Porter Tasting

After the outrageous cliff-hanger in my previous blog article, I’m going to discuss what the porter that we brewed in June tasted like.

We followed the Fuller’s London Porter recipe in Brew Your Own British Real Ale by Graham Wheeler. In this he describes the brew as a “rich and flavoursome dark ale based on an 1880s Fuller’s recipe…hints of coffee and chocolate…long complex finish…and liquorice maltiness”.

It tasted interested when it finished fermenting – certainly dark, complex and roasty. We then spent a whole evening bottling it in hopeful anticipation.

A week or so later we allowed ourselves to try a bottle – bitter disappointment. It had hardly any carbonation, and tasted flat and almost oily.

So I left the bottles on the shelf and forgot about them for a couple of months. Here we are in September and we opened a bottle this week to see if anything has changed. What a difference a couple of months maturing makes! Firstly, the beer had carbonated, so we got a 1cm or so of fizzy head. This didn’t last long, but at least it was there and the beer had a delicate carbonation that lifted the heavy flavours out of the glass.

The aroma smelt enticingly of cocoa.

As for the taste – as we expected, complex, malty, coffee and chocolate. And a deep long aftertaste. But also in there was a tartness which kind of helped cut through the chocolate and coffee flavours.

Bump, back down to earth: I wouldn’t call this the most amazing porter I’ve ever tasted, but given that we’d been so disappointed just after it had been bottled we were pretty pleased.

So, two learning points here:

1. Maturation is everything. Don’t write a beer off until it’s had plenty of time to mature.
2. Carbonation really lifts a beer. Without it (no matter how small) a beer is pretty unpalatable.