What do you do when you walk into a bar that calls itself a beer bar and you don’t know much about craft beer? That’s a reasonable thing to wonder before you push open the door at The Porter on North Highland Avenue in Little Five Points. The short answer is: you sit down, look around, and ask whoever’s behind the bar what they’d put in front of a person who usually drinks wine or cocktails. They will give you a straight answer.
The Porter has been open since 2008, which in Atlanta bar years is practically geological. It occupies a corner building that’s been a bar for longer than most of its current regulars have been alive. The room is dark in the right way — wood, low light, shelves of bottles you’ve never heard of — and it splits into a main bar on the ground floor and a more intimate upstairs space that fills up on weekends but never feels like a club. There are no televisions competing for your attention. The music is audible but not demanding.
The beer list runs somewhere between 700 and 800 bottles and cans at any given time, plus around 40 taps. That number sounds like it should be overwhelming, and the first time you see the menu — a bound document, organized by style and region — it kind of is. But the staff is unusually good at narrowing things down. Tell them you like something tart, or something dark and warming, or something you can drink three of, and they’ll point you somewhere useful. That’s not a small thing. A lot of bars with long beer menus leave you to figure it out yourself.
The food is better than it needs to be. The kitchen does burgers, sandwiches, and a rotating handful of snacks, and they all hold up to the kind of serious drinking this place encourages. The Proper Burger — a double patty, American cheese, pickles, onions, special sauce — costs around $14 and arrives in good shape. The Brussels sprouts have been on the menu long enough that they’ve become a legitimate local habit. If you’re there on a cold night, the pretzel with beer cheese makes the case for staying longer than you planned.
Prices for beer run from about $5 for something simple to $20 or more for rare bottles, with most drafts landing between $7 and $12. The menu marks each option clearly enough that you won’t accidentally order something you don’t want. Happy hour runs weekdays from 4 to 7 p.m. and takes real money off the tab.
The crowd at The Porter is mixed in a way that feels natural rather than curated. You’ll see industry people on slow weeknights, couples on dates, regulars who’ve been coming since the early days, and visitors who ended up there because they were walking through Little Five Points and followed the smell of something good. It doesn’t have the performative cool of some Atlanta bars. It’s just a well-run place that takes its subject seriously without making you feel like an outsider if you don’t.
If you’ve been to Little Five Points for the record stores or the vintage shops and walked past The Porter without going in because you assumed it was too serious or too specialized, that assumption was wrong. It’s a neighborhood bar that happens to know more about beer than any neighborhood bar you’ve probably visited. Go on a weeknight, sit at the bar, and let whoever’s working steer you somewhere.
