A Porter and Stout argument (part three)

More from my highly amusing discussion with an overconfident home brewer.

This time he's replying after having gone away and read Obadiah Poundage's letter. Unsurprisingly, he didn't understand it.

"Interesting read.  He refers to "Porter or Entire Butt," rather than "Entire gyle," which sounds more like mixing the containers of fermented beer, rather than mixing the worts.  Also, are you certain "entire gyle" didn't simply mean the default process of adding the sparge back to the first runnings, rather than making a second, weaker beer from it?  There is literally no advantage to combining different worts.  Making a wort with dark grains, and combining it with a wort made from light grains, would taste no different than a wort made with a mixture of light and dark grains.  Something's getting lost in your translation/explanation. 

Note he's also clueless about 18th-century brewing methods and doesn't realise no brewer in London sparged until about a century after Porter first appeared. Nor can he grasp the concept of entire gyle. No idea where he got the idea that it meant blending worts from mashes of different-coloured grains.

He then expands on his theory that Porter was an English derivative of German Dunkles:

"Regardless, this in no way disproves porter was based on Dunkel and Schwartzbier.  In fact, Dunkel just means "dark" in German.  We know it was the beer most widely drank my commoners because it was cheap, and there is historical record of Dunkels being hundreds of years older than Porter.  Not to mention, the oldest known document mentioning porter being from 1760 tells me the beer is even older, because we have no idea how many countless other documents have been lost, and how long people uttered the term out loud without penning it down.  Dunkel is likely the origin of porter, and English-speakers just referred to it as "porter" because, just like in Germany, that's who drank it.  The origin of porter is just as muttled as IPA.  I know you want to believe otherwise, but the fact is that many versions of all this information are out there, in many languages, from multiple countries, and they conflict.  Being positive one is right and the other is wrong is no more asinine than being religious. None of this proves Germans weren't drinking porter-like beers hundreds of years earlier.  Nor does it prove that Americans didn't go through their own history of dark beers.  Countless other beers that would have tasted the same as a porter could have come and gone, or been renamed "porter" after the name was popularized.  I find every story I hear fascinating, but I put faith in absolutely none of them.  Sorry."

It's very much from the it-could-have-happened-so-it-must-have-happened school of history. Not sure where he got the idea that porters drank Dunkles in Bavaria. Back then most Bavarian men would have been agricultural labourers or craftsmen. I'm trying to imagine happy peasants drinking steins of Porter. Nope, doesn't feel right.

I just love this line of argument: "None of this proves Germans weren't drinking porter-like beers hundreds of years earlier." You can't prove it didn't happen, so it probably did. I could just as easily say, Germans had potatoes centuries before chips were invented, so chips must be derived from Bratkartoffeln. Or, aliens could have built the pyramids. You can't prove they didn't.

Towards the end he even hints that Porter might have first been brewed in the American colonies. It's amazing what brilliant theories you can develop if you completely ignore annoying little details like facts.

I suggested he read Martyn Cornell's demolition of the theory that Porter came from the Flemish beer Poorter and he came back with this:

"Let me get this straight, I inform you that the history of porter is muddled because there are multiple historians that disagree with one another, and your proof that I'm wrong is posting yet another article written by a beer historian who disagrees with everyone else?  Got it.  JFC.  This whole conversation is hilarious.   Besides, that article simply argued against where porter got it's name, and I've never uttered the word "poorter" once, so I have literally no idea how you think it relates to this conversation." 

How was this relative to our conversation? Because it fucking showed, giving sources, what the true history of Porter was. And that it was a style first brewed in London. It seems pretty obvious to me the article was extremely relevant. Because other people have written unsourced nonsense about Porter, Martyn's article was just "one of many equally valid theories"?

Immediately he's back to Porter being originally German:

"I'm saying Schwartzbier was invented 300 years before porter, and at some point, a London brewer probably tasted one.  If you disagree with that notion, you've likely lost touch with reality yourself.   I don't even care about any of this.  I've said MULTIPLE times now, that beer history is muddled, and that I don't take stock in anything I'm saying, but hey, if you're enjoying this interaction, I'm here for you.  Keep arguing.  Put whose ever face you're mad at on the punching bag.  Let it out."

I'll be honest with you here: I've no idea how old Schwarzbier (he can't even spell it correctly) is as a style. I doubt that it goes back as far as the 15th century. A London brewer would "probably" have tried? What the fuck? Until the 1990s, Schwarzbier was a very obscure style, brewed in tiny quantities in just one region, Saxony. Few German brewers would have tried let alone one from London. 

In the 18th century London had the largest and most advanced brewing industry in the world. By a very long way. Germany was a backwater when it came to beer at the time and didn't have any reputation internationally. What did they do in the 19th century when they wanted to modernise their industry? They went to the UK. One German brewer who visited the UK - Gabriel Sedlmayr from Spaten -  used what he had learnt in the UK to brew the first modern Dunkles back in Munich. If anything, Porter influenced Dunkles.

Because he's stated MULTIPLE times that beer history is muddled, then it has to be true. That's the logic of a lunatic.

Let's end with him banging on about Germany again:

"Not being able to understand that Germans made dark beer hundreds of years before the UK, and being convinced that the people of London were never influenced by these"

I would have let it go, if the arrogant bastard hadn't kept putting in little personal digs. Instead I invited Martyn to join in. That was fun. It was like watching a cat play with an annoying mouse. Sadly, the posts have now been deleted.