Learn all about porters from beer expert Katherine Kyle in this Howcast video.


Porters are more substantial than a brown. They were for many years just the traditional beer that produced in England and also exported from England to different parts of the world, so for a long time, you know, porter was sort of your standard beer in certain times and regions. Your normal porter, it's going to be malty, it's going to be roasty. This is a good example of a porter. You're going to get into a category called robust porter which is going to be even stronger, more malty, and complex. And, again, you know, with that stronger ABV it's, and, you know, that really nice roastiness, and, you know, all these different, you can get all types of flavors that come out, you know, in the robust porter.

Then you also have a category called the Baltic porter, and that's interesting because it, you know, originated, you know, around the Baltic Sea and it was a result of England exporting their porter, and they were really trying to get their porter all the way to Russia where it was said Catherine the Great wanted her porter. But it was an extra strong porter and so they called it a stout porter.

So that was eventually what got to, you know, her and became a totally different style of beer, but along the way it stopped in the Baltic and in that area lager yeast was used instead of the ale yeast which is traditional with the porter so the Baltic porter became two things. Number one, it became much stronger because that was what was being exported to Russia, but also was used with a lager yeast and so that, you know, the cleanly, the cleanliness of that yeast can really allow you to taste even more flavors from the roasted malts. So sometimes you can pick up flavors, you know, in addition to the roast, caramelly, malty, you can get something like licorice. You can get, you know, a really diverse field of flavors. So, again, those are your basics on porter. You've got your brown porter, your, you know, what most people refer to as porter. You've got your robust porter, stronger, more complex, and then you've got your Baltic porter.

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