Unhorrible histories

It's taken a year, but we're not in any hurry. Trouble Brewing has created a set of beers to mark the publication of Christina Wade's multi-award-winning book on Irish beer history: Filthy Queens. Liam was deployed as production consultant and they decided early on that a by-the-numbers attempt at historical beer recreation wasn't going to fly. So where everybody else would have just lied about it, they settled on two recipes, showing aspects of what we know about porter as it was brewed in the 18th century. One is influenced by Irish brewing, the other by English.

It's clearly an indication of our innate moral superiority that the Irish version contains less weird stuff. This is Fire & Labour, named for the non-ingredient expenses of brewing. It's 6.5% ABV and has molasses and gentian as its historical-meets-craft ingredient twists. I can see how they might be used as malt and hop substitutes, respectively. Reading about old-style shortcuts and adjuncts, I often wonder how easy they were to hide in the flavour: would drinkers have noticed? On this first showing, quite possibly not. I thought there would be an out-of-place extra bitterness from the gentian, but there isn't; nor is there an overdone sticky treacle effect from the molasses. This tastes like a decent, if heavy, strong dark ale. Yes, there's a leafy, green-tea, greenness and lots of brown-sugared filter coffee, but it's all within the accepted flavour profile of porter. Where it misses that mark is the finishing gravity. This is a thick boi, and you would want to have portered up one hell of a thirst for it to be slaked by it. A brisk thirst-quenching porter would be a basic requirement for 18th century me, and this isn't that. It will do for breakfast in lieu of chocolate Ready Brek, or serve as a dessert drink when we're at war with Portugal. Daytime invigoration, though? It has the calories, but thirst quenching was not on offer. Still: this is a lovely beer, even if I'd have shelved it with the extra stouts rather than the porters.

Representing the neighbours is The Fox, a derogatory term for substandard beer. The ABV goes up further, to 6.8%, and it's as thick as the previous one. Our novelty ingredients this time are treacle, liquorice and ginger. I would have thought the latter is unmistakable in any beer, and that's its whole point. There's no ginger in the flavour here, however: no spice nor candy, cake nor biscuit. This is another straight-up heavy dark beer, and while it's altogether plainer than the one before, it's tastier too. Wherever the bitterness comes from, it's doing an especially good job, making me think of old-fashioned export stout. It's a vegetal effect, with overtones of cabbage leaf meeting a harder mineral zinc and iron. I understand why people thought this was nutritious: the flavour must have resembled any number of medicines. As a 21st century leisure beverage, again it's one to drink slowly and appreciate rather than quaff for refreshment.

The absence of the interloper ingredients in the finished flavour profile is perhaps the lesson here: 18th century brewers knew what they were doing when they cheated, and there's nobody but the taxman and the more compliant breweries to say they were doing anything wrong. These days, the problem is not that your porter contains ginger and gentian, but that it doesn't explicitly taste of them. Consider that.

Well done to all concerned, and a special big thanks to L. Mulligan Grocer for hosting the sort of launch event we used to have, back when beer was fun.