The Goose Island Brewery, founded in Chicago in 1988, has been experimenting with aged beer. Combine a ‘living legend’ in beer historian Ron Pattison and brewing icon Derek Prentice, armed with a 150 year old Truman’s brewing book, and you are bound to have an unusual project. The result is Obadiah Poundage, a London porter, with origins from the 1840s.
Goose Island representative.
The base is Chevalier malt, a favourite malt in use for a century until the 1920s. Traditional porter recipes use brown malt but, unusually, the malt for this brew was custom made in the USA to reproduce what might have been in use 180 years ago. It’s slightly smoky and has five to six different colours, which would have been not untypical of that time. At the launch of the beer, at Goose Island’s pub in Shoreditch, it was explained that brown malt was popular because it provided a counterbalance to London’s acidic water.
The beer was brewed in 2018 and was massively hopped, as was the style for British beer at the time in question, using 50% of hops grown at that time. The resulting beer is rich and dark with a tart aroma. Notes of caramelised fruit, treacle and plums on the palate are followed by a slightly dry roasty finish with a developing bitterness balanced by a malty sweet character. It has an ABV of 6.5%.
And why the name Obadiah Poundage? It was the pen name of a retired C18th London brewer and one of the topics of his writing was porter, what else! The beer can be purchased from Goose Island’s pub (222 Shoreditch High Street, E1 6PJ) or from the BeerHawk agency.
Christine Cryne
Editor’s note: older CAMRA members may recall that Obadiah Poundage was the by-line used for many years for a column in What’s Brewing. I’ve no idea who wrote it. The original Obadiah published a letter in the London Chronicle dated 4 November, 1760 arguing for a rise in the price of beer. The letter was reprinted in various journals, including the Gentleman’s Magazine and has since been used by beer historians as the basis of information about porter. You can find the letter in full on Wikipedia. It’s worth a read