I was delighted to learn BarrelHouse, the craft brewery in Over-the-Rhine, again is offering its marvelous Powder Horn Porter.

        This hearty, dark ale was pushed off BarrelHouse's tap list some years ago by the hugely popular stout, but now it's back. Brewer Rick DeBar says he wanted to do something different to help entice people back to the neighborhood, and I think he succeeded.

        The BarrelHouse porter is one of the most drinkable examples of the style. It's a rich English ale with a deep chocolate flavor and just a hint of coffee. Unlike many of the porters you find at brewpubs around the country, this one has none of the burnt, roasted character sometimes associated with brewers who never have been to England. Even beer novices who don't have much experience with dark beers should enjoy this porter.

        Thinking about how eminently drinkable the BarrelHouse porter is, I'm reminded that porter was just about the most popular beer style in the world during the 18th century.

Blended at brewery

        In the early 1700s, the streets of London were full of men carrying boxes and baskets of merchandise. Commerce of the day was moved mainly by horse-drawn carts, but they couldn't go inside buildings, and porters always were loading and unloading them. It was extremely hard work, and the working men needed (and deserved) a good glass of beer after their labors.

        At that time, three sorts of beer were available in pubs. There was a brown ale, which probably wasn't much different from modern brown ales, and two other beers that we barely would recognize.

        One was a slightly sour version of the brown ale, and the other was a weak, low-alcohol beer. You could order any of the three, but the fashion of the day was to order “three threads” — a blend of the three.

        This wasn't popular with the bartender, since it involved pouring from each of three taps into the customer's glass. As you can imagine, it also led to arguments, since each patron had a slightly different idea of the ideal mix.

        Fortunately, one enterprising brewer decided to solve the problem and brewed a beer that was blended before it left his brewery. This became known as “entire” because it was all three types of beer in one. It eventually became known as “porter's beer” or simply “porter.” Today's porter is a single beer, not a blend, but we think it tastes much like those early porters.

Immense vats created

        London brewers constructed huge storage vats for conditioning the beer, and some were incredible construction projects for the time. In the 1740s, Whitbread built tanks that held more than 4,000 barrels each, launching a friendly competition among big brewers to see who could construct the largest porter vat.

        One brewer built a vat so large that he held a sit-down dinner inside for 100 people for its inauguration. Not to be outdone, a rival brewer in 1790 built one that held 200 diners. The biggest of all was a vat that held 20,000 barrels of porter, constructed in 1795.

        Unfortunately, the era's construction methods weren't quite up to the demands of these giant breweries, and in 1814 one of the huge tanks burst. The liquid contents smashed through the walls of the brewery, knocked down several nearby buildings, and eight people died. The causes of their deaths were variously reported as “drowning, injury, poisoning by porter fumes or drunkenness.”

        Clearly, a different construction method was needed. Whitbread solved the problem by building underground tanks, lined with specially glazed ceramic tiles made by Wedgwood. One of these tanks was built so sturdily that it survived the bombing of London during World War II.

        Contact Ed Westemeier by e-mail: hopfen@malz.com.

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