Porter or Stout?
26 Mar 1957Pressure on space lopped-off my little paragraph on the riddle of: Which came first – Porter or Stout?
Mr. Leslie A. Luke (now P.R.O. to St. James’s Gate) supplements the story most Interestingly – from the Dublin angle. According to this, brewing was blooming in Dublin as far back as 1300 – when women were the principal brewers along the banks of the rivet Poddle! Three centuries later in Charles time – Dublin boasted no. fewer than 1,180 ale-houses and 91 brew-houses; and this at a time when the population was just over 4.000 families.
But what is more Interesting is that at this period—and until the first quarter of the 18th century—”almost every housewife of importance may be said to have been her own brewer,” and every wealthy citizen seems to have had his own brewing-plant.
In the early years of the 18th-century Porter was introduced into Dublin from London; and as the century proceeded so did the imports of porter, until in 1763 the Dublin brewers Joseph ‘ and Ephraim Thwaites petitioned the Irish House of Commons for help in the brewing of porter which they claimed to have brought to perfection “after repeated and expensive experiments.”
But the imports built up and favoured as they were by the English Revenue Laws, soon began driving Irish brewers out of existence. (The tax on imported porter was only one shilling per barrel as against 5s 6d. per barrel on the Dublin brew). Long before the end of the century the number of breweries in Dublin had declined from 70 to less than thirty.
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