Nostalgia

It’s always exciting to see how different breweries interpret a style that’s defined in very broad strokes, but the amorphous nature of such styles can also make them difficult to identify and talk about. With fairly wide margins in which to play and experiment, robust porter has become a broad term with which to describe a beer with more bitter, roasty notes than a traditional London porter, but which isn’t as dark and rich as a stout. You can see how much room for interpretation and opinion

there is here, and that’s before we get down to defining the difference between stout and porter. 

Some would say stout comes from Ireland, whereas porter hails from London. Others hold firm in their belief that porter comprises 100% malted barley, whereas stout can include unmalted barley. 

Esteemed beer writer Terry Foster writes in his 1992 book, Porter, that “The American Homebrewers Association, in its specifications for entries in the 1991 National Homebrew Competition, deems it necessary to define two types of porter. The first is 'Robust Porter', with the accent on black malt flavour and no roast barley character; the second is 'Brown Porter' with no roast barley or strong burnt malt character. Personally I would like to think of porter as one beer with a whole continuum of roasted malt flavours.”

To complicate things further, ten years later, in 2021 the Beer Judging Certification Programme — an international but US-born non-profit organisation formed in 1985 to recognise beer tasting and evaluation skills — conflated robust porter with the American porter, citing the fact that the more bitter iterations of the style are often heavily hopped, though it acknowledges the origins of the hops are what makes a robust porter either British or American. 

So why is this robust porter our best dark beer? Firstly, because it’s delicious, but equally because it generates the discussion and debate that energises the beer industry, drives its development, and in a strange, roundabout way, brings people closer together.