The Best British Porters

Porter was invented in London in the early 18th century, dominated British brewing for over 150 years, and then almost disappeared. The style's origin has long been attributed to Ralph Harwood, a London brewer supposed to have blended three beers ("Three Threads") into a single beer around 1722 — a tradition that beer historians (notably Martyn Cornell) have argued is largely apocryphal, a 19th-century myth built onto the actual emergence of a new dark beer style in early-18th-century London commercial brewing. What is undisputed is that Porter became London's dominant beer style through the 18th and 19th centuries, was brewed at industrial scale by London great houses (Barclay Perkins, Truman, Whitbread, Fuller's), and then declined heavily through the 20th century until it was almost extinct in Britain by the 1970s.

The hopIQ ranking captures the modern British Porter revival, heavily concentrated in London. Fuller's London Porter (from the Chiswick brewery that survived through the porter dark years) anchors the traditional continuity. The Kernel Brewery Porter (Bermondsey — archive-recipe recreations from the great London porter houses), Partizan Brewing, Anspach & Hobday (The Porter, London Black), and Five Points Railway Porter build the modern London craft revival. Outside London: Titanic Brewery's Plum Porter (Staffordshire — a fruit-porter that became one of the most-awarded British porters of the past decade) and Elland 1872 Porter (West Yorkshire — brewed to an actual 1872 recipe, giving the beer its name) round out the ranking. British Porter is small but historically load-bearing.