Whitbread Brews Its Final Porter at Chiswell Street

On September 9, 1940, Whitbread brewed its final batch of porter at the Chiswell Street Brewery in London. The brew took place while air-raid sirens sounded during the Battle of Britain, bringing nearly two centuries of porter production at the brewery to an end. Whitbread produced the porter as part of a parti-gyle alongside stout rather than as a separate full-scale brew. Only sixteen barrels of porter were produced from the batch, reflecting how far demand had fallen from the nineteenth century, when porter had formed a major part of Whitbread’s output. The event did not mark the complete disappearance of porter from Britain: other London breweries continued producing beers under the name into the 1950s, and Whitbread itself briefly revived porter decades later. It nevertheless marked the end of porter as a regular product at one of the breweries most closely associated with the style’s industrial rise.