by Mark Dredge
Beer and Travel Writer of the Year 2016
03 March 2021
Difference between porter and stout
Porter and stout have both been around for centuries. But their co-existence has shifted, weaving in and out of each other’s histories, sometimes overlapping, other times with one or the other more popular, and they’ve certainly not always tasted the way they taste today.
Stout and its dark, roasted counterpart, porter is similar in many ways. Their entwined history means they share a lot of similarities but also have some differences.
They are both dark beers with quite broad flavour profiles however the flavour is what sets them apart. Porters are known for the notes of caramel, chocolate, cappuccino or liquorice. Porters range from dark copper to dark brown and may have flavours of toasted fruit. Porters are full of flavour, slightly sweet with an extra malt body. Stouts are known for their more coffee forward flavour and balanced bitterness.
It’s often said that porter came first, but that’s not true. Not technically, anyway. And porter as we know it today has a far more recent identity compared to the beers which were made famous in London a few hundred years ago. But let’s go back to the early 1700s and try to track it from the beginning.
From Brown to Porter
Porter is a beer wrapped in myth and anecdote. It begins with brown beer in the early 18th century London. Brown was the standard beer of the day and you could go into a pub and order ‘Mild’ or ‘Stale’ versions of that same brown beer; the stale was an older version of the younger, sweeter brown. Brewers delivered the beers to pubs soon after primary fermentation was done and the pub matured the beers themselves.
Other beers were also available, including Amber, a variety of Ales, and Stout. The ales were less-hopped than the beers (the old differentiation of hop-less ales and hopped beer was beginning to change by this point), while Stout could’ve been any type of beer or ale and its name referred to it being a stronger ‘stouter’ version. It was supposedly common for a drinker to have a preferred mix of different beers poured into one tankard.