Session #150 – Martyn Cornell’s Porter and Stout

I haven’t read Martyn Cornell’s Porter and Stout, but I wanted to join this Session anyway, largely to pay my respects to Martyn. He was the first beer blogger I ever read, back in the mid-00s; the second and third were The Pub Curmudgeon (RIP) and Tandleman. (Peter, if you’re reading this, look after yourself!) Mudge and Tandleman, titans of the beer blogosphere though they may have been, were models I felt I could aspire to. Go to pub, drink beer, have (slightly contrarian) opinion, write it down and hit Publish: I could do that! Martyn was always playing in a different league: he didn’t just write about his opinions, he wrote about his research. Having done some time as a historian myself, I could see that Martyn was the real thing. His blog posts were meticulously detailed and told some fascinating stories, all in the service of clarifying historical puzzles and filling gaps in the record – after, in many cases, stripping away the accretions of later myth-making which had…