Thank you all for your participation in this month’s Session! The roundup follows, and while I hope I got them all if I somehow managed to overlook yours PLEASE do leave a comment below and I will correct the oversight immediately.
Your contributions
Juan Fajardo of Beer 511 (Juan’s Beer Blog) was first with his post, “The Session #109: Porter.” Having “settled pretty clearly on saisons, “farmhouse” ales, and sours. porter holds some strong and dear associations” for Juan. We learn about his journey into homebrewing, porters, and of a couple porters from Lima, Peru.
John Duffy at The Beer Nut went “Back to the source.” We learn about two versions of porter brewed for Marks & Spencer by Meantime, London Porter, and Greenwich Winter Porter with cinnamon and allspice. “Simple is best where porter is concerned. In 1750 and today.” Can’t say I disagree.
Gary Gillman’s Beer et seq. “The Session – What Is Porter?” provides a brief history lesson on the differences between porter and stout, and why it is all porter in the end. There are times and reasons to differentiate but this is certainly my thinking.
Jessica Boak & Ray Bailey at their eponymous Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog dash off “Session #109: Porter” where they tell us “It is like drinking a Dickens novel.” Hear! Hear! Boak & Bailey spit out some rapid fire thoughts on porter and remind us that they have done some previous writing on the topic. Think if it as background material for this post, if you will.
By the way, have you read their book Brew Britannia? You should consider their Gambrinus Waltz also but I have so far failed to review it. Consider this a hearty recommendation. [Amazon US | Amazon UK]
Alistair Reece at Fuggled in “#TheSession – Head East Young Man” takes a look eastward and provides a story of Baltic Porter.
Sean Inman of Beer Search Party lets us know in “The Session # 109 – “Porter”” that he is clearly not a fan of porter with it being “…, well, boring and solid” but seeing as this is an election year in the US he does bring in several political references. Who said beer and politics can’t mix?
By the Barrel; or, Bend Beer Librarian, “Porter (The Session #109),” in which I, your host, waffle on about a local cherry Baltic porter and The Brewers’ Project beers (currently) available from Guinness.
Thomas Cizauskas of Yours for Good Fermentables reminds us in his “In Praise of Porter. (The Session: Beer Blogging Friday.)” that “Modifiers heaped upon modifiers yield differences of kind not degree.” Be “honest and respectful” and call your Imperial chocolate coffee peanut butter porter something besides porter. I fully agree. We also learn about his homebrewing and professional brewing background that led to this respect for porter.
Kate Bernot at Draft Magazine writes an ode to porter after first almost dismissing them as a topic in her “We should all swipe right on porters” post.
Looke at Likely Moose “The session – Porter” could only find one in his British supermarket, Guinness West Indies Porter, which was “nice,” but ends with a question, “My question, are dark beers really just for beer geeks because the powers that be think most people dont want to drink it.” I certainly hope not.
Derrick Peterman at Ramblings of a Beer Runner is in search of porter in his post, “The Session #109: In search of Porter.” Derrick has to work at finding a few porters among the plethora of other choices, whether at his local bottle shop, the supermarket, or at local bars. He succeeds but the numbers are not heartening to us fans of the style.
[Despite what I said above about agreeing with Thomas that too many modifiers/ications takes one away from the style itself I would love to try that Heretic Chocolate Hazelnut Porter. Maybe I’d decide it had gone beyond porter but was tasty nonetheless. That said, getting nuts right in beer is, in my opinion, almost impossible. Peanuts, “Blergh!,” but I have had one or two well-executed hazelnut beers.]
Jay Brooks of Brookston Beer Bulletin gives us “Session #109: Loving Porter.” Please tell me that you are aware of Jay Brooks’ more recent undertaking, Typology Tuesday! It takes place on the last Tuesday of the month, and addresses where he prefers that The Session itself had stayed centered. As he says, “So I want to make more of a concerted effort to explore the nature of different kinds of beers, how they can, or should, be organized, divided, dissected and shuffled around, preferably with one in my hand.” There’s a tad bit more to it if you need a better explanation but see that Typology Tuesday page. In January we did Barley Wine; February was Bock [Sadly I was unable to find one and was unable to participate.]; March will be Irish-Style Dry Stout, for which I have already secured a couple; and April will be Saison. Please consider joining Jay and others and let’s get this look at styles off the ground and running.
Why did I write all of this? Well, as one of my suggestions was to “Construct a resource along the lines of Jay Brooks’ Typology style pages,” he did just that for Robust Porter. Check it out.
A Good Beer Blog, “Session 109: Porter And Our Shared Georgian Culture,” is written by Alan McLeod and brings us an image “from the commonplace book of William Maud, evidently of Wetherby, York, England, b. 1787 who served as a customs official in Great Britain; he was employed at the excise office in Leeds in 1830.” It includes recipes for both strong and common porter. As he writes, “Porter is Georgian Britain’s gift to us all. It comes in many forms.”
Quite possibly my favorite contribution from Georgian Britain.
Jon Abernathy of The Brew Site in “The Session #109: Porter” drinks a classic local [Bend, Oregon] porter, the flagship of what I often think of as our “little local brewery” [due to the pub] despite the fact that they are squarely in the top 7 or so craft breweries in America, along with a much newer, adjectified, er, flavored, porter from one of our newest local breweries that really has people talking.
Sorry about the timing regarding “Porter,” Jon and Sherri. But coincidence, serendipity, outright strange things cropping up seems to be some kind of metaphor or description of my life.
At my blog, By the Barrel; or, Bend Beer Librarian, my wife, Sara Thompson contributes “The Session: Lovely Time Warp” in which she expounds on the Bend Brewing Lovely Cherry Baltic Porters we shared and a lesson she learned regarding beer awards.
** Updated submission 08 March 2016 **
“The Session #109: Porter” by Dan at Community Beer Works in which we learn that he is just as confused as many others as to what exactly a porter is; “For me, stouts, porters and brown ales are sort of like a pie graph mixed with a venn diagram that then gets beer spilled on it ….” Sounds about right to me.
Some of us might want to pull that apart a bit but I actually kind of love that metaphor for the (few) non-pedantic moments in life.
Final comments
All this talk of porter and flavored porters, whether for or against, put the wife and I in mind of a few of ours that need drinking. We settled on our last Ninkasi Ground Control Imperial Stout released in April 2015. It is a flavored with Oregon Hazelnuts, star anise, and cocoa nibs and it is fermented with ale yeast shot into space. Seriously.
I think this is one of the best nut-infused beers that I have ever had but nonetheless did not want to risk the hazelnut going rancid. I first had it less than a week after it was released in the tasting room of the brewery in Eugene, Oregon (April 2015). It was particularly exquisite 2 1/2 months later. From there it has tapered off, in my opinion, but it is still quite tasty. It will never be my favorite Imperial stout, as I much prefer them “simple” as John said and “honest and respectful” as Thomas said. It was quite good with a bit of homemade chocolate chip cookie, which brought out a really nice rum barrel-aged quality that it doesn’t actually have. Yum.
Thank you all for your contributions to this month’s Session and I hope we can find room to appreciate one another’s viewpoints whether or not we agree.
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