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Beer styles

The Great Porter Flood of 2017

At some point in the last year a memo must have gone round all the traditional-regional-family brewers: let’s brew porter!

So far this year we’ve noticed new ones from:

And that’s before we get into debatable cases such as the revived Truman’s which has a vanilla porter in development.

Have we missed any others?

We’d guess this has been enabled by the trend for small pilot plants which enable large breweries, otherwise equipped to turn out tankerloads of one or two flagship beers, to produce styles with less mainstream appeal on the side. For a long time this was often cited as the reason for the lack of dark beers — they don’t sell enough to warrant a full brew — so this might also bode well for other marginal styles such as mild.

We’re also firmly of the view that porter is a more dignified way of meeting the current demand for novelty and variety than disappointing cod-American IPAs, or beers that are supposed to taste of Tequila.

Whatever the reasons and motives we’d be quite happy if October-December became a sort of semi-official porter season across the country. Imagine knowing that you could walk into almost any halfway decent pub and find porter on draught — imagine!

5 replies on “The Great Porter Flood of 2017”

For those of us who grew up putting up with Guinness just because it was often the best thing available, a simple cask-conditioned porter is an absolute treat, esp. here in London, and I’ll forgive all manner of craft silliness if it means I can get a decent pint of Redemption/Sambrook’s/Hammerton/Five Points/Fuller’s…

“Imagine knowing that you could walk into almost any halfway decent pub and find porter on draught — imagine!”

I am imagining it, and it feels good. It also helps knowing where to look, but it’s certainly good to see these new porter brnds appearing.

A growing porter trend makes me very happy, and thankfully more breweries on this side of the Pond seem to be making one as well. Now if only they could get the cask thing down….

I’d suggest the mid size older and family brewers generally understand porter. It works as a seasonal beer, I think most real ale pubs with four or more lines want one dark at least in winter months. I’d also suggest that they probably realise their ipas are at best getting a mixed response. A new porter from timmy taylor I’m expecting quality,were they to do a 7%American ipa I’d be sceptical at least and the core bolt maker drinkers wouldn’t be at all keen. Porter sits on the safe middle ground

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