Mocha Porter - A Friendly Rogue

Porters and Stouts often get lumped together in a group called darkandheavy, misleading potential drinkers about its diversity. As I already mentioned in my recent report on young's chocolate stout, dark color does not automatically translate to heaviness, high alcohol, or high calories. This neat list at the shapefit.com website reveals that Guinness, Anchor Steam, and Tsingtao all have the same number of calories (153 kcal/bottle). Of these three, Guinness has the least alcohol by volume - only 4.2%. Porter gets its name, not from any sort of portly quality, but from its popularity among porters--transportation workers--in eighteenth century London, as the Alström Bros, founders of the Beer Advocate, explain.

Porters may be very heavy, or not heavy at all. The point is, don't judge a beer by its name, or worse, its color!!

Brewed in Orgeon, the Rogue Mocha Porter is a little bit of a trickster of a beer. Full of smokey, dark, and robust flavors, it seems like a heavy beer. But it's not. The initial sharpness of its flavors seem to defy food pairings, but it turns out to be an excellent food beer. 

It's all about the malts in this beer. With 9 different kinds of malts, they color and flavor this fun beer. One Woman tasted burnt sugar, moist tobacco, charcoal, a bit of dark toffee, and of course, mocha. With very little carbonation, it pours to create an airy crumpet-like head the color of a café au lait that quickly disintegrates. With all the burnt flavors, it would seem like the beer would be much heavier, but this is the beauty and the surprise of this porter. After the initial hit of flavors, it doesn't linger. It's not sticky-sweet either, so it doesn't fight with food. A little amazed about how well this porter slipped into the meal, One Woman enjoyed this porter with a meal of roasted beets with crushed almonds on a bed of greens tossed with a honey dijon vinaigrette, a grilled cheese sandwich (yeah, baby!!) made with a mild Petaluma Creamery cheddar and sautéed onions, plus a little spot of apple sauce on the side.


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Musical pairing: Igor Stravisnky's Rite of Spring, a riot-causing, very HEAVY piece that premiered in 1913. The selection tonight is dedicated to those still craving the weighty, heavy and dark of the primordial pagan ritual sacrifice. It's also probably one of One Woman's favorite works for orchestra. Congrats to David Milnes and the UC Berkeley University Symphony Orchestra for an awesome performance of the piece tonight!