BREWERS, LONDON AND HOME-BREWED PORTER. 383 



porter brewer, who purchased, at a low price, the 

 guile, to start among his beer. Of late years, the 

 conscientious wine-dealers have used a new and dan- 

 gerous drug in their white wines. 



Good ale or beer, however, is too heavy to dilute 

 full flesh meals, and perhaps inferior in that respect, 

 to porter, to which again, good small beer or water is 

 a superior and better diluent ; strong ale being in its 

 proper place, consorts afterwards with the dessert, or 

 accompanies a light supper, or the noon luncheon, 

 after fatigue. It is moreover due, from an impartial 

 writer, to note that much of the vulgar ribaldry, 

 against the porter brewers particularly, may well, 

 and ought to be spared. So far as I know of the 

 porter to be had at present in the metropolis, it is a 

 brisk, full-bodied, and pleasant beer, which will bottle 

 well, referring particularly to that of Messrs. Barclay 

 and Co., Whitbread, and Reid. With the profits 

 of these great and opulent traders I have nought to 

 do, but to remark my little doubt that the patriotic 

 grumblers thereat would not, in their own case, be 

 too modest to accept them from a bountiful public. 



Having acknowledged my unacquaintedness with the 

 peculiar method of brewing PORTER, I cannot, I be- 

 lieve, do better than take as a text-book, a small and 

 useful tract on the subject, written upwards of thirty 

 years since, by Mr. Samuel Child, a brewer. He 

 assures us, on his own experience, that as good porter 

 may be brewed from a single peck of malt, as from 

 a brewing on the large scale ; and that which ap- 

 pears to me yet more strange, another writer avers 

 as much with respect to proportional equality of 

 quantity, as of quality. For its singularity, I give 



