was an alcoholic drink, rather like stout,or to use a well known trade name, Guiness.

This is what Pamela Sambrook has to say about the drink in her book Country House Brewing in England 1500-1900(1996):

Porter , originally a mixture of brown,pale and old ales but by the mid eighteenth century made Eentire", was drunk by the landed families, but little brewed by them.

The only record found so far which indicate that porter was brewed in a country house is the iventory in the Lucas papers referring to Wrest Park which inlcude "a portering fatt(vat-JW) that was to stnad in the larder".

Usually porter was brought from the London breweries, families perhaps developing a taste for it during thir stay in town.

Small quantities were then taken back to the country, for records of bottled porter in country cellars are faily common in the early nineteenth century-as at Shugborough and Freeford in Staffordshire.

The Paget household at Beaudesert situated in the same county was one household who had a particlaur weakness for porter consuming it in quantity throughout the decades atteh end of teh eighteenth century

Page 123.

It would seem that JA had an alcoholic treat that night, don't you think?