Porter

Porter emerged in London in the early 1700s as a more heavily hopped and longer-aged version of the brown beer popular at the time. From the 1720s the great London brewers produced it on a vast scale, and changes in scale, ingredients and storage altered its flavour.

Popular histories say that in 1722 Ralph Harwood of the Bell Brewhouse in Shoreditch brewed a single beer, "Entire", to copy "three-threads", a pub blend of beers from three casks, and that it took the name of the London porters who drank it. The account first appeared in a pseudonymous letter signed "Obadiah Poundage" in the London Chronicle in 1760; John Feltham first named Harwood as the inventor in 1802. Historians including Ray Anderson and Martyn Cornell treat the details as embellishment: there was no single invention of porter, and three-threads may have had nothing to do with it. The name is usually linked to the city's load-carrying porters.

Porter became a widely exported style in the early 1800s, helped by inventions such as black malt (1817). It declined from the 1870s as it became a weaker, unaged beer, disappeared in Britain by the 1950s and was reintroduced by small brewers in 1978. Its stronger versions, "stout porters", became stout.