Never heard of it but im a big fan of cooking with bacon in non traditional ways. I recently had a bacon jelly that was to die for. I say go for it! Maybe would go well with spicy hops like target, fuggles, or tuttnanger. And maybe spiced with peppercorn or corriander
have a friend that wants to try this as well. I am curious of any responses as well. Biggest problem we see is adding bacon to primary would hinder fermentation cause of the grease. we were thinking of something added to the secondary
You could fry the bacon then boil it for a little while and then take the water to near freezing. The grease can then be scooped off the liquid and the bacon flavored water can be used. In theory of course, I've never tried this for beer but I do it lots of time to remove fat from cooked foods.
The reason for posting this is I'm thinking of doing an experimental batch, extracting the bacon flavor using the fat-washing process (create an essence of bacon by washing bacon grease with vodka)
Just trying to find others who may have already tried this.
Made a bacon beer with cooked and dried pieces of bacon in the boil and dry baconed in the primary. Base beer was an amber ale.
Not the greatest beer, but not bad.
Gotta limit the fat to avoid issues with head retention.
Another option would be the vodka trick, or using rauch malt.
There's a lot here when I hit search, but you don't have to bother now, just look at the similar threads box below, and they will lead you to the similar threads box of THOSE threads. VVVVVVVVV
Bacon and beer threads on here are like zombie theads, pretty plentiful.
I've found several threads here, and brewed a bacon beer once before using the dry-porking method. It was a rauchbier base, which was helpful in getting that bacony goodness to really come through.
Rauchbier is a Marzen base, so it has a nice malty backdrop too, which was very pleasant. Still took me a bit to polish off the keg though.
There was an article a while back in BYO. I do believe that they put the Bacon in the secondary. There as something that they did with it t remove most of the grease. Although, it did not effect head retention.