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Jenski

Titanic Plum Porter: the origin story that refuses to stay still

I thought this was going to be a fairly simple beer-history rabbit hole.

Titanic Brewery made a plum porter. People loved it. It became famous. Find the launch date, find out what went into it, add a few awards, job done.

That was adorable.

The deeper I went, the less the story behaved. The surviving record gives us an early-2011 beer already turning up in pubs and CAMRA tastings, later memories of a one-off autumn special, competing stories about who pushed the idea through, a recipe explanation involving failed experiments with real plums, a national award whose silver-and-bronze placing exists in two different official versions, and a beer that eventually became so dominant that later sources repeatedly describe it as roughly half or more of Titanic’s business.

The nice neat origin story is not entirely wrong. It is just much tidier than the evidence.

The first problem: when did Plum Porter actually begin?

The earliest dated drinking record I have found puts Titanic Plum Porter at The Paramount in Manchester on 20 January 2011. That record needs one important caveat: the site it appears on allows retrospective diary entries, so the date is evidence that the pint was recorded against 20 January, not airtight proof that somebody published the note online that day.

A cleaner contemporary anchor appears only a couple of weeks later. Liverpool CAMRA’s Spring 2011 magazine describes a women’s beer tasting at The Dispensary where Plum Porter was one of six beers tasted. A later Liverpool CAMRA retrospective pins that event to 7 February 2011.

So by early February 2011, at the latest, Plum Porter was not merely an idea in the brewery. It was being poured and discussed in public.

That immediately makes one later story interesting. Titanic’s current material describes Plum Porter as first brewed in 2011 as a one-off seasonal, while a 2023 interview with Titanic’s head of marketing described it more specifically as a one-off autumn special.

But a beer being drunk in January and February cannot also make its first public appearance in the autumn.

That does not mean the later recollection is useless. It means “the beginning” may be doing several jobs at once: first experiment, first planned seasonal batch, formal launch, marketing push, or the moment somebody inside Titanic later remembered as the real start. The documentary record does not currently let me choose one of those and pretend certainty.

So the safest answer is also the messiest: Plum Porter was publicly circulating by early 2011, and the exact production or launch milestone later remembered as an autumn special remains unclear.

Titanic already had porter in its DNA

It is tempting to tell the story as though Plum Porter invented dark beer at Titanic. It did not.

Titanic Brewery itself dates from 1985. John Pazio founded it, and Keith and Dave Bott took over in 1988. Long before Plum Porter, Titanic was already making porter-labelled beers.

The best documentary trail I have for Last Porter Call currently begins in October 1999, when a Cardiff Beer & Cider Festival list records Titanic Last Porter Call at 4.7%. By 2004, a Danish beer-festival guide lists Last Porter Call at 4.9% and explicitly mentions Goldings hops. Modern Titanic material still presents Last Porter Call as a core, all-year 4.9% cask beer.

There are other porter names preserved in older databases too: Burslem Porter, Port-Er, Queenstown Last Porter Call and Queenstown Porter/Queensway among them. A separate late-1990s Andy Porter story also survives.

What I have not found is the magical missing document saying: “we took Last Porter Call, added plum flavouring, and Plum Porter was born.”

There may be recipe ancestry there. There may not. Shared style, ABV or naming is not enough to manufacture a genealogy.

2011: the beer starts leaving footprints everywhere

Once Plum Porter appears in the record, it spreads quickly.

During 2011 the surviving trail puts it in Manchester and Liverpool, then at pubs, tastings and festivals in places including Oswestry, Newcastle, Bromsgrove, Bridgnorth, Long Eaton, East Bedfordshire and Cardiff.

Two early festival wins are particularly solid.

At the Bromsgrove Beer & Cider Festival, held from 30 June to 2 July 2011, contemporary Redditch & Bromsgrove CAMRA material says festival-goers voted Titanic Plum Porter Beer of the Festival.

Then at the Long Eaton Beer Festival on 16–17 September 2011, Nottingham CAMRA later reported the same result: Plum Porter was Beer of the Festival.

One small research trap is worth recording because it shows how easily beer history grows extra facts. Later lists sometimes make it look as though Plum Porter won separately at “Redditch” and “Bromsgrove”. It did not. Redditch & Bromsgrove is the CAMRA branch name. On the evidence I can actually verify, Bromsgrove is one win, not two.

Claims that it also won Middlewich in 2011, and that it sold out early at Coven Beer Festival, remain plausible later stories but I have not found contemporary result evidence strong enough to promote them to fact.

Who actually came up with it?

This is where the story gets properly human.

Former Titanic brewer Gav Stanton has said that his partner Anneli Baxter was the inspiration behind Plum Porter and persuaded David and Keith Bott to go ahead with it. Baxter was not a random person passing through the brewery: later profiles place her in a senior operational role at Titanic for many years.

Baxter herself has subsequently described the beer’s emergence as something closer to an accidental discovery, while being fairly coy about the precise mechanics.

Then there is George Hawbrook’s version. In a later CAMRA event report, Hawbrook told the story of a promised new beer being overlooked, a porter already having been brewed, “some plums” being added, and the result becoming Plum Porter.

And then there is the later corporate shorthand about a one-off seasonal or autumn special.

I do not think the responsible answer is to blend those memories into one cinematic scene where Anneli walks into the brewery, somebody misses a deadline, a brewer happens to have a porter sitting around, everybody throws fruit into it and history is made.

That would be a lovely story. It would also be partly invented.

The evidence supports several things separately: Baxter was remembered by Stanton as the champion/inspiration; Hawbrook later told a deadline-and-improvisation story; Baxter described an accidental discovery; Titanic later remembered the beer as a one-off seasonal. Those recollections may overlap. The record does not currently tell us exactly how.

Were there actually plums in Plum Porter?

This is the question that sent me furthest down the hole.

Near-contemporary evidence already uses the language of plum flavouring. An East Bedfordshire CAMRA report describing a September 2011 pour calls out rich plum flavouring balanced by Goldings hops.

By February 2012, a Liverpool CAMRA festival programme was more explicit: natural plum flavouring was described as a late addition, again alongside Goldings.

Then, in March 2012, beer writer Tandleman reported a conversation with a Titanic representative that fills in a fascinating technical detail. According to that account, Titanic had tried using real plums, but they did not provide enough plum flavour. The brewery instead used plum essence supplied by a local sweet or confectionery manufacturer.

That does not let me name the supplier. I found one local flavouring company that looks geographically and industrially plausible, but there is no direct documentary link to Titanic, so it stays out of the public claim.

The interesting bit is simpler: the surviving evidence does not support the lazy assumption that “Plum Porter” necessarily meant a load of fruit went into every batch. By 2011–12, flavouring language is already in the record, and the real-plum experiment is described as something that did not give the intensity Titanic wanted.

From curiosity to cult beer

The next few years show Plum Porter gathering momentum without giving us one dramatic “and then it became huge” moment.

A direct bottled-beer review proves bottled Plum Porter by 16 January 2013. By early 2014, one retailer was saying Titanic bottled it only once a year, while pub and festival evidence shows the cask beer circulating more widely.

The drinker-vote trail is useful because it predates the big national award.

  • March 2014: runner-up in the public vote at Winchester Beer Festival.
  • 2014 Wakefield festival: fourth in the drinker-voted Top 10.
  • 2015 Merrie City/Wakefield festival: first in the published Top Performers.
  • 11 August 2015: CAMRA Champion Beer of Britain Speciality Gold.

That makes the 2015 Gold look less like a bolt from nowhere and more like the national recognition of a beer that drinkers had already been repeatedly voting for.

What it does not prove is the common causal story that winning the Gold made Titanic turn Plum Porter into a permanent beer. I have found no contemporary brewery statement saying that.

When did an “occasional brew” become permanent?

This is one of the places where the research got materially better rather than merely bigger.

A dated August 2015 guide still describes Titanic Plum Porter as an “occasional brew”. That same month it wins the national CAMRA Speciality Gold.

By February 2016, bottled Plum Porter is documented on a Waitrose shelf.

Then on 23 March 2016, a Cask Marque trade report on Carlsberg UK’s new Tapster cask portfolio says the number of permanently available cask ales had increased and explicitly names Titanic Plum Porter among the beers newly added to the permanent Craft Selection. The report separately distinguishes those permanent beers from a monthly rotating range that included seasonal choices.

That gives us a much better external boundary than the usual vague “it became permanent in 2015” line:

August 2015: still being described as occasional. By March 2016: being offered nationally as part of a permanently available cask portfolio.

The exact internal Titanic decision could have happened in late 2015 or early 2016. A later specialist retailer says Titanic decided in 2015 to brew it all year round, which is plausible. What is still missing is the contemporary Titanic announcement that would let us put a clean date on that decision.

The 2016 medal that exists in two versions

If you enjoy documentary weirdness, this is the good bit.

Plum Porter won a medal in the Speciality category at the 2016 Champion Beer of Britain awards. The problem is that the surviving documentary record cannot agree which medal.

One official archived Great British Beer Festival/CAMRA release, supported by several judging-day and contemporary sources, gives the Speciality order as:

  1. Binghams Vanilla Stout — Gold
  2. Titanic Plum Porter — Silver
  3. Saltaire Triple Chocoholic — Bronze

But a separate official CAMRA historical-results page, along with other contemporary trade and CAMRA-family sources, gives:

  1. Binghams Vanilla Stout — Gold
  2. Saltaire Triple Chocoholic — Silver
  3. Titanic Plum Porter — Bronze

The split did not vanish immediately. Different versions persisted into later 2016 publications.

I have not found the thing that would solve it: a formal correction notice, revised judging sheet, certificate image or brewery explanation showing how one result became the other.

So I am not picking the tidier version.

The accurate story is that Titanic’s 2016 Speciality placing is genuinely conflicted in the surviving documentary record.

Scale stops being a beer story and becomes an infrastructure story

By this point Plum Porter’s expansion starts showing up in distribution rather than just awards.

Carlsberg’s permanent cask portfolio is one checkpoint. In June 2017, Asda announced a 24-store Staffordshire regional listing for Titanic beers including Plum Porter. By April 2019, Titanic was talking about a Tesco footprint of more than 50 stores across Staffordshire and Cheshire.

The cultural evidence changes too.

In March 2018, Cask Marque writer Annabel Smith described Plum Porter as “somewhat iconic” and said it was the most-requested beer readers had asked her to feature.

Then in Winter 2019/20, a Wirral CAMRA contributor wrote an entire piece effectively complaining that Plum Porter had become too ubiquitous in his local pub landscape — not because he thought it was bad, but because he felt its permanent presence was crowding out other dark ales.

That is only one writer’s view, not a national stocking survey. But as a cultural marker it is rather wonderful. The problem had moved from “will anybody drink a plum-flavoured porter?” to “can somebody please put a different dark beer on?”

One beer turns into a family

Plum Porter did not stay as one cask beer.

The minimum safe format chronology I can document now looks like this:

  • 2011: cask, from the earliest public records.
  • January 2013: bottled form directly documented.
  • February 2016: conventional keg directly documented in a Liverpool CAMRA festival programme.
  • late 2016: Plum Porter Grand Reserve is independently in consumers’ hands by early December.
  • 2017–18: Port Infused Grand Reserve emerges as a distinct festive variant; its exact first public release date remains fuzzy.
  • October 2019: original Plum Porter cans are already in consumer hands, with Titanic brewery news confirming the new canned range that winter.
  • beginning of 2024: strong later evidence places the nitrogenated keg format here.
  • 16 May 2025: Titanic launches 440ml Plum Porter Nitro cans.

That conventional-keg point matters because Nitro is sometimes allowed to swallow the earlier keg history in later retellings. It should not. Plum Porter was being served on ordinary keg years before the nitrogenated format appeared.

The same applies to cans: the 2025 Nitro can is a new format for Nitro, not Plum Porter’s first can.

Ten million pints — sold, served, brewed or pulled?

By autumn 2022, contemporary reporting says Titanic was celebrating having sold more than 10 million pints of Plum Porter.

Later pump-clip material says more than 10 million pints served. Other secondary retellings sometimes switch the verb again.

That sounds pedantic until you are trying to establish a historical milestone. Sold, served, brewed and pulled are not automatically the same metric.

The safest version is therefore the one tied to the strongest recovered contemporary account: by autumn 2022 Titanic was publicly celebrating more than 10 million pints sold.

I found an image-archive page carrying an apparent 2020 date for a 10-million-pint banner, but that archive gives the same displayed date to unrelated images by the same photographer. It is not strong enough to drag the milestone back two years.

The beer that became roughly half the brewery

The later scale claims are striking, but they need their denominators attached.

At a 2019 CAMRA event, Titanic sales executive George Hawbrook was reported as saying Plum Porter was around 60% of production.

A 2025 profile of Anneli Baxter says Plum Porter accounts for over 60% of Titanic sales.

More recent Titanic/trade material puts it at more than half of what Titanic brews.

Those are different years and different measures, so they should not be blended into one audited percentage.

But they do support a strong qualitative conclusion: Plum Porter became Titanic’s defining beer.

That still does not mean it created Titanic from nothing. Roger Protz reported Titanic brewing about 8,000 barrels a year in 2010 — roughly 2.3 million pints-equivalent — before the earliest Plum Porter evidence. Titanic was already a substantial independent brewery.

The more interesting story is that a strange fruit-flavoured porter came to dominate an established brewery that already had scale, pubs, history and a porter tradition of its own.

So what actually happened?

Probably not one thing.

The record I can defend looks like this:

Plum Porter was already being drunk in early 2011. It spread quickly and won festival votes that summer and autumn. Contemporary descriptions were already talking about plum flavouring. Later brewery people remembered its creation differently: inspiration, accident, missed deadline, seasonal experiment. By 2012 a Titanic representative was reportedly explaining that real plums had not produced enough flavour, which is why an essence was used instead.

Drinkers kept voting for it. It won a national CAMRA category in 2015. Somewhere between an August 2015 “occasional brew” description and March 2016 permanent national cask distribution, it crossed into something structurally bigger. Supermarket and on-trade distribution followed. Special editions multiplied. Packaging multiplied. Eventually the beer became so successful that later accounts repeatedly put it at around half or more of Titanic’s output or sales.

And, as often happens when something becomes famous, the origin story got cleaner while the documentary record stayed messy.

I think the mess is better.

It leaves room for the brewery memories without forcing them to agree. It lets the January and February 2011 evidence coexist with the later “autumn special” recollection. It lets Anneli Baxter be important without turning her into a character in a scene nobody actually documented. It lets us say real plums were tried without pretending we know every detail of the first recipe. It even lets a 2016 medal remain stubbornly silver and bronze in different official records.

That is the bit I like about this kind of rabbit hole.

The answer is not always a cleaner story.

Sometimes the answer is a better map of where the evidence stops.

Sources and research notes

This piece is built from a larger evidence ledger rather than one later retelling. The most important source routes include:

There are still unresolved seams — especially the exact internal 2015 permanence decision, the mechanism behind the 2016 silver/bronze split, a few repeated 2011 festival claims, the precise first Port Infused release, and some packaging chronology. None of those currently blocks the main story; they are simply marked as unresolved rather than quietly promoted into fact.