Porter Beginnings
If you have read any of my other articles in Brew Your Own you will know that I have a great interest in trying to reproduce historical beers. The beer that really sparked my interest was porter, perhaps because it was first brewed in the 18th century in London, the city where I was born. Or perhaps it was because porter played a big role in the growth of commercial brewing, yet had vanished from the English scene before I even started drinking beer. Or perhaps it was because the ingredients to brew it were just not available for much of my homebrewing career. Or perhaps it was because the brewing process used for brewing those early porters remained unclear to me, because for a long time I had little access to any original 18th century sources.
There was one source in particular I wanted to check for myself, and that was a volume that a noted brewing historian, H. S. Corran (Guinness archivist at one time) described as, “One of the most important brewing treatises ever written . . .”. This book, The London and Country Brewer (LCB) was published anonymously in several editions from 1734 up to 1759. It did not mention porter in its early editions, but did so in the 1742 and 1744 versions. I finally managed to find some time to visit England’s National Brewing Library (at Oxford Brooke’s University, Oxford) and to read several of these editions. Note that the author is now known to be one William Ellis, a writer on brewing and agricultural methods.
Ellis, who claimed to have been a porter brewer in London, gave a relatively specific recipe for porter in the 1744 LCB. In short, he stated that 1 Quarter of brown malt gave one hogshead of porter, with the grain being mashed twice, the first wort boiled with 3 lbs. (1.4 kg) hops per barrel, and the second wort being boiled with the spent hops from the first wort. He implies that the worts were mixed (perhaps even with those from a third mash) before fermentation, and that this beer was sent out to the customer after about three days of fermentation.
There are a number of problems in trying to make sense of this recipe in order to construct a re-creation of the beer. To begin with, all other available evidence suggests that porter was stored at the brewery for a good many months before being sold for drinking. Next, we do not know what hop varieties were used or their alpha-acid content. The earliest recorded variety with which we are familiar is the Golding hop, first discovered in 1785, some 40 years after this recipe was published. Finally, the measures he uses are all English, so 1 hogshead is 1.5 UK barrels, 54 UK gallons (65 US gallons, 2.1 US barrels). And the weight of a Quarter of brown malt is not certain, as the Quarter is a purely volume measure. Of course, too, we do not know the yield Ellis got from his grain — he didn’t know his original gravity as the hydrometer as a brewer’s tool would not arrive until much later in the 18th century (read more about porter’s role in the invention of the hydrometer at the historical snippet at the end of this article).
So let’s try and decipher all this information and turn it into a recognizable recipe (which I did with some help from Dr. John Harrison of Old British Beers and How to Make Them fame). I’ll start with the malt, and the fact that a Quarter of pale malt weighed 336 lbs. (152 kg) (according to later information). Now there are a good many contemporary references stating that brown malt was up to 25% less dense than pale malt, which makes the Quarter of brown about 250 lbs. (113 kg). This malt was apparently high-dried on the kiln, and was often scorched, so it probably would have given a lower extract than pale malt. John Harrison suggested that brown malt would give 18 °SG/lb./UK gallon, while my own estimate was 25 °SG/lb./UK gallon. My estimate was based on figures from the early 19th century, when brewers were using the hydrometer. However, by that time malting techniques had probably improved so that my numbers were probably high for malt made in 1744, and indeed 25 °SG/lb./UK gallon would have given a much higher OG for this beer (1.116) than was indicated by John Richardson’s work with the hydrometer in 1785. I therefore decided to go with John Harrison’s number, so that (18 x 250)/54 = 83 gravity points, or OG = 1.083, which I rounded to 1.080.
Next let’s look at the hop rates. Again I had to make an assumption that the first wort supplied half the final volume to the fermenter, and so was 27 UK gallons. The hop addition to that first wort was 3 lbs./UK barrel, so that the total addition was 3 x (27/36) = 2.25 lbs. (1 kg). But what was the alpha-acid content? Hops in those days were surely lower in alpha than present day hops, but we don’t know how much lower. However, a well-respected figure in the UK hop industry told me they were likely to be around the same level as present day aroma hops, or about 2–4% alpha-acid, so I opted for 3% in my calculations. As to utilization (U), this was probably pretty high, since the spent hops from the first boil were used in the second. My estimate was that U would be about 30%, and I used this in the following calculation: IBU = (oz. x 28.35 x %alpha x U)/(BV x 4.54).
*IBU = (2.25 x 16 x 28.35 x 3 x 30)/(10 x 54 x 4.54) = 41.6, say 42
*This equation is discussed in a “Techniques” column in the Sept. 2011 issue of Brew Your Own; here I have slightly modified that to allow for the fact that the volume is in UK gallons.
I did this calculation from scratch and 42 IBU was a surprise to me! When I made my first attempt at re-creating this beer some years ago I came up with a figure of 60 IBU. Checking back on my notes it seemed that my original calculation was based on the fact that I assumed 2% alpha-acid, and that the hops were added at 3 lbs./barrel based on the finished beer, that is 1 hogshead! So this emphasizes the difficulties waiting to catch you out when you try to interpret a historical recipe.
Now, to the malt. We know that only brown malt was used, but we need to convert Ellis’ figures to something more sensible. He used a Quarter, or 250 lbs. (113 kg) to obtain a hogshead, 54 UK gallons, of porter. Therefore, for 5 US gallons (19 L) we have: Weight of malt = (250 x 5)/(54 x 4.54/3.78) = 19.3 lbs.
This might appear to be a lot for a beer of 1.080 OG, but remember we ascribed a fairly low level of extract from this malt. So let me summarize the above, bearing in mind that Richardson’s 1785 analyses indicated about 75% attenuation during fermentation. Our recipe for 5 US gallons (19 L) is:
OG = 1.080; FG = 1.020;
ABV = 7.9%; IBU = 42, and all from 19.3 lbs. (8.75 kg) brown malt.
Brown malt just was not available to me when I first became interested in brewing this beer. So imagine my excitement when I finally got my hands on some in the mid-1990s. But then reality returned and problems arose, because modern brown malt contains extract, but no enzymes, as they are killed off in the kilning process. So my first thought was that I might be able to steep out the extract from the grain and I ran a suitable experiment to see if that were the case. The result was a terrible mess as everything set to an unmanageable gel, which told me that the malt contained significant amounts of starch.
Therefore, I could not follow the LCB recipe and use only brown malt, for I was going to have to use some pale malt in the mash in order to have enough enzymes to break down the starch in the brown. This suggested that maybe there were some problems inherent to Ellis’ recipe, which I shall return to later. So I decided to use some 72% pale malt as a base and to add about 25% of an equal mix of brown and amber malts. Why did I suddenly introduce amber? First, I decided the remainder should be black malt (a bit under 5%), since using so much less brown malt than Ellis would make my version much paler in color than his. But that might give my version a rather harsher flavor than Ellis’ if I used only pale, brown and black malts. So I opted for the brown/amber mix, so that the lighter and more nutty, amber malt might balance any harshness from the black malt and give me the kind of mellow flavor I was after.
The use of black malt is certainly not authentic to 1744, since it was not invented until 1817. It does have some credence in that black malt was (and is) widely used in porter as brown malt fell out of favor because of its low yield. Amber malt, on the other hand, was around in 1744 and was certainly in use in porter later in the 18th century, so my choice of it may not be so far out as it appears. As I have repeatedly said earlier in this story we’ll return to this subject later, after the recipe — which I actually brewed. Jeff Browning and I liked this beer so much we brewed 7 US barrels of a closely similar version at BrüRm@BAR in New Haven, Connecticut, under the name of “Presumptuous Porter.”
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
By now you may well be wondering what sort of rubbish I am talking about in re-creating the original version of porter. I mean, I haven’t stuck to the all-brown malt version, I’ve not only chucked in pale and amber malts, I’ve also used black malt which wasn’t around in 1744. I may have come up with a good-tasting porter but does it really have any resemblance whatsoever to Mr. Ellis’ version?
I said I would talk about this later, and now I shall, starting with taking a look at Ellis himself. Well, it turns out that on his own admission (in a later publication) that he was not a brewer in London, but went there merely as the executor to his uncle’s will to dispose of the latter’s brewery. He was a farmer in a county north of London, and by all accounts not a very competent one. Yet he wrote several other books on agricultural matters, in which he offered various farming gadgets for sale, none of which appeared to work very well. A careful examination of his brewing writings in the LCB, and elsewhere show that much of his material is simply a collection of recipes given to him by others. In short little or none of his material is original to him and does not come out of his own knowledge. In which case, with all due respect to H. S. Corran, can we really trust Ellis’ 1744 account of porter brewing?
Next, we need to consider brown malt from the perspective of a brewer. Ellis gives the method for preparing brown malt, which entails taking the partially dried green malt to a very high temperature very quickly, by suddenly ramping up the fire (confirmed by later writers). So quickly was this done in fact that the malt would “snap” or “blow,” with the moisture inside the grains boiling and expanding the grain, which is why it was 20–25% less dense than pale malt, and therefore cheaper to produce on a volume basis.
By my reckoning that means that all of the starch-converting enzymes in the malt would have been destroyed. But also, heating the malt so quickly would surely not have permitted the conversion of starch to fermentable sugars. So with no enzymes present it was impossible to mash the grain to convert the starch, and the presence of the latter would have made it impossible to simply steep out any sugars that were formed in the drying process. Remember me producing a mess of jelly when I tried to mash modern brown malt on its own?
We know from Richardson’s hydrometer work in 1785 that porter brewers were able to produce a reasonably balanced wort that would ferment in the normal manner, with decent attenuation (see more on Richardson and hydrometers in the sidebar on page 48). So if it was impossible to prepare a normal wort from brown malt they could only have done so by adding another malt to the grist that did contain sufficient enzymes to convert the starch in the brown malt. That, of course, would have had to have been pale malt.
Many writers (including myself at one time) have held that Richardson’s work showed that brown malt, although cheaper in terms of the volume price, was actually more expensive than pale malt in terms of extract yield. The theory was that this was the turning point when porter brewers stopped using only brown malt and replaced it first with pale and brown mixtures, and then for a period using various additives (some of them toxic) to recover the “true porter flavor,” and finally to resort to using mixtures of brown, pale and black malts. My reasoning earlier suggests that any such turning point was due to other factors, since brewers must already have been using pale malt along with the brown.
In other words, I am proposing that Ellis’ statement that porter was brewed solely from brown malt is likely a myth. After all, we already have one great and enduring myth about porter, and this is that the beer was first brewed about 1722 by Ralph Harwood, and that he called the beer “Entire” because he combined all the worts to make one beer. This was all based on a magazine account that appeared some 40 years after this supposed event and has been repeated by a host of writers, often verbatim, through the years right up to the present. In fact, there is no evidence that Harwood did, in fact, invent porter, and it is likely that it simply evolved from a move by London brewers to accommodate public taste. Whether early porter brewers used an inhomogeneous malt or a genuine mix of pale (coke- or air-dried) malt plus brown and somehow roasted malt, it’s hard to know for sure . . . and probably nobody does. Nonetheless, inhomogeneity could have been part of the explanation for those early brown-malt-only descriptions of porter mashes.
One thing to also consider is that the old malts in those porter mashes were almost certainly floor-malted. They may have also been somewhat smoky, because the indirect-fired roasting drum was not invented until 1817 (in England, by Daniel Wheeler) and indirect-fired, steam-heated, “pneumatic” malting (for pale malts) was not invented until 1842 (also in England, by Patrick Stead).
Make Your Own Historical Porter
You may well have spotted how I am going to finish this story, but I am going to say it anyway. If my hypothesis is correct, then my re-constructed recipe (found below) may in fact be closer to authenticity than at first appears to be the case. In any event, if you try it out I am sure you will find that the result is a very tasty and drinkable beer. If you do give it a try, be sure to let Brew Your Own know how it went by emailing the editors at [email protected]. We’d love to hear how things turn out!
Related Links:
If you like recreating historical beers, why stop at porter? Try some of these recreation recipes:
• Find out what beer was like in the time of Al Capone. We’ve got the recipe for his once-illegal brew: https://byo.com/story1275
• Using a handwritten recipe unearthed at an eighteenth-century Virginia plantation, a homebrewer and archaeologist recreated Mrs. Cary’s Good Ale, a homemade, all-malt beer from a colonial kitchen: https://byo.com/story479
• Historical “India” Pale Ale: What did this beer taste like when it arrived from the ocean voyage from England to India? https://byo.com/story759
Illustration courtesy of Martyn Cornell’s Zythophile – http://zythophile.wordpress.com An illustration of the interior of a London brewery in 1889, showing pontos for brewing porter, with the troughs that carry the excess yeast away. To the rear, and at the side, can be seen huge vats for maturing porter and stout after it has been brewed.
Historical Porter Recipe
1744 Porter
(5 gallons/19 L, all-grain)
OG = 1.080 FG = 1.020
SRM = 57 IBU = 46 ABV = 7.9%
Since the hops were only used for bittering in the original, I opted for a high alpha-acid US hop, Columbus, and upped the IBU level a little just to give a round number for the weight of hops used.
Ingredients
12.25 lb. (5.6 kg) 2-row pale malt
2 lb. (0.91 kg) amber malt
2 lb. (0.91 kg) brown malt
0.8 lb. (0.36 kg) black malt
12 AAU Columbus hops (90 mins) (1 oz./28 g at 12.4% alpha acid)
Wyeast 1098 (British Ale) yeast (2 pkts in a 1 qt./1 L starter)
Priming sugar (if bottling)
Step by Step
Mash grains at 152–154 °F (67–68 °C) for 60 to 90 minutes. Sparge one hour, with water no hotter than 175 °F (79 °C) to collect about 6 gallons (23 L). Boil for 90 minutes, with bittering hops added at start. Cool as quickly as possible to 70–75 °F (21–24 °C). Pitch with yeast as a 1 qt. (1 L) starter prepared previously and allow to ferment for five to seven days. Rack to secondary for one to two weeks, then prime with sugar and bottle, or keg in the usual manner.
* Note that one thing I did not mention in the story was the yeast. We know nothing about the yeast used in Ellis’ recipe, but Samuel Whitbread was brewing porter in 1744, so a Whitbread yeast strain is about as authentic as it is possible for us to get.
1744 Porter
(5 gallons/19 L, partial mash)
OG = 1.080 FG = 1.020
SRM = 57 IBU = 46 ABV = 7.9%
We must use brown malt in this so we shall have to do a partial mash along with the extract. You could use 6 lbs. (2.7 kg) light liquid malt extract (LME) in place of 9.25 lbs. (4.2 kg) pale malt, and do a partial mash with 3 lbs. (1.4 kg) pale malt and the amber, brown and black malts. But that means a partial mash of just less than 8 lbs. (3.6 kg) in weight, which I think most homebrewers would find a little too much to handle. I have therefore developed a more suitable recipe, based on an amber malt extract (preferably one made with crystal malt and Munich malt), eliminating the use of amber malt and reducing the amount of brown and black malts.
Ingredients
9.5 lb. (4.3 kg) amber liquid maltextract
1 lb. (0.45 kg) 2-row pale malt
1 lb. (0.45 kg) brown malt
0.5 lb. (0.23 kg) black malt
12 AAU Columbus hops (90 mins)(1 oz./28 g at 12.4% alpha acid)
Wyeast 1098 (British Ale) yeast (2 pkts in a 1 qt./1 L starter)
Priming sugar (if bottling)
Step by Step
Place the crushed grains in a muslin bag, add to 2 gallons (7.6 L) of water at 165 °F (74 °C), and keep at 150–155 °F (66–68 °C) for 30 to 60 minutes. Remove the bag, rinse with hot water two or three times, collecting the runnings in the brew pot. Do not squeeze the bag (see tips for success, below). Add the malt extract, stirring well to ensure it is properly dissolved, then bring to a boil and continue heat for 90 minutes, with bittering hops added at start. Cool as quickly as possible to 70–75 °F (21–24 °C). Pitch with yeast as a 1 qt. (1 L) starter prepared previously and allow to ferment for five to seven days. Rack to secondary for one to two weeks, then prime with sugar and bottle, or keg in the usual manner.
Tips for Success:
For partial mash brewers, resist squeezing the grain bag. Brew Your Own’s Mr. Wizard, Ashton Lewis, explains that when specialty malts are steeped in a grain bag the grains really do not behave as a filter and trub is not filtered from the wort, as is the case when a mash tun or lauter tun is used to separate spent grains from wort. Nonetheless, some of the trub is retained in the grain bag. By squeezing the grain bag more trub and cloudy wort is moved into the wort. This is why gently rinsing the bag with hot water is suggested instead of squeezing; it also extracts more of the good stuff from the grain bag.
Additional Snippets – Invention of the Hydrometer
In this article I have credited John Richardson with the honor of being the man who pioneered use of the hydrometer in brewing in 1784. He showed that porter original gravity at that time ran at around 1.070, with corresponding final gravity at around 1.018, which allows us today to deduce that those porters contained around 6.7% ABV. He also showed that these figures could be used to calculate the yield of different malts, and in particular that brown malt gave less extract yield than pale malt (on a volume, not weight basis). Michael Combrune introduced the thermometer to brewers some 20 years earlier, and this work coupled with that of Richardson forms the foundation of brewing science.
But Richardson was not the first to adapt the hydrometer for the brewer. The idea for doing so had been proposed in 1760 in a book by W. Reddington, but he did not actually bring his idea to fruition. The man who did so, in 1765, was John Baverstock, a brewer in Hampshire in southeast England. It was not easy for him, for his father (who founded the brewery) would not allow him to carry out such work, so that he was forced to do it clandestinely. He at first thought that the way to progress it after his initial studies would be to offer his method to one or more of the larger porter breweries in London.
Sadly, his first such approach was a failure. This was to Samuel Whitbread, founder of the eponymous brewery, then one of the top three porter brewers in London. Whitbread rebuffed young Baverstock entirely, basically saying that he saw no need for such gadgets, and that he, John, should return to his country brewery and get back to the real work of brewing. He did not, of course, but then in 1770 turned to Henry Thrale, owner of the Anchor Brewery in South-wark. Thrale proved receptive to Baver-stock’s ideas and conducted several tests with the hydrometer at his brewery. Some of these were carried out in the presence of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer, who was a close friend of Thrale and his wife. Thrale was impressed enough with the results that he presented Baverstock with a silver-encased hydrometer. However, nothing further seemed to come of this, and no other brewers took up the idea. That was when John Baverstock made a fatal mistake — he did not publish it. Why Baverstock did not do so we do not know, but we do know that John Richardson did so in 1784. Baverstock then responded with a book of his own in 1785, but it was too late for Richardson had already gathered the honors, and the system he introduced came into widespread use by brewers.
Baverstock did not entirely retire into obscurity, for he continued a successful career as a professional brewer, and did publish other tracts on various aspects of the brewing industry. In fairness, Baverstock’s hydrometer work was neither as extensive nor as rigorous as that of Richardson. However, Richardson came up with a system for determining gravity based on “lb. per barrel.” In other words he measured it as the extra weight of a barrel of wort or beer over that of the weight of a barrel of water. This unit became currency in British brewing right up to 1974, which to me is a very clumsy unit. Baverstock used specific gravity in his work, which is a much more sensible measurement, and indeed was the system adopted in Britain when lb. per barrel finally went out of use.
Ellis gives the method for preparing brown malt, which entails taking the partially dried green malt to a very high temperature quickly, by suddenly ramping up the fire. In fact, there is no evidence that Harwood did, in fact, invent porter, and it is likely that it simply evolved from a move by London brewers to accommodate public taste.
