BeerBorg

List the ingredients and see who can guess the style of beer.
I will start with a simple one I am brewing right now.
8 Lbs 2 row, 1 lb Munich, 1 lb Crystal 40L, .5 Carpils, .5 Black Patent, .250 Chocolate, 1oz ea. Northern Brewer and Cascade. s-04 yeast.

Well, while it could be a number of things I'll just go with an Amber Ale though the recipes I've seen have less dark malt.

I’ll go with a Porter.


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I will go with "American Brown Ale" and round out the guesses.

I second Porter.

I'm going to guess either porter or stout.

I've never really grasped the difference between them and I think one may be a subset of the other.

bpgreen wrote:I'm going to guess either porter or stout.

I've never really grasped the difference between them and I think one may be a subset of the other.

Originally porters would have been made with brown malt, not roasted barley or chocolate malt or that sort of thing.

Incorporating those things is what brings them into the confusing sorta like stout character. I believe that became a thing as a way to brew a strong imperial stout and then use the second running to make something like a "porter" from the second running's as to make more money off of that batch of imperial stout.

Anyways, make a brown malt porter and it will be more like what they would have been in 1700's London, and it will taste not much at all like a stout. If not authentic brown malt, then try to use "special roast", it would be the closest thing to it. No roasted barley, no black malt, no chocolate malt. Just brown malt, medium crystal, and base malt.

I like brown malt porters very much.

OK, all good guesses, but it is a porter but very close to a brown except for the chocolate and Black. I think a more American version of a porter then what the brits made when they first came up with it, they were more of a dark brown I think. As Mash said probably no chocolate was used back then and the black patent will make it quite dark. I think I read somewhere that a porter was a mix of light med. and dark ales drawn off 3 different casks to start with then they refined to that style at that time period.
Ok you else wants to play the guess the style game? Next.

berryman wrote:I think I read somewhere that a porter was a mix of light med. and dark ales drawn off 3 different casks to start with then they refined to that style at that time period.

That comes from a book about the history of Porter. But the author of that book came up with that theory by not understanding the terminology of the brewers logs that he was reading. It's wrong (in that the blending wasn't talking about porters specifically at all, and it wasn't about light / medium / dark... it was about old and young beers, regardless of style). But it's commonly cited still because it was in a book and people who cite it didn't dig deep enough into the back story.

So the blending he is talking about wasn't a "porter" as such, it was more of a discussion from brewers logs on how people of the time liked to mix barrel aged beer(s) with fresh(er) beer(s) to achieve a certain kind of aged beer profile that was some perfect balance between the funkyness of the really old stuff (IE not as strong as an "old ale") and the mellowness of the really young stuff. This discussion was regardless of style - it had nothing at all to do with it being a "porter". It was just a discussion similar to how Belgians blended various beers to achieve a profile. You need to realize these beers back then were pretty much all Brett infected from the casks. So the beers of various ages had various levels of various funk or lack of it.... Blending was done to achieve the perfect level of funk. They liked the funk. Just in the right amounts.

Actual Porters were originally 100% made with the brown malt of the period (which is not identical to the brown malt available these days, what we have now has little to no enzymatic power so must be mixed with a base malt, brown malt back then could self convert, IE it was a darker kilned pale malt, but not as browned as todays brown malt which is meant to give similar profile when mixed with pale malt) and then aged in very large vessels in order to achieve the desired flavor profile without blending required. At some point they discovered that using bigger and bigger and even bigger then that aging vessels made the beer achieve the perfect and more consistent level of funk without blending necessary because barrels of smaller size led to very inconsistent results (think every barrel had it's own little funky microcosm living in it, so one aged barrel would not necessarily be like another). We are talking vats here not barrels, vats that were like the equivalent of 1000 barrels or 5000 barrels or 10000 barrels even. They were huuuuuge. But one giant vat had one single flavor profile that it developed with aging and without blending required to tweak it. And they were what made porter what was porter vs some other kind of beer back then. The beer was actually stupidly simple just brown malt, hops, water, yeast... To make it special it was all about finding that perfect conditioning/aging method that brought out the desired complexity from the funk and then serving it in mass quantities (it was a beer for the working masses as such) when it was at that perfect place.

Anyways, that's what the brewers documentation the author was reading was trying to say. He just didn't read it right and interpreted that the original blended from barrel beers were "porters" where they were actually pretty much any kind of beer at all, it was just a conceptual discussion about aging and how it affects flavor and finding the perfect balance and how they tried to find that kind of balance in "porter" without the blending required.

It was later when the old kind of brown malt became less common (better kilning methods producing all sorts of new pale, crystal, and more tightly controlled dark malts), and the perception of funk becoming less desirable that people started adding other things and tinkering with the porter style and it started to get tangled up with stouty things.

Crazy Climber wrote:https://beerandbrewing.com/the-modern-b ... vs-porter/

Good find and haven't read this one before.

My personal opinion, they are very close and can cross over. But I think a porter should be lower ABV and more easily drinkable then a Stout, I like them both. A porter is just a very dark brown with less ABV then a Stout and less malt and chocolate presence.

berryman wrote:My personal opinion, they are very close and can cross over. But I think a porter should be lower ABV and more easily drinkable then a Stout, I like them both. A porter is just a very dark brown with less ABV then a Stout and less malt and chocolate presence.

Dry Irish draft stouts (Guinness/Murphy's/etc.) are usually 4% ish... plenty of porters are higher then that. Gravity has little to do with the style now, if even back then. Gravity could have been all over the place depending on intent. Serve now? Put it on a ship? Age it? Beers meant for export were stronger. Beers meant to be aged were stronger. This had more to do with OG back then then the style itself.

The article Crazy Climber posted is a mix of historical more modern stuff about porters. IE it is talking about mixing various malts. The original historical London porters *did not do that*. They were *just brown malt*, and aged like I described.

But modern Guinness does do a bit of a sour mash and then add that to the boil to get a bit of the tang the article mentions.

You can find actual historical British brewing stuff on blogs like "Shut Up About Barclay Perkins" (just google it). If you want the facts about historical British brewing I highly suggest that blog. That is like the LarsBlog of historical British brewing. There are lots of articles there about Porter, including articles about the transition from bulk aged porters like I described to porters meant to be consumed immediately after brewing, which is where the transition to what we have today started to occur.

You will discover things like milds also had little to do with gravity. We think of milds these days as super low ABV beers. But back in the day that was not necessarily the case. If you want to make an imperial mild for some reason, you can find authentic recipes for said things on that blog.

Imperial mild does sound delicious...off to google.


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