3 minute read
Roger Protz
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New beer craze
The boys from the black stuff are back on our bars and beer lovers can’t get enough of their dark delights
I was enjoying a beer last summer
in one of my favourite London pubs, the Harp in Covent Garden, when I was aware of unusual activity at the bar. It’s a Fuller’s pub but I noticed that, even on a hot day, a large number of customers were ordering Guinness.
Nothing wrong with that, but it seemed an odd choice given the weather and the availability of Fuller’s ales. But just a few days later, I read Guinness was claiming that one in 10 pints of beer being poured in London was its stout.
I then recalled that, a couple of years earlier, a marketing guru had predicted that the next new beer craze would be stout. How we laughed. “Haven’t you seen the stats?” we guffawed. “IPA is unstoppable.”
But he had the last laugh. Guinness has responded to demand for its beer by building a new brewery in London, fittingly in Covent Garden close to the Harp. It’s costing an eye-watering £73m, but Guinness’s owner, Diageo, has deep pockets. It will be built in Old Brewer’s Yard, once the site of the Combe brewery that made porter and stout in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Historically, the strongest version of porter was known as stout porter, later reduced to stout.
Guinness had a brewery in Park Royal, North West London, from 1936 to 2005. At its peak it produced 1.6 million barrels of stout a year, but demand dropped and the site was closed. The new brewery will be smaller at 50,000 square feet and will produce special beers for the London market. Let’s hope some beers will be in cask- or bottleconditioned form. Original, when it was bottle-conditioned, was one of the joys of the beer world.
Guinness is not alone in witnessing a revival in sales of stout and porter. The independent London brewer Anspach & Hobday launched a London Black Porter (4.4 per cent ABV) in 2021 and has seen sales rocket. It’s now its bestselling beer and the draught version is in pubs from Newton Abbot in Devon to Glasgow.
It’s not the only brewery where stout or porter is the leading brand. Titanic in Stoke, one of the country’s oldest and most successful small independent brewers, has seen its Plum Porter (4.9 per cent) grow to account for 50 per cent of production. It’s so popular that drinkers have formed a society called the Plummers who hold regular tastings of it.
In Scotland, Belhaven, owned by Greene King, has had considerable success with its Stout (4.2 per cent) that’s available south of the border. In the far north, Black Isle near Inverness brews a fine organic Porter (4.6 per cent), while Fyne Ales near Loch Lomond names its 6.8 per cent stout Sublime and also brews a 4.4 per cent porter called Vital Spark.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, at the height of the popularity of dark beers, London brewers produced strong versions for export to Russia and the Baltic states that were known as imperial stouts.
Thornbridge in Derbyshire brews an exceptionally fine example of the style called Saint Petersburg (7.4 per cent), while in Lewes in
Sussex, Harvey’s uses an original recipe to make its superb bottle-conditioned Imperial Extra Double Stout (9 per cent).
The Bristol Beer Factory has led the way in bringing back another version of the style known as milk stout. Back in the 1950s and 60s, Mackeson Milk Stout accounted for half of Whitbread’s annual production and it vied with Guinness in popularity. Mackeson is now owned by AB InBev and is hard to find, but there’s now a growing number of milk stouts. They are brewed with the addition of lactose or milk sugar that contains glucose, which can’t be fermented by brewer’s yeast. As a result, lactose adds a pleasant creamy character to the beer.
That marketing expert was right: dark beer is back in fashion. Guinness may be opening a new brewery in London, but it won’t have the market to itself.
Roger Protz’s book, World Beer Guide (2021), is on sale from CAMRA’s online book store. Follow him at @RogerProtzBeer
