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Church Brew Milk Stout

Church Brew Works
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Beer style: Stout - Milk / Sweet
Ref: ratebeer.com May2024

Common descriptors are
Porter was first recorded as being made and sold in London in the 1730s. It became very popular in the British Isles, and was responsible for the trend toward large regional breweries with tied pubs. With the advent of pale ale the popularity of dark beers decreased, apart from Ireland where the breweries of Guinness, Murphy’s and Beamish grew in size with international interest in Irish (or dry) stout. "Nourishing" and sweet "milk" stouts became popular in Great Britain in the years following the Second World War, though their popularity declined towards the end of the 20th century – apart from pockets of local interest, such as Glasgow with Sweetheart Stout, and Jamaica with Dragon Stout. Originally, the adjective "stout" meant "proud" or "brave", but later, after the fourteenth century, "stout" came to mean "strong." The first known use of the word stout about beer was in 1677, the sense being that a stout beer was a strong beer. The expression stout porter was applied during the 1700s to strong versions of porter, and was used by Guinness of Ireland in 1820 – although Guinness had been brewing porters since about 1780, having originally been an ale brewer from its foundation in 1759. "Stout" still meant only "strong" and it could be related to any kind of beer, as long as it was strong: in the UK it was possible to find "stout pale ale", for example. Later, "stout" was eventually to be associated only with porter, becoming a synonym of dark beer. During the end of the nineteenth century, stout porter beer gained the reputation of being a healthy strengthening drink, so that it was used by athletes and nursing mothers, while doctors often recommended it to help recovery. Milk stout (also called sweet stout or cream stout) is a stout containing lactose, a sugar derived from milk. Because lactose is unfermentable, it adds sweetness, body, and calories to the finished beer. Milk stout was supposed to be very nutritious, and was given to nursing mothers. In 1875, John Henry Johnson first sought a patent for a milk beer, based on whey, lactose, and hops. Milk stout was not very widely distributed before Mackeson’s Brewery acquired the patents to produce it in 1910. Since then its production has been licensed to other brewers.