With the lark

On Sunday nights, I like to drink a bottle of dark beer. Somewhere in the maelstrom of pre-Xmas shopping, I found a bottle of "Plum Porter" that fitted the bill. 'Porter' was the dominant English beer from the mid-18th to mid-19th century, developed by London brewers as a superior replacement for the 'mild' and 'stale' (meaning 'matured') ales that had been the main drink. Extremely dark, with some unfermented sugar creating sweetness, and a lot of hops adding bitterness, it was the robust drink of working people - especially those carrying messages and packages all over the city, the porters

Of course there were a range of styles and flavours, and of alcohol content. The strongest were referred to as 'stout' porter. Eventually the 'porter' was dropped and the two were treated as if they are different beers. The strongest stout then became 'double stout' - that's marketing for you. After a century of dominance, tastes changed; innovative brewers blessed with rather special water in the Burton-on-Trent area developed a new pale ale, initially for the export market, particularly to the British in India, and India Pale Ale (IPA) was born

Stout, as a mainstream beer, has survived as Guinness (interestingly, I've heard Irish people colloquially call it 'porter') but most other brands became eclipsed and, until it was revived recently by micro-breweries, porter had all but disappeared. I assumed that 'plum' porter was just a fancy name for a style but got a rude awakening when I tried it - it has plum cordial or flavouring added after the brewing process, like the much-derided lager-and-lime of my youth. Honestly, it was a bit much for me - a sweetish beer with added fruit syrup - like drinking a crumble, more than a beer - but I can tick the box

Our brewery brews stouts, both a double stout and a Guinness-like keg beer that they call a 'Merula stout'. Keg beer is a process of injecting carbon dioxide into the beer, in a metal barrel (the keg), to make it effervescent. The process got a bad name in the 1960s and 70s, when monopoly brewers flooded the market with dreadful quality, cheap keg beer, almost destroying the British craft beer industry (three cheers for Camra, who campaigned to save it). In the hands of craft brewers, keg is a legitimate technique to produce a quality product, adding brightness to the flavour

The brewery claims the recipe for Merula stout dates from 1899 but I don't know if that was its name then, but it's an imaginative choice that rolls off the tongue and sticks in the memory. Unlike plum porter, merula is not a flavour, just a name, it's the species name of the common blackbird - Turdus merula. This one was in the shadow of the brewery tower at dawn, bright eyed - a little surprised to see me open the curtains, and checking I didn't have a hangover