I hope you like details. The late Martyn Cornell, beer’s foremost historian and mythbuster, said he put five years of his life into compiling this comprehensive history of porter and stout, though I suspect the real number is somewhat higher. I would like to say that, now, it’s all there on the page, but I have no doubt that there are slews of meticulous research that didn’t make it to the final draft. What we’re left with is still a highly impressive work which, even with copious illustrations, maps and tables, is close to 400 dense pages of highly detailed beer history.
For the most part, the book takes a geographic approach to its subject, beginning of course in 18th century London, where the porter style evolved to answer a number of needs, not least the enormous beer demands of the world’s largest — and growing — city. From the get-go, porter was about scale: not only the amount required by the market, but also its use of technology to create vessels of hitherto unknown hugeness, serving both to offset unpleasant smoky malt flavours, but also allow for a new economy of scale, creating a new breed of industrial brewers.
These early chapters set the tone for the rest of the book, where it seems as though every known fact of porter in the time and place discussed is set out and rigorously footnoted. Everything that can be known about how porter was made, and by whom, and where, and when, is described exhaustively, in a way that might easily deter the casual reader. Although I read it cover-to-cover over several months, I got the impression it will serve best as a reference work, for dipping into and checking facts. I noticed that the author often repeats contextual information, not assuming that you remember an important fact that might have been last mentioned a hundred or more pages previously.
From London, there’s a brief treatment of porter elsewhere in Britain (an 1890 accusation of Burton-brewed porter being merely a black pale ale raised a smile) and then we’re on to Ireland. Again, every known brewery who produced porter in 18th and 19th century Ireland gets at least a mention, with more detailed histories of those which are still household names today. Having covered the country by area, the next six chapters tell the story of Guinness, from its origins through to the arrival of its alcohol-free stout in 2020. A bonus appendix at the end sets the record straight on the company’s pre-history: Arthur Price, Richard Guinness and exactly what happened at Celbridge prior to the move to St James’s Gate.
The pace picks up after this, as porter spreads its wings. Again, there’s a detailed account of the development of Baltic porter — a term I did not know was originally coined by Michael Jackson as recently as 1977. North America, Asia, Africa and Australasia ensue, largely tracking the growth of the British Empire. I found it particularly interesting to follow porter’s story in the early United States, where the British influence didn’t get things all its own way, having to share throats with German-derived lager brewing. Latin America is relegated to a mere mention because the Germans and Austrians had their foot in the brewery door there first.
It’s also of interest, as we see porter breweries being established all across the world, how often Irish names pop up as the founders and managers. The author has an almost Irish need to tell us not just their names, but where they were from — who their people were. Brewers from Mountmellick show up in the story several times, on three different continents, the Laois town punching above its weight in global porter history.
Once the tour concludes in New Zealand, the final chapters are more general history, covering specialisms like milk stout, oyster stout and even granting pastry stout its place in the story. This tail section includes a very Cornellesque debunking of the notion that “imperial” stout takes its name from the imperial Russian court. Further mythbusting happens in the appendices: porter isn’t named for Covent Garden market porters and it wasn’t created by Ralph Harwood as a substitute for a three-part blended beer — all familiar topics for those who followed the author’s blog.
It’s not an easy read, and is probably best handled in small doses. It will make for a first-rate reference source, and of course every fact and quote is meticulously referenced, for those, like the author, who insist on original sources.
Martyn Cornell died only a week before the book was published and it’s a tragedy that we won’t get the follow-up discussions and debates that he would have relished, now that everyone else gets to read it. As a monument to his abilities as a researcher and communicator, however, it’s hard to imagine a better one.
Porter & Stout: A Complete History by Martyn Cornell is published by McFarland (https://mcfarlandbooks.com), ISBN 9781476675725 (print), 9781476653594 (ebook).
