That Porter Pour: Another 'High-Low' Film

Every now an again I tweet something and immediately think that I should probably have recorded it in a more easy-to-find and more permanent place like here. That was certainly the case a while back when I found what I believe to be only the second film of the high-low porter pour in action. By now most people with an interest in the subject are aware of the old method of pouring a pint of porter from two naturally carbonated casks which usually sat on the bar. The first pour was from the fresher, more highly carbonated cask, which was then blended in the glass with porter from a lower carbonated older cask. This was supposedly the origin of the gimmicky modern stout pour, cleverly developed by Guinness to mimic the effect in appearance - if nothing else.

The most famous film is this one from the BBC’s lament to the porter’s death in 1973. People have put up other videos supposedly showing the high/low too, but they do not look quite right. Some showing a pour from a modern-ish keg and others showing porter being poured from a jug into a glass - this appears to be just a way of calming down a fresh keg at a very busy Irish music festival.

But in the Northern Ireland Digital Film Archive I found a short clip called the ‘Drinks Flowing in Dirty Dicks’ from 1965 that appears to show the proper high-low pour, with a pint glass being filled with a foaming fresh porter from one tap and then being topped up with a less active cask, as you can see from the how the dark liquid starts to fill up the bottom of the glass. The pint probably needed another top-up and scrape - and we must remember this was being done for a camera, which might also explain why it was not left to rest. (I am aware that the video might not show in all locations, but try reloading the page if you get an error.)

It is worth mentioning again that this sort of pour was probably not something that was done throughout Ireland in the mid-twentieth century. I also wonder if it just arrived with the advent of those tapped countertop casks? Was it used for stout as well as porter? Again I doubt it was or I certainly believe it was not common if it did exist. In a country where The Bottle of Stout was king it is fair to say the vast majority of stout consumed in Ireland was bottled by the plethora of commercial bottlers and by the pubs who bottled their own. I also do not believe that porter in any form but especially on cask was extremely common(?) outside of the major cities from early in the 20th century onward ...

Lots of questions there I admit, but I worry at times that we are trying to rewrite our brewing history to suit our modern perceptions of what we assume was done instead of sticking to the actual facts of what we know, and can see or read about. As I have said before, we all make errors - including myself - but we certainly do not use the words ‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’ and ‘possibly’ enough - not to mention the wonderful ‘I don’t know…’

Liam K.

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