At a time when sales of such beers as IPA and golden ale seemed unstoppable, it looked at first that the return of dark beer was an aberration. But it was backed by hard facts – and big bucks.

Guinness said last year that one in 10 pints of beer poured in London was its stout, and to emphasise the point, it announced it was building a new brewery in Covent Garden in central London. It marks an astonishing reversal of fortune. In 2006 Guinness closed its brewery at Park Royal in North-West London due to falling demand. Now demand is booming, and Diageo is rushing to cash in with a new plant that will produce special beers for the London area – regular versions of Guinness will continue to be brewed in Dublin.

A number of British brewers have jumped on the fast-moving black bandwagon, emphasising that the origins of porter and stout lie in this country in the early 18th century, not in Ireland.

It became a phenomenon, with demand creating such big commercial brewers in London as Barclay Perkins, Truman and Whitbread. It picked up the name of porter as a result of its popularity with the army of porters working in the docks and markets in London.

The strongest version of the beer was called stout porter, later shortened to just stout. Large amounts were exported to Ireland and brewers there, notably Arthur Guinness in Dublin, hurried to brew it for their domestic market.

Now it’s back on the British brewing agenda. Several sizable regional brewers launched versions of stout in 2022, with Black Sheep and Hall & Woodhouse reviving an esoteric version known as milk stout. The finished beer has a creamy palate, quite distinct from the roasted malt character of traditional stout.

Family brewer McMullen of Hertford launched a porter in autumn 2022, initially to celebrate the 25th CAMRA beer festival in St Albans, but it will go into its pubs in the Home Counties and London. In Croydon, Anspach & Hobday introduced London Black Porter in 2021 and it met with such acclaim that it’s now the brewery’s biggest brand. The draught version is on sale in pubs stretching from Devon to Scotland.

At a time of general gloom in the beer world, it can be said with a smile that’s there’s dark at the end of the tunnel.

This is an extract from Roger Protz’s feature on the stout revival, which will appear in the first edition of CAMRA’s Good Beer Yearbook due out in February 2023 and is available to pre-order here.