Rich, toasty porter is one of winter’s beer necessities

Dark and swarthy with a foamy head, porter is a beer best sipped slowly, perfect for students bored with more frat-house-style brews.

Though once favored as the morning beverage of choice among the porters working in London’s produce markets in the 19th century, the porter ale style only barely survived a period of near-extinction in the 20th century. The heavy porter fell out of fashion in the United Kingdom when the pale ale gained favor, and Prohibition almost completely wiped out porter production in the United States. Only during the renaissance of American microbreweries in the 1990s did porter once again emerge as curious and enterprising brewers, tiring of India Pale Ales, looked to expand their repertoires to include more uncommon styles.

Porter is lightly hopped, and it is defined by its roasted barley malt flavor and resultant notes of chocolate, caramel, and espresso. Only a shade less potent than the stout, its near cousin, the porter is an ideal winter brew, toothsome and deeply flavorful. Though the brew’s intensity can sometimes make food pairings tricky, heavy meat-based stews are rich and unctuous enough to support a porter’s power.

So where do we begin when sampling the porters available in Morningside Heights? Westside Market stocks Anchor Brewing Company’s Anchor Porter. Hailing from Northern California, Anchor Brewing Company produces a notably pitch-perfect porter of stout-like intensity—chewy and richly full-bodied with an aftertaste of toasted malt and molasses. It’s a creamy brew with a lasting foam head that leaves lace-like tracery along the insides of a glass. Overall, it’s beautifully balanced despite its complex flavoring.

Though already redolent of coffee and chocolate flavors, some porters are often spiced up by actual cocoa, coffee, and vanilla beans during the brewing process to impart even stronger flavor. Whole Foods Market sells a decent example of such a porter, Wolaver’s Alta Gracia Coffee Porter by Vermont’s Otter Creek Brewing. Punched up by shade-grown organic coffee from the Dominican Republic, the porter’s smooth malt flavor gives way to a caffeine-jolted simmer at the taste’s conclusion, leaving behind a bitter, haunting smokiness.

For the brave of stomach, Flying Dog, a brewery hailing from Maryland, produces a porter of unparalleled intensity: the Gonzo Imperial Porter. Complete with a Hunter S. Thompson-inspired label, the porter is deep black and bitter with only the subtlest trailing caramel notes. It’s a porter that shows the true versatility of the genre—whether drinkable and chocolatey or darkly potent, porters show off a brewer’s creativity and range.