Session number 150: When porter was… amber?

Porter is a dark beer, right? Pretty much black. Well, that was not always the case, as the late Martyn Cornell explains in his 2025 book Porter & Stout. He describes 18th century London porter as “mid-brown or deep chestnut in colour at most” and, on the same page, quotes a contemporary source which refers to porter as a “blood-red drink”. It’s always hard to understand how flavour and colour were perceived by people in the past but we do have Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours from 1814 which gives us references for “arterial blood red” and “chestnut brown”. In a later chapter, about the spread of porter brewing across England, he quotes a 1785 newspaper advertisement from Philadelphia which refers to Bath porter as “a fine colour, and as bright as amber”. As Cornell puts it with characteristic care and caution, “That last simile is another hint that 18th-century porter was not totally black.” The point is that, early in its evolution, the colour of porter was less important than its…