Reggie Cobb's London Porter

 5-Gallon All-Grain Homebrew Recipe

Reggie Cobb — you hear him before you see him. That laugh — big, rolling, the kind that starts in his boots and doesn't stop until it's rattled every glass on the shelf — announces his arrival from halfway down the street. Reggie works the London docks. Has since he was fourteen. His hands are calloused, his nose was broken twice and healed crooked both times, and he claims to have outdrunk every man on the Thames. Nobody has successfully disputed this. His London Porter is the original working man's beer — dark, smooth, and honest. 

Porter holds a unique place in brewing history as the first beer style to be industrially produced and the first to become internationally popular. It emerged in London in the early 1720s, evolving from the common practice of blending different beers at the bar. London publicans would mix old brown ale with fresh brown ale and pale ale to create a drink called "three threads." A brewer named Ralph Harwood is traditionally credited with creating a single beer that replicated this blended flavor. The beer became enormously popular with the street and river porters who hauled goods through London — and took their name as its own. Porter gave birth to stout, which was originally simply called "stout porter" — a strong porter. But the original porter is lighter, more sessionable, and more subtle than its famous offspring.