porter

In the 1720s, London brewers began producing a dark, heavily hopped beer that could be stored longer than pale ales. It was cheap, filling, and strong enough to survive the soot and squalor of Georgian London's water supply. The beer needed a name. It got one from its most visible customers: the porters who carried goods through London's streets and markets. These men — ticket porters, fellowship porters, street porters — were the delivery infrastructure of a city without trucks.

Ralph Harwood is traditionally credited with brewing the first porter at his Bell Brewhouse in Shoreditch in 1722, though beer historian Martyn Cornell has called this story a Victorian invention. What is documented is that by the 1740s, London's largest breweries — Whitbread, Truman, Barclay Perkins — were producing porter on an unprecedented industrial scale. Samuel Whitbread's brewery was the first in the world to produce 200,000 barrels in a single year, in 1796. All of it was porter.

The word traveled with the beer. Arthur Guinness began brewing porter in Dublin in 1759. By the nineteenth century, porter was brewed in Russia, the Baltic states, and Scandinavia. The Russian imperial court ordered porter from London in such quantities that a stronger version — Baltic porter — became its own style. The workers who gave porter its name never left London. Their word did.

Porter faded in the twentieth century, replaced by its stronger descendant, stout, and by pale lagers. It nearly disappeared. The craft beer revival of the 1980s brought it back, brewed now by small producers who romanticize the very industrial history that made porter possible. A beer named for the lowest-paid workers in London is now sold at a premium in taprooms that those workers could not afford.