OK, think of your favorite craft brewery. Excellent. Now think of all the hoppy ales they offer: APAs, IPAs, DIPAs, Belgians, etc. It’s a few, right? Now think of all the porters and stouts they offer…
It’s usually a couple at a time at most. Sure, you have your standard stout or porter, oatmeal stout, Baltic porter, milk stout, Russian imperial stout, and something with coffee in it. Even though coffee is a flavoring, we’ll give it a pass here as a standard style as it’s really, really common.
What you typically won’t find at your favorite brewery is five different porters distinguished by their hops and grain profiles. I.e., no variety analogous to the different hoppy ales your brewery produces. The reason? OK, here comes the uncomfortable truth:
Porters and stouts largely taste the same.
The first porter I tried was Anchor Porter in 1998. So dark, so rich! I loved it. I tried one a couple years ago, and it’s still good, since “porter technology” has not vastly improved since the late 90s. What has changed is dumping every kind of flavoring into porters and pretending it’s something amazing. Sometimes it works. I had a ghost pepper stout at Union Brewing in Carmel, Indiana, that blew me away last year. I’m a fan of Three Floyds’ Alpha Claus Christmas Stout. I also love their Backmasking oatmeal stout. But their Moloko milk stout and Wigsplitter coffee stout don’t do anything for me.
Hey, I know that it’s just me, but barrell-aged stouts make me want to barf–literally. One day my gf and I had half a bottle each of Founders’ Breakfast Stout and Backwoods Bastard. I ended up with extreme nausea for like six hours because of that. I have no idea why this is, as I drink whisky straight all the time (if anyone cares to speculate, I am genuinely curious why this stuff makes me sick if I drink it in any volume). I will still drink little flight pours of barrel-aged stuff as I find the flavor intriguing in small amounts.
At the end of the day, do I want to try every variation of porters and stouts with coffee, chocolate, and God-knows-what-else thrown in to be “different”? Not really. I do like dark beers, but they are not, IMHO, suitable canvases for beer amazement. For that, I do prefer hoppy ales, lagers, and more subtle styles.
TD;DR: Porters and stouts taste basically the same, so they add a bunch of flavorings to mix stuff up, but that only works to an extent.
Thoughts?