Test Your Vocabulary. Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words? Need even more definitions? Just between us: it's complicated. Ask the Editors 'Everyday' vs. What Is 'Semantic Bleaching'? Thankfully, within the categories of porter and stout there are a number of modern sub-styles that give us some guidance about what to expect before we crack open a bottle.
British Porters are usually broken down into 3 styles: brown, robust, and Baltic. In their modern forms, brown porters taste a bit like stronger dark milds or brown ales—malty beers with chocolate, caramel, and nut flavors alongside a varying amount of roasty bitterness.
Robust porters are a bit more Historically, they were sweeter than brown porter, but this isn't always the case these days. Robust porters tend to exhibit a more assertive roasty bitterness than their brown brothers, along with a little extra alcoholic kick think 4.
Baltic porters are the strongest members of the extended British porter family. As the name implies, these beers were developed in the Baltic, where brewers began producing their own variations on strong imported British porters using lager yeast. The stout category has a whole bunch of sub-styles too.
The softest of these is Irish dry stout , which as you may guess from its name, was not born in Britain, but we'll include it here anyway. Dry stout is indeed a dry beer style, made famous by the iconic Guinness Draught. Oatmeal stout is brewed with oats to provide a smooth texture alongside a nutty, chocolatey richness.
These display varying levels of sweetness, but tend to be richer than dry stout. Their flavor is often likened to that of a coffee with cream. If oatmeal stout is made with oats, you might get nervous when I mention milk stout. But don't worry: brewers aren't dumping the dregs from their morning cereal into the tank. Milk stouts are made with powdered lactose sugar. This stuff cannot be fermented by regular ale yeast, so it leaves behind sweetness and body that soften the roasty bitter edge common in other stouts.
The biggest and baddest stouts are the imperial stouts, also known as Russian imperial stouts. Here, the story is true: these started out as a specialty product brewed in England for Russian empress Catherine the Great, and they're boozy, aggressive beasts.
Americans have run away with their own interpretations of the style, but English examples tend to have a whole lot of fruity flavors accompanied by big doses of malt or hop-derived bitterness in a dense, dark liquid. If you dig the intensity of imperial stout, old ales and barleywines sometimes spelled "barley wines" are a great place to look next.
There's quite a lot of overlap between these two styles as they exist today. Both are strong beers that are frequently aged prior to release. Old ales tend to be sweet, strong beers with nutty and toffee-like malt flavor complemented by sherry and leathery notes that result from aging. Some examples will show the tart or funky influences of wild yeast and bacteria that often live in the wooden casks where these beers are sometimes cellared. Barleywines offer similarly dense maltiness, which means flavors reminiscent of brown sugar and leather are balanced by an assertive presence of alcohol.
While American takes on the style are usually highly hopped and aggressively bitter, English versions are more often malt-focused sippers built for fireside contemplation. Red beer has a long history in Ireland; literary mentions go back at least as far as the ninth century. But as a style, the stuff we call Irish red ale is a more recent development. Many credit Coors with the popularization of the beer as we know it today—after purchasing an established brewery, they renamed and rereleased an existing beer as George Killian's Irish Red Ale.
The beer found wild success in the s and spawned a slew of imitators. Killian's Irish Red is now actually made with a lager yeast strain, so it isn't an ale at all, but most Irish red ales are indeed made with ale yeast. They tend to be caramelly, malt-driven beers with little hop character, a touch of bitterness on the finish from roasted barley, and a deep reddish hue imparted by the malt used for its production.
Expect toasty and caramelly flavors along with a light, coffee-like bitter finish. Though Scotland hangs its boozy hat mostly on whisky, Scottish beer shouldn't be forgotten. By far, the most common Scottish-style beer you'll encounter in the US is the strong Scotch ale, also known as "wee heavy. However for a classic English bitter, many turn to the roots and opt for bitters direct from England.
There are a few sub-types of English bitters which are grouped based on the alcohol content of the beer and subsequently how sessionable it is :. The English bitter is an ale. When brewed, it is made using top-fermenting ale yeasts.
The bitterness comes from hops which should be less bitter than an India Pale Ale. English brewers were the last of the Europeans to adopt hops and up until that transition to hops, gruit was the option for herbed and spiced beers.
Around the s and through the second world war, English bitters rose to popularity in England as consumers opted for something other than the common dark-style ales available at the time. Tastes are heading in the opposite direction. Modern beer drinkers crave flavour — trying to hold back that tide back seems pointless, retrograde even.
Which is not to say mild is dead quite yet. As Camra knows , mild lives on as a specialist drink, as many beer styles do, such as gose or gruit. Given that US mild enthusiasts emphasise the broad range of flavours this style can encompass, you can bet their brews will bear little resemblance to our own historic, shy milds. Which is a great thing. This beer designed to minimise flavour seems like a relic from another era. Would anyone really mourn its demise?
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