The Profoundly Puzzling Alice Porter

North Bar in Leeds is one of our favourite beer bars ever. Awesome line up, laid back atmosphere and evangelically passionate staff, all put together with a punk-rock snap. Recently North Bar Manager and craft beer legend Matt Gorecki got married (Congratulations Matt!). And what better way to spend your stag weekend than at BrewDog? And what better way to mark your wedding with a special beer you brewed just for the occasion?

Consequently, at the start of November 2010, Matt and his 5 best friends headed up to Aberdeen. On Friday night they enjoyed a private beer dinner at Musa before heading up to the Brewery bright and early on Saturday to do some rock ‘n roll brewing. Matt and the guys were going to brew a beer specially for the wedding and named after his bride to be, Alice Porter.

They worked on the recipe and put this together with our brewer Graeme then lugged the malts from the malt store and got brewing! The beer style and recipe all came from Matt, we pretty much just helped with some of the technical aspects and ratios.  We made sure they did everything when it came to brewing the beer too. What they saw as a cool weekend, we saw as cheap (ok, free) labour. They loaded the mash tun, dug out the mash tun, meticulously weighed out the hops and even cleaned the brew kettle and fermentation tank. Our Graeme pretty much chilled out like the tea drinking vagabond he is.

Alice Porter is a 6.2% Porter with loads of dark malts, a twist of vanilla and an unusual blend of English (Bramling X) and Japanese (Sorachi Ace) hops. We only brewed a 15HL batch back in November and it ended up only being sold on cask and keg at North Bar and at BrewDog Aberdeen.  The response to the beer was phenomenal.

Since people liked it so much, we have decided to brew a few more batches of it. We will be brewing this beer as a limited edition seasonal in January, February & March 2011 and it will be available on bottle, keg and cask. Any beer designed for the Baltic should do a good job of keeping beer drinking scamps warm during this icy cold winter! The beer will be available on our online shop from late January.

Here are the specs:

ABV: 6.2%

OG: 1059

IBU’s: 50

Malts: Marris Otter, Dark Crystal,

Caramalt, Chocolate Malt,

Roast Barley

Hops: Bramling Cross, Sorachi Ace

Twist: vanilla pods added during the boil

Few beers are shrouded in secrecy like the porter; a beer whose roots are said to be punctuated by hurried footsteps along cobbled London streets and swirls of mist from atop the River Thames. Decloaked and radically reinvisaged, BrewDog's Alice Porter is a 6.2% sacred union of one 300-year-old recipe and two cross continental hop varieties.

A delicate mirage of chocolate, red fruit and burnt sugar, let Alice Porter whisk you away to a forgotten time juxtaposed against the backdrop of modernity. And then, before you know it, she's gone... tumbling down a rabbit hole into the same obscurity that first caught your attention.

Leaving but the question – who or what is Alice Porter?