Strong Words and Strange Porter: Some Notes on the Beer Recipes for a Talk and Tasting in L. Mulligan Grocer, Stoneybatter, Dublin on 7th December 2025

When Dr. Christina Wade first approached me to collaborate on a couple of 18th century beers to tie in with the English vs Irish porter wars chapter in her book Filthy Queens, I thought it would be a relatively straightforward task. I had some limited experience of homebrewing 19th century Irish porters, albeit on a modern system, so what would pushing a recipe back a century require?  Relatively, easy-peasy surely? A little more research into an era I wasn’t hugely familiar with perhaps, but it should be a relatively straightforward task to come up with a historical-ish recipe. How wrong we were …

Irish brewing records from the 19th and 20th century are scarce enough but those from the 1700s are practically non-existent outside of places like the Guinness archive, whose records of their own beers, as well as the brands they still brew, are inaccessible to the public. That left us looking through old newspapers and books for mentions of what an Irish porter from this period was like, and we certainly found some bits of information but no actual full recipes.

The English version was a little more straight forward, as there is, and was in the past, a little more published on the porters produced on that side of the pond than here, but we soon realized that anything even close to real recipes was going to be impossible. Plus, we were never going to get close to the same process on a modern brew kit anyway, nor would any of the ingredients be date-correct as, for example, barley varieties have changed since the 1700s - not to mention the malting process. Old fermentation methods and using wooden barrels would be problematic too, so we soon resigned ourselves to not being able to replicate porters from that period in any meaningful way given these constraints and settled into a more ‘inspired by’ mode – much as I dislike the term and its use by certain breweries. The difference would be that we would be sure to communicate that these were not historic recipes, but where we could we’d try to add ingredients we found mentioned in brewing at the time – even if they had been highlighted in a derogatory way – and attempt to hit mentioned alcohol contents if we could. I other words we’d have a bit of fun with it and not take the recipes too seriously!

For the Irish Porter we came up with the name Fire & Labour based on a mention of the many costs of brewing a porter, and how that factor was another expense on top of the ingredients – plus it’s a great name for a beer! The hopping rates and gravity were taken from 18th century book mentions so they were factored into the recipe. Gentian root and molasses were allegedly – and sneakily – used in small-beer at this time as a way of saving on bittering hops and increasing the sugars for fermentation, so even though we were brewing a porter in they went too! The malt was mostly modern Irish ale malt but with a little Chocolate malt and Special W in a poor attempt to replicate an old brown malt of the period – and this method is mentioned as a mix for porter in some books, but with different malts of course. Longish mash and boil times were required, and just Fuggles used in the boil for hopping, even if East Kent Golding would have been a better if not perfect fit – my bad! Irish ale yeast was used for fermentation and the target abv was 6.6%.

Again for the English Porter we based it on documented gravities and tried to keep much of the base the same, but with English pale malt and treacle, liquorice and ginger root – again as they had been mentioned as adjuncts in English porters. Fuggles were (wrongly again!) used for bittering too but some were added quite late in the boil this time. It had a higher gravity – over 7% – than the Irish one, again as mentioned in some publications, and we used English ale yeast. This one was called The Fox, a name used for a beer that wasn’t quite what it should be!

These recipes were then passed over to Trouble Brewing for replication and production, and they certainly didn’t let us down. They used as many of the ingredients as they could find that were economical – including the odd ones – and did a fair job at hitting the correct gravities given the vagaries of the conversion and those ingredients. I could not be more pleased at how they adapted and brewed the recipes.

Only one question remains.

How do the taste and who won this particular porter war?

And remember, these are not serious, historical beers – they’re a bit of experimentation and a bit of fun, although they do include historical elements.

More importantly, hopefully they are enjoyable!

Thanks again to Christina for including me in the project, and Trouble for doing all the hard work and taking a leap of faith.

Liam K