Today is Baltic Porter Day, an event started by the Polish brewer and porter fan Marcin Chmielarz. In 1977, beer writer Michael Jackson penned the existence of porter brewing in Poland in his World Guide to Beer. Jackson is credited with inventing the expression, “Baltic porter,” the name the style is now known, even in Poland. The Baltic porter is a traditional English style, developed by the British in the 1800s for export to their buddies in the Russian Court. The Baltic porter is an interesting breed because while it’s a porter in name and flavor, it’s not an ale. All Baltic porters are lagers, meaning they’re brewed with a yeast strain that ferments longer at colder temperatures and contributes a cleaner, crisper flavor to the brew. The Baltic porter is a dark black beer, sometimes with garnet and ruby highlights. It is known for an assertive chocolate malt that imparts sweetness and often hints of toffee, licorice, and roast, and it can be quite strong, ranging from 7.6 to 9.3 percent. Today, Peaks & Pints presents a flight of Baltic porters — a flight we call Peaks and Pints Beer Flight: Baltic Porters.
Peaks and Pints Beer Flight: Baltic Porters
Single Hill Chiromancer
7.2% ABV
Single Hill Brewing is situated in downtown Yakima, along a bustling avenue just a few short miles from endless strands of hop farms, with a new location on the west side of the brewery-dense Ballard neighborhood in Seattle. Their smooth Baltic porter Chiromancer showcases rich chocolate and coffee flavors of Black malt.
Threshold Neptune
8% ABV
Started in 2019 by longtime homebrewer Jarek Szymanski, a Polish immigrant, and his wife Sara, Threshold Brewing brews a range of modern styles as well as traditional Polish beers with a distinct Pacific Northwest twist. Threshold’s Neptune Baltic Porter is named after the famous Neptune Fountain in the Baltic city of Gdansk, Poland where Jarek attended university. Neptune pours a rich, dark brown with a strong chocolate aroma. The beer is definitively chocolate-forward but smooth and well-balanced, with roasted malt notes, as is characteristic of the style.
Structures Silvernail
8.3% ABV
Silvernail Baltic porter will be forever known as Bryan Cardwell’s first Structures beer. In 2021, Cardwell joined Structures Brewing as a co-owner with James Alexander. Alexander met him when Cardwell was brewmaster down the street at Chuckanut Brewery. Cardwell also did a stint as senior brewer at pFriem Family Brewers in Hood River, Oregon. Silvernail is a complex malt-rich lager fermented and aged for notes of toffee, prunes, and chocolate ganache. As with many Structures beers, a bird graces the can. A Gyrfalcon, specifically — a fierce predator in the High Arctic — drawn by Hash, who can be found at @thehashishin.
Talking Cedar Baltic
8.9% ABV
Talking Cedar is southwest Washington’s first tribally owned and operated craft brewery. The 35,000 sq. ft. distillery-brewery-restaurant in Grand Mound is owned by the Chehalis Tribe. Their Baltic hits the nose with dark barley, campfire, rich fudge, dark soil, and licorice, followed by notes of raisin, dark brown sugar, espresso, and coffee-roasted bitterness on the back end, which keeps it balanced, bready, dark, and just short of burnt.
Browar Fortuna Komes Porter Baltycki
9% ABV
In 1889, Polish entrepreneur Władysława Rabsk founded the steam brewery Browar Fortuna in Mirosławiec, a town in Wałcz County, West Pomeranian Voivodeship, Poland. After 10 years the brewery was sold on an auction to Stefan Golcz but quickly changed ownership to Antoni Duchowski. The Nazis were the next owners when they nabbed it in 1939. After the war, the brewery was nationalized under the control of Wielkopolskie Zakłady Piwowarskie. In 1995, the heirs of Antoni Duchowski reclaimed it, Two years later, after modernization, Browar Fortuna began pumping out beers again, including Komes Porter Baltycki. The Baltic porter undergoes a slow fermentation at low temperatures in open vats, coupled with at least three-month long maturation, for dark roasted malt, peat, and a whisp of smoke on the nose. Flavor follows the nose with some sweetness from chocolate and coffee adding to the flavors.=
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