Porter Roundtable
Brewers:
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Company
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Company
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
The heart of any porter is the darkly-roasted malts and grains. What malts/grains do you like in a porter?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
Obviously, I want some roasted grains. I don’t tend to use any unmalted barley like I would in our stouts. What I want in a porter — especially in a standard porter — is an acrid bitterness that you can get from very highly roasted grains, although I don’t look for this as much in our Baltic porter.
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
The thing I love about porters is to bring out as much caramel as possible, and for that I use chocolate malt. Some crystal malt is called for, but the real key is chocolate malt.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Company
In a British-style porter, I like to include a combination of English crystal, brown and chocolate malts in addition to the pale ale or 2-row malt. Sometimes I add a touch of torrefied wheat for head retention and palate softness. In our Baltic porter, I use more Germanic/Continental malts. These would be a portion of dark Munich for richness of character and de-husked Carafa II Special from Weyermann for color and flavor.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Company
I prefer the chocolate and bitter black malts, roasted barley, sometimes, maybe some special roast, crystal malt or maybe some Munich to get a little body.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
We use a combination of pale ale malt, crystal malt, chocolate malt and roasted barley.
Do you mix multiple dark malts or grains to get the dark grain character you desire, or do you rely on a single dark malt or grain?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
I want a kind of depth of roasty character in a porter, not just one note, so I use a range of grains to achieve a depth of character. Whenever you use roasty grains, I find that layering a couple of different varieties of malts makes the beer more complex.
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
I think we have four different crystallized/caramelized chocolate malts in our blend.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Company
We definitely use a mix. If one type of malt could get me the flavor I want, I would use only one dark malt. Some porter recipes from long ago call for using 90–100% brown malt. You would be hard pressed to make a palatable beer today if you used all brown malt as malts have changed over time. The brown malt of today is different from the brown malt of old.
Other than the dark malts, do you add any other specialty grains to the grist? What do these add to the beer?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
We do use caramel malts to get more of that sweet malty backbone — not just roasty. I want to support that roastiness with a good body. In our standard porter, we use oats. I find that adding a little bit of oats in the grist gives a silkiness to the mouthfeel that I think goes great with that acrid roast bitterness.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Co.
In English-style beers, I occasionally use torrefied wheat or flaked barley in conjunction with the malt. Small portions of these can improve head retention. I think wheat can soften the palate of the beer, allowing for some of the complexities of the specialty malts and yeast character to show through.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Company
Sometimes I might throw some oats in there to smooth out the flavor. Most of the time we use some crystal or Munich malts to round it all out. It’s a delicate mixture
of malts.
How much bitterness should one have in a porter? What is the role of bitterness in a porter?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
We brew porter in the English style, which is traditionally not dominated by hops. The bitterness needs to be there and be in balance, but the main source of the bitterness in a porter comes from the malts rather than lots of hops.
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
We run right at 50 IBUS in our porter and we tend to use hops that aren’t significantly flavor or aroma forward including Willamette. We tend to have front-end hopping so the majority of the hopping is done in the first and seconds and just a little bit of hopping in the back end. The roast and chocolate malts kind of hide the hop aromas and flavors, so if you try to strive for high hop aromas, the beer can get muddled up and that’s not the goal of a porter for us.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
The role in any beer is to balance the sweetness of the malt. How much bitterness is a personal preference or brewery style. I think in many porters, to get the full body, there is a higher residual sugar than, say, a pale ale. When there is a higher residual sugar, it takes more bitterness to balance that. Bitterness level is appropriate if it balances the sweetness of the malt and fits the style.
Do late hop additions — for flavor and aroma— benefit a porter? If so, what hop varieties do you prefer?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
I think that they do, but again, you don’t want to go overboard with the hops. Late hop additions add complexity and aroma. We add hops in the whirlpool. I myself really love Fuggles, but lots of varieties could work. You get a little bit of a black pepper character from the Fuggles, which I think goes well in a porter.
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
We use just a small amount. Willamette. We tend to use Nugget on the front end.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Company
I think a token hop addition for flavor at 15–20 minutes before boil end is OK. I keep the addition very, very small. I prefer Fuggles for English porter and Saaz or Lublin for Baltic porter. I think aroma additions are totally inappropriate for these beers and can detract from the rich malt notes that these beers are famous for.
What yeast strains work well in a porter?
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
We have our own yeast strain — we’re pretty much a British ale type of brewery and our house strain came from an English brewery and it’s up to the task of producing a porter.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Company
For English-style porter, I like Fermentis Safale S-04. It is a dry English yeast strain that provides great English ester character and it flocculates well. For Baltic porter, I use my house lager yeast, but the classic Weihenstephan 3470 lager yeast works very well.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Company
We use Wyeast 1028 (London Ale) for all of our ales. This yeast gives off a very clean aroma and flavor.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Co.
Traditionally porter is of English origin, so an English ale yeast is best, and even more specifically, I recommend using a London ale yeast.
What temperatures do you ferment at, and do you think esters play a role in a porter’s profile?
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
We ferment at 63 ºF (17 ºC). I think esters absolutely play a part. The variety of yeast we use produces no sulfur, so the predominant attribute of the yeast is the higher esters.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Co.
Yes, for traditional porter. English ester characteristics can add a pleasant wine-y character that adds complexity to the beer. I ferment at 68 ºF (20 ºC) for English porter. For my Baltic porter, I ferment roughly at normal lager temperature.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Co.
We usually keep our ales at 65 ºF (18 ºC). We’re not looking for esters in this beer and want it to be clean smelling, no fruitiness. I want to smell the malt, I don’t want to smell any esters coming off the yeast. Sometimes you may get some esters in there if you’re experimenting, which is the great thing about brewing, but when making a straight porter, I personally wouldn’t want esters in there at all.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
In our porter we’re not looking for a highly-estered flavor. Look at your yeast strain and go lower in temperature if you want less esters and higher if you want more.
The dark roasty character of porter lends itself well to other flavorings. Do you have any advice on making flavored porters?
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
We used a significant amount of coffee in a double Black Butte porter we called Double Black Butte Porter XX and XXI. We put in about a pound per barrel of coarsely ground coffee. We worked with a local coffee roaster to come up with the right source of coffee geographically and how it was roasted. I think adding flavors is just one big experiment.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Company
If you’re going to do that kind of stuff you have to make sure whatever you do it is really subtle because too much can ruin the beer. One of our former chefs made real vanilla extract and it was a great way to infuse the beers. Go all natural — use coffee beans, use real vanilla extract — and make sure what you’re doing is not overwhelming. If you’re going to make anything great, it is going to take time. You don’t want to stamp your name on something that you don’t agree with yourself.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
We have red currants growing outside our brewery and once I made a keg of red currant porter — I think the flavor and residual sweetness works well as would raspberry. Right now we also have a vanilla porter. The style lends itself well to anything with a dessert flavor — fruit, chocolate, vanilla.
Do you mash for a high or low degree of fermentability?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
We aim for a medium degree of fermentability. The beer is relatively high alcohol with lots of grain and I don’t want it to go overboard.
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
I would say fairly low. We’re shooting for about 50–57% [real attenuation], which is pretty low. Most IPAs are in the 64% area. I see a real tendency for people to overmash their sugar conversion program and I think you need to be very patient on that. You want to have a lot of residual sweetness in the mash that the yeast is not going to ferment.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Company
I go for medium fermentability in the English porter and high for the Baltic because I will have a lot of residual sugar and body regardless so I try to manage it. I do not want too much and have a cloyingly sweet beer.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Co.
We go for a pretty high fermentability because your malts are going to dictate to you what the style is going to be. If you’re not going to do that, or have a real basic recipe, I would try for a little bit higher temperature for more residual sugars. Our mash is 150 ºF (66 ºC) like most of our other beers. Probably 148 ºF (64 ºC) is the lowest we’ll go for say, an IPA. You want it to ferment out. I like residual 4.4–4.5 [°Plato] for a porter. Anything sweeter and I would try to balance that out with more hops.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
We tend to go on the lower side than say our pale ales.
Given the deep color of a porter, do you treat the beer as you would your paler beers with respect to steps taken to promote clarity (kettle finings, filtration, etc.)?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
We don’t actually brew anything much lighter than an amber, but yes, we treat the porters the same way we would the rest of our beers with kettle finings and we do filter.
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
Every brew we make we have a test where we determine the finings to put in. The goal of that is to have a compact trub in the whirlpool and in the cold break. I would say in general we treat the porter at about the same level as a pale. We never filter our porter.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Company
Generally, I do not filter my porters.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Co.
We treat the beers all the same — but delicately. Overall, we treat them like any other ale we have.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
The kettle finings we use are the same. We’ve played with filtering and not filtering, but we do filter our porter.
Are there any special actions that need to be taken when fermenting a porter?
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
Porter is one of our least complex fermentations. The yeast love it. The key is to watch the amount of diacetyl generation, which is dependent on the amount of yeast and oxygen. Taste the beer during fermentation and see how much diacetyl is in it.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Company
Get rid of the yeast as often as you can. The lower pH from the dark malts can increase the risk of yeast autolysis. If you do not need it, get rid of it. Rack off the yeast cake at the end of fermentation. Stronger beers are more of a risk for autolysis as well.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Co.
Make sure you don’t crash cool them, because the yeast won’t have time to digest the diacetyl. Let it sit at about 65 ºF (18 ºC) after it finishes, then bring it down to 40 to 38 ºF (4 to 3 ºC) and leave it there for a while.
What level of carbonation do you shoot for in your porter? Why?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
We carbonate at around 2.4 [volumes of CO2], simply because I like it that way.
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
We shoot for 2.2 volumes and we expect our kräusen will take us up to about 2.5. I think that’s a pretty medium to low carbonation.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Co.
All our beers are about 2.7 for bottles and around 2.5 for kegs. You don’t want it flat and you don’t want it super-carbonated. I don’t like drinking stuff flat or over-carbonated, that’s my style . . . the middle of
the road.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
Ours is about 2.6. We also make a nitro version of our Cutthroat Porter. We’ll take ten barrels off of our regular run and nitrogenate. What’s interesting is even beers from the very same batch that are carbonated differently show a significant difference in mouthfeel and flavor.
What foods do porters pair well with?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
We’ve had great luck with roast meats like roast turkey. Roast beef goes great with a porter. The kind of fire flavors you get in roast meats go really well with the roast flavors in porter.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
Most dessert type foods work well, such as chocolate, crème brulee — anything with a caramel character. I also say it works well with chili, beef stew and good meat marinade. Porter also pairs well with richer meat entrees — something like a porter/raspberry glaze on roast pork is quite nice.
When you think of the perfect porter, what is it like?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
It’s delicious, roasty and reminiscent of espresso. It is full bodied, fairly robust, but nothing that ought to scare anybody away. If a person is a fan of good coffee I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t be a fan of good porter.
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
It’s a melding of chocolate and roast attributes — a comfort beer for drinking in front of the fireplace.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Company
I think of a dark rich blanket of flavor that warms and soothes the soul.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Co.
The aroma must have some nice chocolate aroma, a little bit of caramel, a little coffee, a real nice roasted aroma — it’s kind of like when you smell good brewed coffee. The flavor is not too bitter but you also want to taste those malts. It is not too sweet either — a nice balance between malts and hops, not too astringent from the dark malts with small tiny CO2 bubbles — not overwhelming.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
I like a rich mouthfeel and I like an appropriate level of roast character. I’ve had some stouts in particular that I thought were overdone with roast character — you can go overboard. I like to see a relatively light-colored head, and an overall flavorful experience that’s well balanced.
How does porter brewing differ, if at all, from brewing a pale English-style ale?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
In an English pale ale you are concerned about the hop flavor, which is a little more dominant – so more care that that is front and center. Other than they are pretty similar in procedure.
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
It’s night and day to coin a pun here.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Company
For English-style porter, in many ways it doesn’t differ much in the brewing from a pale ale. English-style porter is more ingredient / recipe driven. In Baltic-style porter, I brew it like I would a strong lager. Baltic porter blends some similarities of bock beer and strong English porters. It’s a neat beer because it is sort of a hybrid.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Company
No not really – I don’t think there’s actually a difference other than the malts and the hops. Same yeasts, same parameters.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
Dark malt is the obvious difference. They’re both English style ale – so pay tribute to the English brewing traditions. I think it’s important to think about what you’re trying to make and the inspirations for them.
How long should porter wort be boiled?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
We boil our porter for 75 minutes but boiling time is going to depend on the specifics of your equipment, the evaporation you’re getting, etc. For us, 75 minutes gives us plenty of time to achieve what we want in the kettle – isommerization, sterilization, color. A very long boil will tend to produce compounds that are susceptible to oxidation.
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
Boil times are all equipment delivered. If you have a direct-fired brewhouse an hour is a good amount of time. In a less aggressive system you might need a couple of hours.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Company
For our English porter 60-90 minutes. Baltic Porter 120 minutes.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Company
I would say an hour to an hour and a half. For us, the longer we boil the more shelf stability problems we have. Once you start oxidation problems it is all downhill. An hour and a half is the longest I would go for a porter.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
Boiling time depends on a lot of things, including your elevation, in Fort Collins our elevation requires we boil a lot longer than brewers at sea level.
Some brewers mash the pale malts first, then stir the dark malts into the top of the grain bed near the end of the saccharification rest. Have you tried this? Do you think it is a good idea?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
We’ve always put our dark malts in with the base malts. I don’t think they need to go through the saccharification rest. You would be getting less of that pH benefit in the mash. I think it would be fine but that’s not what we do.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Company
I have tried this and I do think it is a good idea. That said, I am wary of grinding dark malts on my mill and introducing residual malt dust along with the dark malt at a point that saccharification is over. I do not want to add starch to my beer.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Company
No we don’t do that. If you have the right grain amount, we blend it all together and get it nice and mixed up. You need to make sure the grain is well mixed. Mashing is a big part of brewing. People are creative, though – no judgment here.
In a beer dominated by the dark roast character, how important is the base malt selection?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
I think in a porter that you taste the base malt a lot less than you would in some other beers that don’t have as big of the roasted malt character. But of course the base malt is very important as it is the majority of the beer.
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
I don’t think the base malt is significantly important. We use two types of base malt for all our beers – a standard pale ale malt that is about 2 °L and a darker pale malt that is somewhere in the 3 °L range.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Company
I am happy with my base 2-row malt but I generally blend English Maris Otter in for English-style porters, and German-Pils malt in for Baltic Porters for extra complexity.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Company
Your main malt takes up 50 or 60% of the grist. The flavor of that beer is your basic 2-row and that’s huge. It’s the canvas you paint everything on. We use a Harrington 2-row which is a clean flavored malt that allows the flavor of anything else you add to come shining through.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
I think that in any beer that you want to have a quality base malt. Some people argue that it doesn’t matter what base malt is as the dark malt contributes all the flavor. I believe that every malt you put into a beer that quality is important. It’s like cooking wine – if it’s not good enough to drink then it’s not good enough to cook with.
With all the dark grains in a porter, what should a brewer do to prepare suitable brewing liquor?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
It’s always important to pay a lot of attention to your water regardless of the style you’re brewing. With something like a porter with lots of dark grains you won’t have any problem getting the pH to drop in the mash because the dark grains do that. We aim for 5.3 and we don’t have to worry too much about acid additions.
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
We filter our water and we have very soft water so we do add a fair amount of calcium sulfate – about 100 ppm as calcium.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Company
Depends on the water you are starting with. Get an analysis of your water and then adjust to where you want it, if you can.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Company
Science says 5.3 is the ideal pH for brewing, but I think with our porter and anything with dark malt, the acidity of the malt changes the pH, and there’s really not much I would do to prepare the water unless you are in a place where the water has chlorine, which gives off a medicinal flavor that you don’t want. Calcium chloridide is good for sweetness. If you want to go by the purity law, though, counteract the water chemistry with malts.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
Probably the difference in London water to say Burton on Trent water that makes it suitable is a high calcium carbonate. Our water is pretty low hardness so calcium carbonate helps to minimize the astringency of the dark malts.
How important is the mouthfeel and body in a porter? What do you do to influence this?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
Mouthfeel is very important. You’ve got that sharp roasty character with the porter and I think it would be easy for it to come off as thin unless you have that body.
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
This is huge. Mouthfeel goes back to the mashing. A porter that doesn’t have a fair amount of residual sugar in it is lacking.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Co.
Mouthfeel is important to all beers, it just varies from style to style. You can influence it all along the way from your ingredient choices, water quality, mashing regime, boil length, hop rate, etc.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Company
There’s a couple of ways you can adjust for mouthfeel. My advice is to use some dextrin malts (depending on your hop additions). Bring up your mash temperature without dextrins – we brought ours up about 7 °F (4 °C) and it really helped.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
Building mouthfeel for us is shooting for a higher level of residual sugar than another beer. The sugar gives it a bigger mouthfeel and body, which works well with the roasted character.
If there’s any question you wished we asked, go ahead and give us the question and the answer.
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Company
For homebrewers – keep doing what you’re doing. You can learn a lot. I’m limited here to sticking to recipes. The sky’s the limit – you can do what you want. It doesn’t matter what I think – it’s what you like. If you get trained to taste beers, you can taste your own beers and you can evaluate. Keep going – homebrewers drive brewers like me to get better.
What type of mash – single infusion, step mash, decoction – do you use for your porter? Why?
Paul Philippon, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
We use a single infusion.
Larry Sidor, Deschutes Brewery
We’re doing an upward step infusion – about 135 ºF (57 ºC) then take it up to 160 ºF (71 ºC), then we mash off. I really hate to give instructions on mashing because it’s so dependent on the rate you change temperatures. Our ramp and steam addition is about 2.2 degrees a minute. For a homebrewer to do that is generally pretty tough. Mashing is dependent on your equipment and I think any brewer just has to pay attention to what the apparent final extract is. Each brewer has to find his or her own way.
Jason Oliver, Devils Backbone Brewing Company
We do a modified step infusion. I do not have a mash tun, I have a mash mixer and lauter tun. For English porter, 65-66 ºC (18-19 ºF) for an hour, rise to 78 ºC (26 ºC) for mashout. For Baltic porter, I mash-in around 50 ºC (10 ºF), rise to protein rest at 52 ºC (11 ºF) for 10-20 minutes, rise to 62 ºC (17 ºF) for 30 minutes, then to 68 ºC (20 ºF) for 20-30 minutes, rise to 72 ºC (22 ºF) for 30 minutes, and mash out at 78 ºC (26 ºF).
Jason Gompf, Great Lakes Brewing Company
I’m a big step infusion person. We do step infusion, usually around 148-150 ºF (64-66 ºC, then up to 170 ºF (77 ºC) to stop a reaction.
Doug Odell, Odell Brewing Company
We do single temperature infusion. That’s the way our English system is built – no heating the mash lauter ton.
