Once Upon a Time – EIP
Beer Style: Porter
Hop Variety: Kent Goldings, Spalt
Malt Variety: Brown, Pale
ABV: 6%
IBUs: 93
Color: Black
In early 2011, we once again teamed up with Ron Pattinson (our very favorite brewing Historian), to recreate a beer from history. Ron’s “afflict the comfortable” brewery research takes assumed beer styles and flips them on their heads. Want a 10.5% mild? Not a worry: here’s one from 1832. How about a black ale that uses no dark malt? 1901 KK.
This time around, Ron’s taken us back to colonial India in the 1850s. The rum-drinking troops (or “squaddies”) were dying at alarming rates until a beer sent from London to India saved them: but it isn’t what you’re thinking. No, that whole IPA story is a bit of a ruse… We’ll let Ron tell the rest:
“We’ve all heard the romantic tale of beer being shipped half way around the world to quench the thirst of the British in India: the birth of IPA. But Pale Ale wasn’t the only beer sent to India: In fact, it wasn’t even a majority of the beer sent. That honour belongs to beer that’s been lost to history: India Porter.
British military units in India had a big problem. Their men were dying at an alarming rate. Climate and disease played a role, but so did the troops’ drink of choice: rum. What was the solution? Give them Porter instead.
The effect was dramatic. Here are annual death rates of British troops in India in the first half of the 19th century:
Bengal: 73.8 per 1000.
Bombay: 50.7 per 1000.
Madras: 38.4 per 1000.
In Bengal soldiers mostly drank rum, in Madras Porter: Porter-drinking troops had a significantly higher life expectancy than their rum-drinking colleagues!
The East India Company, which effectively ruled large areas of India and had its own military units, took notice and began ordering beer. Lots of it. Casks of Porter out-numbered the Pale Ale 2:1. Between 1849 and 1857 the East India Company ordered 23,511 hogsheads of Pale Ale and 46,363 hogsheads of Porter.”
The recipe that we’re using dates back to a brewsheet from Barclay Perkins Brewery in London, from December 6th, 1855. As with our other historical beers, the EIP was brewed in a vast batch-size that we cannot hope to recreate. The “Porter tuns” were apparently over 3400 barrels in size (that’s bigger than any modern American brewhouse). So, we’re brewing at 1/34th that size, but so much else is the same.
We visited our favorite maltster, Thomas Fawcett & Sons in Yorkshire a few months before we brewed this. The Fawcett maltings has been around since the 1780s, this is pretty authentic stuff. So we employed their lovely grain for this beer. Their brown malt is sublime; the amber was, and to some degree still is a mystery. It’s a lightly roasted malt and our guess was that it would accentuate the dryness of the beer. But why did they use it back then?
The hops are a different story altogether:
4.47 lbs hops per barrel (Kent Goldings & Spalt)
4.5 pounds per barrel! That’s a double IPA, and as many hops as the 1832 10.5% Mild had! It’s more than some of the hoppiest MODERN IPAs out there… Crazy!
So: our Once Upon a Time 1855 EIP is dry, malty beer with a substantial pipe-tobacco bitterness, dark garnet colour and 6% abv.
So what ever happened to these India Porters? Back to Ron:
“Why have we only ever heard of IPA and not India Porter? It’s all to do with who drank the beers. IPA was the tipple for officers, officials and bureaucrats. Porter was the drink of the ordinary soldiers. Like so much of British history, it’s all about class: It was the middle and upper classes who wrote about their experiences in India, so as far as anyone knew (or cared), IPA was the beer consumed. No-one really cared about the tales of the enlisted men.
A couple of London brewers cornered the Indian Porter market: Whitbread and Barclay Perkins. Both brewed a special version of their Porter for export to India. Like IPA, the difference with domestic beers was the hopping. EIP was no stronger than standard Porter, but contained almost double the amount of hops.
The India trade was very important to Whitbread in the 1850s. In some years almost 30% of their Porter output was exported to India, hitting a peak of 50,000 barrels in 1860.
Beer exports declined after the Indian Mutiny and gradually petered out at the end of the 1800’s as breweries were established in India and continental breweries started shipping Lager. But as late as 1910 Barclay Perkins were still brewing their India Porter.
There is still a remnant of the Porter trade. In fact, in one respect, Porter has fared better than Pale Ale. Because Stout is still brewed throughout the tropics, from Sri Lanka to Jamaica. Whereas you won’t find a drop of Pale Ale.”