May-June-2017_flipbook Revised

ROUSES

EVERYDAY

MAY | JUNE 2017

the

Coffee

issue

orters and stouts — they’re both dark

beers, and they sometimes seem to be

interchangeable. But what makes a

stout a stout and a porter a porter?

Well, the porter came first, back in the

early 18th century, around the time of the

Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.

It was the first widely made commercial

style of beer, and the name derives from its

popularity with the working class “porters”

who delivered goods from the docks all over

the cities and towns. Although the color is

dark brown, it is still very mild-tasting, with

a softer, lighter mouthfeel than most stouts

and a fairly low alcohol by volume (ABV).

The British porter has evolved over the

centuries into a variety of styles, including

robust porter, which contains a bit more

bitterness and roasted notes than the

original; American imperial porter, which

has a higher ABV but still has no bitter or

black malt characteristics; and the Baltic-

style porter, a high-alcohol, deeply flavored

style produced by cold-fermenting, or

lagering, for a longer period of time.

Some say that the flavor profile of the Baltic

porter essentially makes it a stout — which

is basically a bigger, badder porter with

more intense, roasted flavors. The name for

the style came from Guinness, which called

one of its first products a “Stout Porter.”The

styles have evolved separately since then,

with stout styles ranging from milk/sweet

English stouts, Irish dry stouts and oatmeal

stouts to American stouts and Russian

imperial stouts.

Although, historically, the term “stouts”

has referred to stronger porters, nowadays

stouts can be low-alcohol, mild and not

“heavy” on the tongue, but rather silky

and well-rounded. The main difference

between the porter and the stout that can be

consistently pointed to is darkness of color.

Stouts are generally black, while porters are

usually dark brown with ruby highlights, a

difference that seems negligible until you

hold a glass of each up to the light.

Stouts also use unmalted but deeply roasted

barley grain (in a process similar to the way

coffee beans are processed). It’s the roasted

barley that both gives the stout its trademark

dark color as well as the chocolate and coffee

notes that are naturally occurring in stouts,

even if there’s no actual chocolate, coffee or

vanilla added to the beer. For this reason, it’s

common for stouts to be accentuated with

those ingredients. And with porters, adding

coffee or other ingredients rounds out the

flavor profile which are, in general, a bit

lighter than stouts.

The fact that coffee beans and the specialty

grains for these dark beers are roasted in a

very similar fashion is another reason they

complement each other so well. And beer

drinkers can harness the power of coffee’s

caffeine to counteract the sleepiness that

can accompany a session of beer drinking.

Coffee also can add a unique element to any

beer, since there are hundreds and hundreds

of varieties of beans by region and roast.

Thibodaux’s Mudbug Brewery brews a play

on the classic coffee drink with its Cafe

Au Lait milk/sweet stout, made with cold

brew Community Coffee Breakfast Blend

and milk sugar. And Parish Brewing out of

Broussard has collaborated with Lafayette

coffee shop and roaster Rêve Coffee

Roasters to create a strongly flavored coffee

stout that is almost like a pint of iced coffee,

with the bitterness of both the grains and

the beans perfectly complementing each

other.

Chafunkta Brewing in Mandeville has a

flagship beer, Old 504, which is a robust

porter infused with coffee from Orleans

Twist

Stout

Nora McGunnigle