Name: Feral Brewing Co Smoked Porter

Style: Porter

Country: Australia

ABV: 4.9%

Beer description: Feral Brewing Co is an iconic West Australian brewery. There most famous beer, of course, is their Hop Hog, but they have other great beers. Let’s find out if Feral Brewing’s Smoked Porter is another one of their great ones.

This beer has a moderate amount of head that dies down pretty quickly to leave a couple millimeters of a very light brown head staying on top. This beer is dark: it’s pushing black. It’s nice to see a beer this dark. The head of the beer, still having some brown to it, but being a very light shade of the colour, compliments the rest of the beer well. It’s just good looking and enticing, the way a beer should be.

Feral’s Smoked Porter smells sweet and sticky. There’s a good amount of smoke in the smell as well of course: it’s sweet and smoky. The smoky aromas are not of peat that one might find in a whisk(e)y , it’s a woody smoke of hickory and barbecue. While the aroma of the beer is pretty much just sweet, sticky, and smokey, it’s not dominating. The aroma is actually pretty subtle.

For a porter, this beer is actually quite light in body, but also quite smooth despite the smokiness. The sweetness and smoke of the flavour give this beer an all in all barbecue sauce taste, but not as rich or overpowering. Don’t worry, it’s not like drinking a bottle of barbecue sauce! Sitting in the mouth though, the beer thickens up a bit and becomes nice an chewy. The darker malts in this beer do add the typical dark malt flavours like coffee and chocolate, but they’re pushed down by the more dominant smoke. These flavours compliment without coming through completely to ruin the point of this beer.

This beer is purposely not terribly bitter, and the hops in it are well balanced to just add a few interesting tidbits of melon and lychee. Any bitterness in this beer is quickly overcome by general burnt flavours and a mild sourness.

The Feral Brewing Co Smoked Porter is on the list of great beers by Feral. Some may not care for it because of the smokiness, but, if you’re a big porter drinker who likes the more burnt flavours, this would be a good one.

Check out other porter reviews.

See other reviews of Feral beers.

Editor’s note – the style name porter is an interesting one, and there’s quite a bit of history to it. We did the research to learn all about the history of the name porter.