Home Brew Forums - Maple Bacon Porter

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Maple Bacon Porter

:drunk:A friend asked me to make a bacon beer. My reply,"You cough up the funds, I'll try anything once."

Has anyone experimented with bacon and maple flavoring. I was thinking a Porter would make a good platform but how much pig and maple to add is what I'm not sure about. Any Idea's?:confused:

I've used maple in a brew already and didn't like the results. I would think bacon would have too much grease that would carry through to the final product, regardless of how well you drain the grease. A lot of fat in bacon that will kill the head.

I used bacon in a porter, it came out quite well all things considered. The bacon flavor is VERY strong and it's salty so drying on the palate. I'd go with a low sodium bacon next time around. It was tough to drink 12oz for 2-3 months after it was in the bottle but it got easier after a few months. When it was young it was quite gross, I thought I'd wind up dumping it, but it mellowed over time.

Here's my notes:

Quote:

8oz bacon added to 1gal of porter on 11/15 - at bottling on 11/21, bacon was extremely overwhelming. blended bacon portion (1gal) with 1gal of regular porter for 2gal of bacon porter

I cooked the bacon in the oven on parchment paper and then when it was just barely short of burnt I pulled it out and smushed it between paper towels. I kept pressing paper towels on it until no more grease came off. This process broke the bacon into small pieces. I 'dry porked' the beer by putting the bacon in a muslin hop bag then added it to secondary.

I had no issues at all with head retention, that beer had a nice sustained head on it.

Thanks for the info. Good to know the head retention wasn't an issue.

bake the bacon in the oven until it is quite crispy to get rid of the fat for the most part and then dry hop with it.

the best way to infuse bacon flavor is to cook the bacon, eat the bacon, but save the fat. To infuse the bacon flavor into the beer, you could pull a small portion of the beer post fermentation or better yet, just use some vodka or your liquor of choice to make a extract of sorts.

What you do is you take the warm bacon fat, strain it so you arent getting any bacon bits or pieces, and add it to the liqour. The alcohol will strip the bacon flavor and infuse it into the liquid. Stir or whisk it around for a couple of minutes then cover it and let sit at room temp for a couple of hours. Then put it in the freezer overnight. What happens is all of the fat will rise to the top and form a fat ring. Carefully remove that ring and then restrain the liquid through some cheese cloth or coffee filters to make sure you get the cleanest, fat free liquid you can. When you taste the spirit, it will have that smoky bacon flavor infused. You dont need much. Maybe 1-2oz of bacon fat for an entire bottle of booze. So if you are only using a couple of ozs of liquor to make the "extract", you wont need a lot of fat.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dirty_martini (Post 2825564)

Have you actually done this?

I strained then soaked the fat in some whiskey for a few days then froze it and strained out the fat. It tasted pretty bad and I didn't wind up using it. I was planning on using it if I needed more bacon flavor but if I do a bacon beer again I won't even plan on making a bacon fat tincture again, I considered it a failure.

Just use bacon flavoring, seriously.

I am a soapmaker (soapwreck.com, shameless placement) and you need to render fat away from any of the meat before it will keep. Even then meat by itself will not keep long. For example, beef jerky you make at home will only keep for a few weeks unless you use preservatives. Any non rendered fat will foul after too long, and the rendered fat will foul but it will take a lot longer.

However, keeping it cool does help. But adding meat into beer just sounds like a bad idea. There was a thread about the possible pathogens that can be on processed grain, etc. Something to stop people from worrying about getting sick from beer as it can only harbor like 2 pathogens. But this just makes me think of canned food that's gone bad.

I am not slamming your or your friends idea. Frankly bacon+anything = automagically better. But somethings are best left to imagination.

Or just eat bacon and beer.

Quote:

Originally Posted by timbudtwo (Post 2825827)

How can the bacon introduce pathogens if it's cooked then placed into beer, which is a sealed environment dominated by yeast?

Quote:

Originally Posted by bovineblitz (Post 2826015)

How can the bacon introduce pathogens if it's cooked then placed into beer, which is a sealed environment dominated by yeast?

How can canned food that has been sterilized and sealed develop bolutlism? It is uncommon, but it happens.

And I am not saying that it will happen and your chances of such are so incredibly minute that you probably have nothing to worry about. But it is still something that is not supposed to be in beer being in beer. Check out old threads about people trying to make butter beer.

Here is one of revvy's homilies on beer borne pathogens:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Revvy (Post 1390190)

If there was stuff that could live in beer and kill you, the human race would have died out a hell of a long time ago! If something toxic could come from our homebrewing, it wouldn't be a legal hobby!

I came across this from a pretty well known and award winning homebrewer railing against a fellow brewer (it was on one of those "color coded" brewboards where they are a little less friendly than we are.) I just cut and pasted it and stuck it in a file...here it is.

It's important to remember that one of the reasons we have beer today (one of the oldest beverages in existence) is because it was made to be drunk in places where drinking the WATER was deadly....By boiling the wort, adding hops (which is an antiseptic), changing the ph, and pitching yeast, you killed of any microorganism that good be harmful.....in fact the third runnings of the brewing process was fermented at an extremely low gravit 1-2% ABV, and it was called "table beer" or "Kid's Beer" this is the stuff that people drank with meals...it was their water replacement, like Iced tea or soda pop...because again the fermentation process insured thatit was safer than the water.

He talks about it here;

YouTube - Ancestral Ale: Brewing In Colonial America

So please, please, please, I can't stress this enough....don't fear you beer!!!

If something bad could happen, then it would NOT be a legal hobby.....

Our beer is really the same thing as commercial beer...it's the exact same ingredients and process.....it's not like there are two kinds of malts and hops..ones for "real" beer and one for "homebrew" :rolleyes:

Hopes this info helps....maybe show it to him.

:mug:

BTW: http://www.torani.com/sites/default/...ucts/Bacon.png

Yes its real.