Melby Dick's Great White Porter
Bluegrass Brewing Co. - East St. Matthew's

Kudos to the brewery for this off-the-wall effort - this from the brewery:

"Call me Ishmael. An original experimental beer from BBC. The idea spawned from a growing trend in the rest of the brewing community making out of style traditionally brewed beers. Other, dare I say, less original breweries, have caught on to the old making a light beer style dark game. They are making Black Bitters, Black IPA's, heck we even made a Dark Pilsner. But that is easy, all you have to do is throw in some dark roasted barley into your "regular" light colored beer recipe and viola dark or black "whatever". The real challenge is to make a dark beer light, and that my friends, is exactly what we have done. You may ask how would you accomplish such a monumental feat, bleach,didi 7,Oxyclean? No on all counts. We had to use a little creativity and some ingenuity. Think about what flavors are in a porter. Caramel malt sweetness, chocolatly and roasty flavors, and even some notes of dark fruit all these are gleaned from a dark roasted barley malt. So we took out all the dark malt and recreated all the flavors with lighter ingredients. We used a combination of lightly kilned barley, French Avo matte, caramel pilsner and Canadian honey malt to give a caramel malt sweetness. We pureed and added golden raisins to lend some notes of dark fruit. We then added roasted chocolate nibs in both the whirlpool and conditioning tank to give a chocolatey flavor and aroma. And finally a touch of brewed espresso from Heine Brothers to lend a bit of roastiness."

Unfortunately, the creativity did not translate into an enjoyable beer. Not at all porter-like. The raisins seemed to be the biggest flavor contribution, giving the beer a sweet, raisin flavor and the malt was more lager-like than porter. A noble effort that just didn't work out.