Five... Pieces of London's Porter-Brewing History
Including Charles Dickens, Catherine the Great, and some very questionable poetry
Hi and welcome to your weekend newsletter, this time all about London’s porter-brewing (and porter-drinking) history.
Going to open with the disclaimer that I mostly avoid porter, hard; I’m not the person to come to for intel on the 60 best porters in London and where to get them (Matt Brown’s DMs are open, though…) But whether or not you get personally excited about sinking a pint of the dark stuff, the history of porter offers beautiful little windows onto the history of London. Developed in the 1720s (we think; there’s some debate around it), it rapidly became the first London beer to be widely exported. Within a couple of decades it had slithered into regular consumption in Ireland, North America and northern Europe. It’s what would have been filling the sizeable tankards in Hogarth’s 1751 painting, Beer Street (above). And for decades it fuelled a workforce of market and ticket porters integral to the city’s infrastructure and daily life.
Here, five vignettes from the height of London’s porter-brewing history.
The origin story
This article by Martyn Cornell on Zythophile about the forgotten story of London's porters explores the workforce of river and street porters in the 17th-19th centuries that much of the city’s trade and daily life were dependent on.
Cornell puts the number of people employed as fulltime porters in the city in the 18th century at around 5000 - including the market porters delivering goods from Billingsgate fish market and Covent Garden fruit and fresh produce market, the Fellowship Porters (regulated by the City of London) who carried measurable goods like salt and coal between the river and London’s warehouses, and Ticket Porters, carrying more or less everything else.
‘Portering was hard work… and porters needed a considerable amount of carbohydrate as fuel – much of which they got from drinking. One estimate is that 18th century manual workers were getting 2,000 calories a day from beer. Pubs were used as fuelling stops: it was “universal” in the 18th century, according to a writer in 1841, for public houses in London to have a bench outside for porters to sit at and a board (that is, table) alongside it “for depositing their loads” while they stopped for “deep draughts of stout … such as are idealised in Hogarth’s Beer Street.” That was “stout” as in stout porter, of course: the strong, dark brew London’s brewers developed out of the brown beer they brewed at the beginning of the 18th century was just the sort of refreshing, energising brew the porters wanted, and its popularity with the portering class is why it was given their name.’
Elsewhere on Cornell’s extremely in-depth, award-winning website about all things beer: a detailed look at the brewing of porter and an interesting slice of first-person perspective in a Canadian’s accounts of his visits to four of London’s porter breweries in 1832.