They limited porter in order to stop
people taking it, not only were they hiking up the tax to increase the cost, but legally at the time
porter had to be limited to 3.2% ABV, which meant that essentially all of the drinks stopped.
It almost overnight, it was killed because brewers were forced to cut down flavour, cut down strength,
and they were left with basically brown water. And this was a totally different thing.
This was nowhere near the one that had been previously the working man's beer that was full of
flavour and also nutrition. So, that is the results of my homework. I could actually go on for
hours by the way, but I cut that we don't. That's really, really interesting. I didn't realise,
because I've did a little bit of research myself and I didn't realise that the origins of
stout and porter were actually the same. Yes. Well, that's what confused me. Like I said,
I mean, I'd seen references to stout before that. And then I was going, but how can stout be
then? And then that's when I found out that stout preage, that's reference pre porter,
was just referencing strong beer as in something I was stout. Right, but these days stouts and
porter's tend to be around the same ABV range anyway. Yes. So stouts are not necessarily stronger.
What's Guinness? Three points? Something four points, something. I thought it was five, but I'm not sure.
And it's not overly strong. Right. Not like I've talked yet. That makes sense. It does make sense.
Yes. So, well, actually, that was one of the, it wasn't from the book I was particularly
taken up, but one of the other books I was reading did actually say sadly that,
traditionally, you would have a more subtle flavour from the porter compared to a much stronger
flavour from the stouts. But it says, largely, that's actually gone. Now, you could call a stout
porter, and nobody would notice, and vice versa. Right. You know, so it says sad dates, I kind of
think that's kind of gone there, gone our way more or less. I don't know whether whether it's just my,
whether I'm making this happen, self-fulfilling prophecy or not. But I find that the reason I don't
get on so much with porters is because I've associated porters with the overly smoky nature
of the dark ale, something I don't usually experience with a stout. But from what you've just said,
and the research I've done as well, that is basically bunkum. So it might be something I've
put into my head that I don't like porters because of a certain characteristic, whereas actually
it's exactly the same characteristic as you would find in a stout anyway. I've got five to choose
from here, because I've four of the ones I picked up were Baltic porters, which is a different style
again. I'm not going to go into that. Yeah. And they're stronger, is that right? Much stronger.
Yes. Although they are basically based off the same recipe, it's just they were actually more
link-to-impedial stouts, the Russian taboo, it was an export market. The sole porter that I found
was from the Wald Top Brewery, which is in Drifield in Yorkshire. And it's called Marmalade Porter.
Now, I don't think it's because it's been made with Marmalade. I think it's just that that's the
flavors that have come out of the brew with the choice of things that are in there. And it says
on the back of the bottle, a rich dark and smooth, that notes of black coffee and dark chocolate
married with a sweet Marmalade and tangy lemon, create a luxurious balance and taste.
Sweet or savoury, fabulous with both. It says 5% that the labeling on the bottle, as you can see,
is quite old-y. I love that. That's great. Which is really, really nice. Despite my preconceptions,
this actually looks really nice. I think I said on the last episode or the one before that I
hold a lot on branding. I determine whether something's going to be nice by how it looks.
And this looks nice. The branding is good. The bottle looks nice. It's a nice brown bottle. The
beer itself is slightly translucent, not amazingly so, but it does look clear. So do you want me
to crack this open now or do you want to go through yours first? No, tell you what, I am actually
going to leave you to crack this open. And then I'll go on to mine second. Yeah. Okay, all right.
So I'm going to use my Broughton Brewery bottle opener for this one. So hopefully you'll hear this.
Oh, that smells amazing. That's if we can get a bit of sound effect out of this.
It's poured quite cleanly. There's a small head on the top of it, which looks like it's not going
to last. It's going to dissipate in a minute or two. It smells lovely. It's got a real nice
smoky overtone to it. I can't really smell the fruity flavours as yet, but then that might be the
foam stopping it from getting through. So I'm going to take a swig. That is incredibly nice.
Yes, sweet marmalade and tangy lemon. I've definitely got the orangey flavour for it from it,
but after about 10 seconds or so, the beer itself is quite clean. It's not watery. It's got a
nice consistency to it. Now that it's poured actually, I can tell you that you can't really see
through it. I'm holding it up to a light and I'm not seeing much through. It's not as dark as
Guinness at all. It is definitely a brown ale. I'm not really getting much aroma from it, which is
quite odd. It almost smells stale from the top of it, like a bottle that's been sat in the bottom
of a cupboard for, I don't know, 15 years or so. It's got that really stale characteristic to it,
but the beer itself is actually very nice. It's a very clean flavour, like I say. The orangey
flavours, the citrus flavours come through a little bit later. There's not really a lot of
aftertaste. Once that marmalade flavour comes through, it dissipates fairly quickly. Usually
after a beer like this, I would expect some kind of palate cleanser to clear it. This doesn't seem
to need it. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but this is actually really,
really nice. I think I'll explore porters a bit more, expand my repertoire slightly to remove my
prejudice. I'm going to get warned, you know. Obviously you guys can't see that. Dave can. I've
got a barbell. That one was given to me. I don't know who gave it to me, but that one was given to me.
Is that a barbell or a keyboard protector? Well, exactly, because one thing I found from
ordering these online, the majority of them are live ails. So be warned if you have a live ails
in a bottle. You open that and this thing's going to go off like a rocket under the circumstances.
Yeah, have a barbell. Actually, if you don't have a barbell, it's good to have a towel. As long as
the wife's not going to kill you for ruining one that's in mother gear, your late mother gear,
you on that on your wedding day or something like that, just make sure you don't throw a weight
towel. Right. So actually, because this is something that's a bit more subtle, I've actually got
sniffed right last. So which I don't know, it's an oversized brandy glass, but it is really good
for actually getting the smells out. The one I'm going to try is one by eight sale and it's a
Victorian porter and I was reading this is actually on the camera website. It's mentioned and it's
actually brewed to a proper Victorian recipe. This is 5%, which is kind of normal. Portage don't
tend to be very strong, but they don't tend to be weak either. Right. A lot of smoke coming out of
that. Don't know if you can see it. Oh, yeah, we can do it. And that'll be my glass smashing. No,
it's not. I've actually smashed it. But yeah. Oh, lively. This is lively. Okay.
Oh, my word. I've got a third ale to two thirds head there. That is huge. Wow. So again,
similar to yours, very dark brown though. Again, it's not black. You can tell the difference between
this and kind of like a dark stout. This is more brown. You can see it around the edges.
Yeah. Oh, oh, roasted malt. Yeah, really roasted malt, lovely coffee, but not I hit a coffee.
It's roasted malt. You're getting in there. There's subtle kind of sweetness in there,
but it's not clawing. Not getting smokiness. But again, I don't know if it's claiming to that,
but I'm not getting any. Oh, I'm actually looking forward to this sadling now. I really want to try it.
Yeah. I can't get over how lively that actually was. It's there a way to avoid that kind of
thing happening. Use the glass you've got. A curved glass like that will cause much bigger head
than a glass. Right. Right. So for context, I've got a slightly shorter tapered big glass,
like the ones you would typically get in a pub that they would serve you cheap lacquer in.
But it's slightly shorter and marginally wider than your typical pub. Yes, but I didn't believe
it initially. How much it would change? I thought maybe there's a wee bit of difference,
but I found this when I went to a friend's house and they were not normally beer drinkers,
but the husband, too, I was it. Well, that's where I was my mate and his wife
kind of brought us in two different glasses because she didn't have their wine glasses.
In retrospect, I should have had a wine glass because we were doing a beta for the beer,
but she gave me like a not a high bowl glass, but like a medium sized tumbler, if you begin to.
Okay. He had one that was like a beveledged tumbler. You know, looking at one quite often people
would serve you like if you went to a nice hotel or somewhere and they served you like a juice
in the morning, you know, quite often it's like a bowed-edge glass. You know the one I mean?
Yes. Yeah. Well, his one kept a lovely head. My one as soon as I poured it was dead and it was
the same beer out of the same bottle. You know, and I was like, wow, that's actually freaky.
So this is finally starting to come down. Still, still, it's actually retaining that.
You would dig this huge head, as you can see. Yeah, that does look a little bit foamy.
You sure you didn't like leave some washing up liquid in the glasses, something?
100% with a little one per nicotine, but that I wore among glasses. There's nothing worse than a
soupy beer glass. Yes. Well, cheers. Cheers indeed. Yeah, those tastes continue. It's not so
rusty malty. It does become the roasted malts kind of tone down a wee bit. There's coffee in there.
There's cocoa in there. Like a dark chocolate, not juggle at all. There's just something producing
a sweetness. Almost like a mildly toasty sweetness, maybe like a kind of extra burnt caramel.
But it's subtle and it's at the end, but oh, that's, yeah, that's lovely. And of course,
with it being at one thing I found generally between difference between portage and stout.
Some people, I mean, if you're used to a stout, especially if you're used to a high ebb stout,
you'll find portage a wee bit more watery. I'm not saying water in terms of lag and water,
but a wee bit more of a wee bit of a lesser body on them. And this is, yeah, continuing on.
It's medium to, it's only medium to think at best. It's not a thick mouth feel at all,
but that's lovely, very, very drinkable. Oh, good. I mean, I finished that glass just about,
but that's only because I don't have third of it in. Actually, yes. Yes. So, yes, so this one is,
as I said, so it's eight-sale brewery who I've heard a lot about after the cafe I've ever drank
any of their beers before. And this is Victorian Porter, 19th century-style Porter. A beer for
the time when Porter was popular. Generous amounts of brown and black malts give a rich roasted coffee
flavor dark beer. But it's done well. I've had Porter's where I'm drinking a cup of cold coffee,
which just isn't that pleasant. When there's just too much in the way of roasted coffee,
this is, they've done this absolutely perfectly. Yes. So, if you really want a nice traditional
Porter, this is eight-sale Victorian Porter. As far as a score goes, I can't really score that
any less than nine. I'm actually going to say 9.5 at a 10. That's really good. Wow, that is good.
That is very good. Yeah. Yeah. And the score for mine, the the Marmalade Porter, I'm going to put
in at 7.5, which has surprised me. Probably as much as it's surprised anyone else, because I have
really enjoyed it. Well, that's good. We'll make a Porter drink at 8. I also had another couple,
but I've had milestone beer before, beer from the milestone brewery, and I got a honey Porter
from them, which I'm in the sit and trying. But after doing the research, I really wanted this
to be as kind of genuine a Porter as you can. And certainly with it being a beer of the working man,
there is no way honey would have been in that beer. That would have been far too exotic at that time.
Right. So as much as I'm looking forward to it, I also picked up one from the Colonel Brewery,
called Export India Porter. And I thought, oh, is this another style I don't know about?
Doing my research, no, it was never a style at all. It's just something they've called
very type in Export India Porter. All you get is the Colonel Brewery stuff. That's all that comes
back, different websites of it. So that's not a style. So yeah, so apparently that Export India
Porter is a traditional Porter. This call Aston Porter, which I've got, which is every beer
review I've had has riddled with very good, but open over a sink. It's so lively. Yes, that's
really good. I will see if I can obtain that, but be purely on your review. I mean, nine and a half
out of 10 is quite a stonking review. Oh, yes. This is like I said, this one to be honest surprised
me. I was fully expecting, I like Porter. But to be honest, I'm a bit like yourself in that
I would prefer a stout normally, but this one is actually way better than I was even expecting.
That is absolutely beautiful. And the good thing is I think I may have actually found with this
Porter. Well, as I said, it's not, it's not overly heavy. I think I might have found my ideal
summer beer here, because you've got something that's actually nice. It's fairly, it's not too heavy.
I don't feel like I'm, I don't feel like I'm, you know, kind of a beach twale and the heat kind of
thing. After drinking a drink in the soil, yeah. No, I know exactly what you mean. Yes, absolutely.
A summer ale to say we're an enjoy rather than to neck. That's a neck back. Yes, I remember drinking
a stout once in the heat. Never again. I honestly felt like I'd kind of was trying to eat a huge
tea bowl and steak. You know, I'm done halfway through this. It was just like it was too much.
Yes. Yes. So, yes, so that one, as I said, highly recommended. So, do you have anything else to add
to this? I do not. The one thing that I think we maybe should mention is the fact that we have had
some feedback. Yay. So, would you like to read our feedback from T.A. Spinner?
So, T.A. Spinner commented on the episode on Hacker Public Radio episode 4462, which is the
first one we did when we were talking about dessert stouts. And they say the title of the comment
is your thoughts on hephavisons. I love exploring beers. I enjoy stout from time to time. I've never
tried a dessert stout, but planned to. I'm curious what you think of hephavisons, my current favorite.
Now, I looked into what a hephavisen is. And it essentially is a wheat beer that has not been filtered.
So, it's a cloudy wheat beer. Hephavisen literally means yeast wheat. So, it's where the yeast has
not been filtered out from the beer. So, I've never had one of these before. So, I'm quite
interested to see what the retention of the yeast in the in the vice beer would actually bring
to the flavor and the feel of the of the of the ale. So, I'm going to see if I can find one.
And then maybe we can we can review one as as a hephavisen style in a future episode.
But thank you so much, T.A. Spinner, for commenting. If you want to comment on any of our episodes
for this, then just literally head along to Hacker Public Radio.org, find the episode that you want
to comment on, leave a comment. And we will read it out on a future show.
Absolutely, yes. And yeah, this is one thing that we're all keen for now, especially because of
my geographical location. Getting beers may be so difficult, especially the motor obscure we get.
So, if we don't review it in the next few episodes, don't get this heartened. I've just received
a rather large shipment of beer so I don't want to order more. So, we will review it, but it might
just take me a week while to get it. Let's put it that way. Yes. Yes. So, that being said,
I believe that is actually us for this episode. I think it probably is. Yes.
So, tune in to model for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
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