What the hell is the difference between a porter and a stout?

[soccerdad]

The answer from the one and only Ron:

http://allaboutbeer.com/whats-the-difference-between-porter-and-stout/

For the third time in the hope that people might start reading it.

"London was the only mid 18th century city in Europe that could support industrial beer production." ... certainly no Austrian, German or Czech will ever dispute that point ;-)

 

[Miraculix]

"London was the only mid 18th century city in Europe that could support industrial beer production." ... certainly no Austrian, German or Czech will ever dispute that point ;-)

I don't know, but as this guy usually does his homework, I am tending to believe him. Remeber that he is talking about industrial scale. My guess is that in Germany and other beer drinking areas, beer production was more spread and localized, meaning many smaller breweries serving the customers which would not fall into his definition of industrial scale. During those times, it was also far more common to brew your own, so you essentailly need a huge amount of people who want to drink, cannot or do not want to brew on their own and live close by so that transportation is not an issue. That's quite a special surrounding if you ask me, don't know if other cities than back in the day London would match this.

 

[Hanglow]

London would have been five to ten times the size of any czech, german or austrian city in the mid 18th century. And while the british empire was not in full industrial flow by then, it was at that point rising to be the dominant one

 

[soccerdad]

Yeah - I read once that London was the first city to reach 500,000 population, but I don't recall when that was. But some of the German breweries date back to the 1200's, so 'commercial' brewing would have been going on well ahead of mid 18th even if it wasn't 'industrial'.