Porter

The story comes from John Feltham. It appeared in February 1802 in the Monthly Magazine and in his guide The Picture of London, and was copied endlessly afterwards. According to beer historian Martyn Cornell it is wrong on several points.

First, three threads was, according to dictionaries from 1694–1699 and 1737, a mixture of only two beers: ordinary ale and extra strong beer. That removes the reason for a 'one-cask solution'. Second, in the more than eighty years before 1802 nobody named Harwood as the inventor, except for one brief attempt in 1788. Harwood did exist and brewed porter in Shoreditch, but his brewery was small next to giants such as Truman, Whitbread and Parsons. Third, porter is already mentioned by name in 1721.

What the sources do show: eighteenth-century writers used 'porter' and London 'brown beer' as synonyms. According to Cornell, porter was that existing brown beer, improved under competitive pressure, with more hops and longer maturation. Whether three threads still played a role in this is something historians do not agree on. There is no evidence for Harwood as the inventor.

Eighteenth-century sources are clear on this. The Swiss traveller César de Saussure, who was in London in the 1720s, and the brewery clerk who wrote as 'Obadiah Poundage' (1760) both explain the name from its popularity with porters and other working men. Daniel Defoe described porter in 1724 as a drink of labourers.

It was mainly about the ticket porters and fellowship porters: thousands of men who loaded and unloaded ships on the Thames and carried parcels, letters and goods through the City. Those occupations disappeared in the late 19th century. Once they were forgotten, readers and later writers in the 20th century wrongly began to link the name to the market porters of Covent Garden, Smithfield and Billingsgate.

Other explanations, such as that Harwood had porters deliver the beer or that the name comes from the Dutch word 'poorter', lack any foundation. The BJCP style guide words the porter explanation cautiously, but the evidence from the 18th century is, according to beer historian Martyn Cornell, strong.

In the 18th and 19th centuries 'stout' was the name for a stronger porter; the word meant 'strong'. At Whitbread in London, porter and stouts were brewed from exactly the same raw materials in 1844; in 1805 only the double stout differed slightly in the types of malt. The difference lay in the amount of water, and so in the strength.

In the 20th century the roles reversed: around 1934 porter was called 'a variety of stout', a kind of stout, that is. By now the difference in strength has disappeared too. Some brewers make stouts that are lighter than their porters.

The BJCP style guide describes English porter as brown and Irish stout as black, and that helps with tasting. But beer historian Martyn Cornell found no sharp boundary in strength or flavour in a sample of 30 British porters and stouts.

According to this theory, the London porter of the 1720s goes back to a 14th-century Dutch 'poorterbier'. But 'poorter' was the old Dutch word for citizen. According to beer historian Martyn Cornell, mentions of 'poorter bier' were about the brewing rights of citizens, not about a type of beer.

There are no sources from before the 21st century that connect porter and poorter. There is also no plausible route by which a 14th-century Dutch name would become an 18th-century English beer name.

At the same time, contemporaries in the 18th century wrote, on the contrary, that the name comes from the London porters (see the myth about this).