| St. Patrick’s Day is the day the pubs fill with drunks all claiming some sort of Irish heritage, usually while drinking an un-Irish green-dyed light lager. This fake Irishness annoys me and reminds me of the infamous South Park episode where Cartman claims that he is one-quarter lesbian as his grandmother was a lesbian. I can’t claim to have any Irish or lesbian heritage, but I do share the Irish love of stouts.
There are many theories to where and why stouts came about, but the one thing that almost every beer historian agrees upon is that porters came first and stouts evolved from porters.
In 1722, Ralph Harwood, a brewer and bartender, was troubled by the most popular beer choice at the time, a swamp-mix combination of portions of two or three casks poured into a single pot (that was the drinking vessel back then).
Ale and beer were distinctly different at this time in beer history. Beer meant that the brew contained hop bitterness to balance the sweetness, and ale meant it contained no hop bitterness, but instead dark malts were used to balance the sweetness. Thankfully, these descriptions of ale and beer do not hold true today.
This pumping of beer and ale from different casks and mixing them was time consuming and Harwood set out to design and brew a beer that could be served out of one cask. He called his new creation "entire butts" (insert your favourite cartoon butt joke here). A butt was the name of the large wooden holding vessels that beer or ale fermented in. Not exactly the most commercially viable name, but this new ale proved wildly popular with the very busy London porters of the time and eventually the ale became known as porter.
The dividing line between stouts and porters is very fuzzy and I, as a semi-serious beer geek, have a hard time telling the two beer styles apart. If you go by rule of thumb, stouts are made with roasted barley and porters are made with roasted malt. Even then, it is confusing, as both look almost the same in the glass.
I can say without fear of being knee-capped that Guinness is not the best stout in the world – there are far superior stouts. However, I applaud Guinness for introducing legions of beer drinkers to better beer. Here are my suggestions for a Guinness-free St. Patrick’s Day.
· St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout. Besides being the best stout I have ever had, it has won more gold medals than you can shake a leprechaun at. This beer has a beautiful, dense head that lasts longer than the beer. In the aroma and taste, this dark beauty has strong hints of coffee and bitter chocolate as well as fresh-baked cookies and toast. Just writing this makes me crave one.
· Fuller’s London Porter. This dark ruby gem has hints of hazelnut, figs, mild chocolate, coffee and caramel, and ends with the gentle, mouth-drying bitterness of one of my favourite hops, British fuggles.
· Young’s Double Chocolate Stout. Perfect for dessert, this beer is liquid chocolate cake. In fact, it gets some of its chocolate character from real chocolate. It has a dry sherry character with hints of coffee and raisins, and the chocolate gently comes though in the aftertaste.
Guinness once ran an ad campaign that stated, "Makes the oysters come out of their shells." Stouts and seafood are a match made in heaven. Stouts and porters also pair well with grilled red meats – combined with these stouts they’ll have your taste buds doing an Irish jig.
One reminder: stouts should be served cool, not cold, to let all the flavours described above develop – and please don’t put green dye in these beers. Happy St. Paddy’s Day! |
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