Name: Bellhop
Brand: Abandoned Rail Brewing Co.
Availability: InStock

A bellhop carries luggage in a hotel. A porter carries luggage nearly everywhere else, and the beer style borrowed its name from the second group. The usual account traces porter to the street and river porters of 18th century London, who drank a great deal of it. Abandoned Rail Brewing Co. has closed the loop by naming its porter Bellhop.

The address suits the joke, whether or not anyone planned it. Abandoned Rail sits alongside the Kettle Valley Rail Trail on the Naramata Bench, on a corridor where the trains stopped running long ago. Railway porters were part of that world too.

The beer itself has been away and is now back. The brewery frames it plainly: an old favourite returns, malty and medium bodied, with a smooth mouthfeel and notes of roasted coffee and cacao. Dark beer weather is coming back, the newsletter says, and so is Bellhop. It pours at 5.8 percent ABV.

The specification worth noting is the bitterness. Bellhop carries 60 IBU, which sits above the range most porters land in and well above what the word smooth usually signals. Roasted malt supplies its own edge in a beer this color, so a hop charge at that level is not filling a gap. It is adding a second layer on top of one that was already there. That is closer to how porter was originally built than the softer, sweeter direction the style has taken in recent decades.

Bellhop is pouring at the Penticton taproom in 8 and 16 ounce servings, with four-packs available to go.

Editor’s Take

Sixty IBU, on a beer the brewery itself describes as smooth. Those two things are not in conflict, but they are certainly in conversation. Porter began life as a beer hopped firmly enough to survive a long wait in a wooden vat, and the modern version has largely let that go, drifting toward chocolate and a soft landing. Bellhop keeps the bitterness in the room. Roast and hop bitterness are quite different animals that happen to arrive at the same part of the palate, and stacking them the way this one does is an old-fashioned move wearing a very tidy black and gold label.

And I cannot let the name go. The brewery is named for a railway that stopped running, sits on the trail that replaced it, and has called its porter after the hotel employee who carries your bags to the room. Every element of that sentence is about somebody hauling something to a platform. I would take a glass out to the swing in the photograph and think about it for a while, which I suspect is roughly the intended use.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.

Bellhop Is a Porter Named After Another Word for Porter

A bellhop and a porter do the same job, which is the joke sitting on the front of the can. Abandoned Rail's returning porter runs 5.8 percent with a notably firm 60 IBU behind the roast.

Source & Editorial