American Stout

Historical Development

If there’s one topic at the top of the tedium heap in beer blogging it’s this one: porter vs. stout. To be honest, I feel bad sitting here right now contributing to this very old and fraying fray. But this is a blog about beer after all, so here it is: our take on the very charted ground of the indistinction between two beers that are constantly shifting and, depending on who you ask, are very different and exactly the same.

Uh, what?

Exactly.

As with most things beer, some of the best (and most entertaining) writing you’ll find on this topic comes from Martyn Cornell at Zythophile. He’s got a ton of great info, and links to other great info, in that post. To summarize the short history for context, porter originated over several decades in early eighteenth-century London just as unhopped ale (“twopenny,” a vestige of earlier barley beverages made with spice mixtures called gruit) was finally dying on the British Islands. Inexpensive brown malt became available around the turn of the century, and brewers gradually adopted it as the standard malt there. The darker, more highly hopped beers that came from this change in ingredients–originally blended barside from casks of different age like a kind of beer cocktail–eventually came to be named after the workers who moved them around town, and the result was a hit (think hazy IPAs over the last decade…they were huge).

At that point, stout was used universally to describe a strong version of porter. Beer recipes from the middle of the nineteenth century show that Truman Brewing made three versions of stout–single, double, and triple–named for their increasingly higher alcohol content. What’s interesting now is that Truman’s stouts used a lower percentage of dark malt than the porters they made at the same time, so the beer didn’t necessarily get more roasty when the alcohol went up.

If you ask a musician what kind of music they play, the answer usually includes a few shrugs, visible discomfort, and a rambling list of a dozen styles and influences. When you talk to brewers about porter and stout, it’s exactly the same. At Black Flannel, we tend to call beers with a bigger body and more pronounced roast flavors stouts and those that are a bit lighter porters, but we’ve had a ton of beers we love that buck that trend.

We’re not here to write the guidelines for either of these anyway (we love all of our beers equally) so here’s what we do know: anything that comes with either of these titles should brighten the nights you spend with loved ones when it’s dark by 5:00 and warm your soul when your bones feel cold during our long Vermont winters. Try both. Hell, order one of each and mix them together…we do that all the time.

Modern Evolution

A modern craft beer and homebrew style that applied an aggressive American hopping regime to a strong traditional English or Irish stout. The homebrew version was previously known as West Coast Stout, which is a common naming scheme for a more highly-hopped beer.