What is Porter Beer?

Series Summary

A porter style beer is very dark in color, similar to a stout. Both beer styles are brewed with dark malts, and the name stout was used to describe stronger porter brews. Porters developed from traditional brown ales, and became the beer of choice in 18th century London, due in part to the speed with which it could be produced. Porter has seen a resurgence in popularity in the United States over the past 15 years as more microbreweries and home brewers have resurrected the art of brewing porter beer.

In this series of free instructional videos on brewing beer you'll learn how to home brew your own porter beer. Award winning expert brewer Mark Emiley shows you the beer brewing process in easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions, from choosing malt, hops and yeast to bottling your batch of homebrew. You'll get tips on sanitizing your brewing equipment, measuring out the hops and other ingredients to get the perfectly balanced recipe for your porter beer. Bottle it, label it, and impress all your friends with your very own hand-crafted home brew beer.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Mark Emiley on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'm going to teach you everything you need to know about how to brew your own porter. Today we'll be talking about everything you need to home brew this style which includes the ingredients, the equipment, and the different processes you are going to need to take all of your basic ingredients and convert them into tasty beer. I've been a home brewer for about nine years, I've got about 140 different batches under my belt. I'm president of the Employee's Beer and Wine Maker's Club. I've even had some of my beers scaled up and produced commercially. There are many different ways to brew beers. Today we are going to be focusing on extract with specialty grades. Our focus will be on doing this as simply as possible with the least amount of equipment investment to start up. We'll recommend the basic amount of equipment you need and also some big equipment that if you want to get a little more into it, you'll appreciate it later. To start off, I'm going to give you an overview of what you're going to be expecting during the whole brewing process. To begin, you are going to start on the brewing day. On this day you are going to steep some specialty grains if you have them and then you are going to add some multi-extracting boil off that, you are going to add in your hops, and then at the end of that when you are done boiling, you are going to cool it down and add in your yeast. And this usually takes between two to three hours. After the yeast has been added, your work is now beer and the yeast will start fermenting away for about three to seven days. And this is called your primary fermentation. Once the yeast starts slowing down, you're going to siphon out of your primary vessel into a secondary vessel. This operation is called racking and it takes roughly about thirty minutes. Once you are in your secondary vessel, you're going to let it sit and finish its remaining fermentation that it has left. And this will take you usually seven to fourteen days. At this point, most of your yeast will have fallen out of solution and your beer will be getting very, very clear. Finally, you are going to be going into the bottling phase where you are going to siphon one more time into your bottling bucket and add some priming sugar and then fill up your bottles and cap them off. Then you are going to put them into a nice, dark area and let them sit for two or so weeks. At this point, the beer will start carbonating itself, get that up to a nice level and then you'll be able to chill and drink your beer. While this video will be enough to get you home brewing, I'd like to recommend a couple of other resources that you can use to develop your brewing skills. First, the American's Home Brewer's Association puts out a "Beginner's Guide to Home Brewing" which you can pick up at your local store or request at their website at www.beertown.org. Next, we have a classic book called "The Joy of Home Brewing" which is going to be everything you really need to get started. For people who want to get a little more advanced, you can pick up "How to Brew" by John Palmer which takes you through a little more of the science. And for some other good recipes out there, for some beers that you may have already tried one of, to reproduce there is "Clone Beers and "Beer Captured." "