Lovely day for a porter.

at the height of the British Empire, porter was the king of ales. By the 1970s, it was nothing but a fond memory for those old enough to recall its WWII-era demise. Reviving the style and generating interest has been a goal of craft brewers in the U.K. and U.S. ever since.

Porter is a type of ale, a top-fermenting style of beer that gets its dark ruby to black color from roasted malted barley. That porter was invented in London is undoubtedly true; that it is so named because it was the preferred tipple of the city's hard-working shipyard men is probably not. Beyond that, its origins are shrouded in uncertainty as dark as the drink itself.

Porter begins to appear in written sources as early as the 1720s although no clear definition of it is given. By anyone's best guess, porter seems to have developed out of the aging of brown ales, a process conducted at the breweries in large vats. The result was a ready-to-drink ale that was more convenient for the tavern owners who had previously been responsible for aging their own. To make the new arrangement more practical, brewers took to aging a small amount and blending it with two parts young porter. "It will produce a beverage of uniform strength, having the flavour of age, fine in summer, and full of tone in winter," William Loftus noted in his 1863 treatise The Brewer.

The first porters were brewed entirely of brown malt and were the strongest of their kind, weighing in with an alcohol content of about 6.6%. It seemed the ideal beer to brew, since brown malt was cheaper than the pale malt used to make other ales. But scientific inquiry around 1770 proved it to be a false economy. It was found that in the brewing process, brown malt creates one-third less fermentable material than pale malt. This in combination with a malt tax elevated by the Napoleonic Wars convinced brewers to find ways of using pale malt to produce their signature porters. The first step was making them weaker, bringing their strength down to about 5.5% ABV, where it stayed for many years. Beyond that, solutions included combining the malts; scorching a small quantity of malt; adding molasses-like evaporated wort; or incorporating burnt sugar. Then in 1816, when brewers were forbidden from using anything but malt and hops in their recipes, one desperate brewer found an inspired solution. In March 1817, Daniel Wheeler received British Patent No. 4112 for a roasting device that could deeply darken the malt without burning it, allowing brewers to use a combination of 95% pale malt and 5% "Patent Malt" to fashion tasteful porters once again.

All the fooling with the original recipe did nothing to diminish its popularity with the people. By the early 19th century, porter had become so popular, brewers were hard-pressed to produce enough. At the Meux & Co. Brewery in London, meeting the demand turned deadly. The brewery was famed for the immensity of its porter vat, which was built larger than prudent. On October 16, 1814, a crack in one of the massive, one-ton iron bands on the vat gave way, unleashing an alcoholic tide that claimed eight lives among the citizens of the surrounding neighborhood.

In its heyday, porter could be found wherever the British were and new styles appeared as interest grew throughout the empire. They were stronger, known as single, double and triple stout porters. Guinness, when it was first made in the late 18th century, was a double, or extra stout porter that eventually mellowed into the single stout porter, or stout, the world is now familiar with. The strongest porter spin-off, Russian imperial stout, was so made to survive the longest journeys. Russian imperial stout in turn inspired the creation of Baltic porters, porters made in the Baltic Sea region. Originally top-fermenting ales, Baltic porters came to be made with local brewing techniques in a bottom-fermenting lager-like style.

No one can say for certain why interest started to wane in the mid-19th century. Some feel it was the introduction of lagers from Germany and eastern Europe that spelled the end for porter. They were lighter, crisper and more appealing in the glassware that was becoming more widely used at the time. But the final blow surely came during World War I, when restrictions on grain usage pushed the strength of porter down further to about 4% ABV. Ireland, which did not have the same restrictions imposed upon it, was able to make stout porter for the British market that came to be preferred over the lightened London brews. Eventually there was no longer enough of a demand for old-fashioned porters and London brewers ceased their production altogether during World War II.

Over the past thirty years, interest in porter has ever so slowly risen on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1974, Anchor Steam Brewing in San Francisco released a porter as one of five beers created to revitalize the 19th-century company, a move that helped bring the craft brewing industry to life in the U.S. In Britain, the Samuel Smith brewery was the first to resurrect porter in its homeland, hitting the history books to make their modern Toddy Porter in 1979. Porter, once so commonplace, became a symbol of a craft rescued from extinction.

Today there are hundreds of porters available, in every historical style. In the U.K., CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, says that porters are hoppier than stouts and get their darkness from black malt, the old "Patent Malt." According to the Brewers' Association Guidelines in the U.S., there are brown porters and robust porters. Both use various dark-roasted malts, including small amounts of black malt, with historical versions incorporating a significant quantity of brown malt. Brown porters are light- to medium-bodied with no roasted barley or black malt character evident while robust porters have a roasted malt flavor and a healthy dose of black malt and hop bitterness. Meanwhile, stouts, although acknowledged to be porters, are generally considered a style in their own right. In finessing their stout recipe, the Guinness company introduced the usage of roasted unmalted barley that is now the hallmark of Irish-style dry stouts, and the taste that distinguishes them from modern porters.

In reality, porter never really disappeared in the first place. It had just settled into the smallest possible niche of the brewing industry, escaping the notice of most beer drinkers, and even quite a few of the aficionados. At Yuengling Brewery in Pennsylvania, porter has been made since the founding of the company in 1829, even surviving Prohibition as an alcohol-free "energy drink." Chief Operating Officer Dave Casinelli says that although porter is not one of Yuengling's mainstays, it is still brewed because "it became something of pride to the brewery; it was a unique brand ... that became synonymous with our company."

Porter is still under-appreciated, representing a miniscule percentage of the specialty beers consumed in the U.S. In 2001, only 3% of the beer consumed in America was craft beer; take into account that porter is far from the most popular among craft beer styles and it barely registers in the statistics. "We're guilty ourselves of probably not giving our porter as much attention as it deserves," Casinelli admits, but adds that plans are underway to "give it a face-lift and an upgrade to its packaging, its labeling. We're going to go back and put some energy behind the brand."

Small brewers today concede the dominance of lagers and light-colored beers in the market but choose to make porters for the pleasure of it. Brewmaster David Yarrington at Smuttynose Brewery in Portsmouth, New Hampshire points out that "we have the ability to brew styles that are a little bit more unusual, and we don't need a whole lot of sales to justify offering [them]." But offering porters--even Smuttynose's award-winning Robust Porter--is not without its challenges. "They don't sell very well," Yarrington says. "We've gone back and forth with offering it as a seasonal. We finally got back into it full time, we think there's enough sales."

Somewhere along the way, porter came to be regarded as a winter brew. "The fact that darker beers tend to be more winter-oriented is just ... a tradition," says Mitch Steele, Brewmaster at Stone Brewing in San Diego. "I think a regular-alcohol-strength porter is something that can be enjoyed any time of the year." American brewers have been adding to the everyday appeal of their porters by offering variations on the original. Stone's own Smoked Porter has a small amount of peat-smoked malt in the recipe. Other brewers add more hops for the hop-loving, or even chocolate or coffee to enhance the style's signature flavors.

Craig Hartinger at Merchant du Vin, the importer of Samuel Smith's, agrees that porter need not be consigned to the cold weather. The undoing of such a perception, he feels, lies in understanding the sometimes surprising food pairings with porter, which include steaks and roasted meats, shellfish, veal and spicy foods. "Porter is great with seafood," he notes. "It might not be an obvious thought, but an oyster on the half-shell, or a piece of fish is beautifully, beautifully contrasted and complemented by a dark beer that has some fruity aromatic notes and a little bitterness but also the dark malt roastiness and richness."

And then there is chocolate. "Porter historically goes well with anything that's chocolate, or that has chocolate flavors in it because of the roasted malts," Steele explains. It is a complement rather than a contrast to chocolate because of its own chocolate and coffee flavors. In a recent survey, chocolate was pronounced America's favorite flavor, with 52% of adults preferring it far above the runners-up, vanilla and berry, each of which took only 12% of the vote. Add to that the national love of coffee--Americans take in 300 million cups a day--and the general indifference to porter becomes a genuine mystery. Reason would suggest that the United States, at least, should be awash in the stuff. Garrett Oliver, Brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery, has even gone so far as to suggest replacing coffee with porter for certain desserts.

While the days of the porter cafe are probably still a long way off, it may be worth trying a porter as a perfectly everyday beer to discover why it was once the "most universally favourite liquor the world has ever known."