Beer · Light & sessionable
Porter
Chocolate and coffee in beer form — the stout's softer-spoken older sibling.
How to order it: London's 18th-century workhorse. Robust porter for bite, brown porter for comfort.
Flavor profile
The proper serve
- Pint glass
- Serve at 45–55°F
- Robust or brown — both work
- Pairs: roasted meat, chocolate dessert
- The stout's gentler ancestor
The story
Porter emerged from early eighteenth-century London and took its name from the laborers who hauled the city's goods and drank it by the quart. It became the first beer brewed on a truly industrial scale, matured in towering wooden vats — one of which burst at a Tottenham Court Road brewery in 1814, flooding the streets and killing eight people in the so-called London Beer Flood. Its stronger sibling, stout porter, gradually swallowed the family name and then the market; even Guinness retired its original porter in 1974. The craft era resurrected it as the gentler dark option — chocolate and coffee without the roast's sharp edge — a working beer restored to working order.
Adjacent pours