Yet another American hack has tried to give a potted history of porter. Let’s just open up for rebuttals for my more scholarly inclined fellow beer bloggers to this:
The credit for inventing porter ordinarily goes to Ralph Harwood of the Bell Brew house in Shoreditch, who developed it around 1722. Before that, En gland’s best- selling beer was threethread, possibly a blend of pale ale, new brown ale, and stale brown ale. A publican did the mixing, but Harwood’s Entire, a bitter, dark- brown beer, required no fuss and came in a single cask ideal for export. It got its name from the men who “ported” goods at such London markets as Covent Garden and Smithfield. They had adopted the brew as their own, and swallowed it with the gusto of dockers. Guinness’s version, officially ruby- colored, was darker, richer, and more full- bodied than the original—a “stouter” porter, later simply stout. Its secret ingredient was a special strain of yeast whose clone is still around, supposedly kept under lock and key in the Directors’ Safe at James’s Gate.
It’s in a book just out – in the US, at least, dunno about Ireland, by Bill Barich, an author described in the NYT as half-Norwegian guy from Long Island. Barich travels around Ireland trying to find the real, authentic Irish pub. A sample chapter is available online, so you can make up your own mind.
The review in the NYT is not too enthusiastic, and the sampler online does not make me click my way over to Amazon right away, either. Consider this nugget of thought from the Gravity bar on top of the Guinness visitor complex:
Guinness is Ireland, the branding suggests, and it forges a bond so absolute that you’ll feel unpatriotic if you don’t finish your jar.
I doubt the Irish feel the same way looking at this from the inside . My encounters with the Irish is they are a bit too sophisticated to look for national symbols when they get thirsty. But the marketing is brilliant, no doubt about that..
I think I’ll wait for the paperback.
Comments, please. Beer Nut? The rest of the Irish Craft Brewers?
Unfortunately, many Irish beer drinkers do consider the foreign-owned nitrostout breweries part of their national and/or local heritage. There are people who would consider drinking anything other than Guinness to be unpatriotic, even if the “other” is made locally by a 100% Irish-owned company.
You are quite right, however, that most Irish beer drinkers don’t drink Guinness or feel any loyalty to the brand or the beer style. Lager accounts for two out of every three pints of beer sold, and virtually all of it is brewed under licence with a foreign badge: Heineken, Carlsberg, Budweiser, Miller, Coors.
The myth that beer = Guinness for Irish people is one that Diageo have spent a lot of time and money encouraging, and is about as true as the Ralph Harwood story.
Also, if you moved your pint about a centimetre to the right you’d be able to see my office.
I couldn’t possibly move the pint. It was so cold it was frozen on the very spot…
A couple of Guinness comments:
The Guinness secret ingredient is a special strain of guarded yeast? The clone is available from at least 2 major yeast suppliers. It’s my understanding that the key was the blending in of old Guinness with new (though that yeast strain does add a certain amount of character.)
Also, my experience over 20 years ago with American market, BOTTLED Guinness tells me that the old, Export version was perhaps a truer version of Guinness. That was great stuff, whereas the nitro version these days, post-marketing gurus, widget cans, B&W TV ads, etc., is pretty thin and flavorless in comparison. Or is it that time has put a shine on my old drinking recollections?
Being an American hack myself, I’m also very interested to hear what the Irish craft brewers have to say. How much has the recipe changed over the years?
The place to find out how Guinness has changed over the years is on Ron’s blog. He notes that Extra and Foreign Extra were basically the same beer up until 1917, and that Foreign Extra has changed very little since the 1820s.
Irish craft brewers that I’ve spoken to seem to have about as much interest in Guinness as their American counterparts have in Coors.
Coincidentally (perhaps) after the article about Barich’s hatchet job on Irish pubs. The London Times had a very similar piece. I did a brief comparison at http://www.codswallopandfries.com
If you want to read a reader’s feedback 🙂 , I rate this post for 4/5. Decent info, but I just have to go to that damn google to find the missed pieces. Thanks, anyway!