Over on By The Barrel, my friend Mark (AKA the Bend Beer Librarian) is hosted next month’s Session and he has announced the topic: Porter.

Yes, Porter—a style topic I couldn’t believe we hadn’t covered in a Session before, but here we are. Mark writes:

I am not talking about your long dead relative’s porter—although you might be—but about all of the variations currently and previously available. Hey, feel free to write about the porter of the future or some as-yet-unrecognized sub-style of porter.

There are English porters, Brown porters, Robust porters, American porters, Baltic porters, Imperial porters, Smoked porters, barrel-aged variants of most of the preceding, and so on.

With as many variations as there are it is hard to believe that porter is perhaps a neglected style. Then again, it did disappear for a while [see Foster, Porter, and others]. Of 14 beer people asked about overrated and underrated styles three of them said porter was most underrated and no one suggested it as overrated in our current market climate. [Yes, I know that is from Thrillist; feel free to ignore it.]

I would like you to sit down with one or more porters of your choosing. Pay a few minutes attention to your beer and then use that as a springboard to further thoughts on the style.

He follows up with a number of suggestions and even includes a copious compendium of resources on the style. So on Friday, March 4, be sure to write up your post on Porter and post to his blog.