My roommate and I have been brewing for a little over a year now, we've made your basic IPA's, and pretty basic red ales, session IPA and a few others. We have never made a porter and we want to make one to enter into a local small town beer and wine contest. Any tips about what kinds of malts, hops, yeast and any other ingredients that make good porters. We want to use and infuse bacon into the beer as well, perhaps if anyone has used bacon in their own beers whether they dry hopped with it or not. Any all tips/ideas are welcome and appreciated. Thanks and cheers everybody!
There is a lot of room for variation in designing a porter. I think the best ones use some amount of brown malt, but that's personal preference. Here's the grain bill from one of my favorite Robust Porter recipes (5.1 gallon batch)... 9 lbs Crisp Maris Otter 1 lbs Crisp Brown Malt 1 lb Briess C-40 0.5875 lbs Simpsons Chocolate Malt (430 L)
You can also get a pretty meaty flavor from smoked malt, rather than bacon. In particular I think Briess's cherrywood smoked malt has a very bacon-y aroma, though I've never brewed with it. (I made a smoked porter using Valley's cherrywood smoked malt, and it was also meaty, but a little more like ham than bacon.) I've never used peat-smoked malt, but from what I've read it is not what you are looking for. If you can't get Briess, maybe try Weyermann (or Valley, although again, its character was more ham than bacon). A little bit goes a long way, I would try using it for maybe 10-12% of your grain bill (15-18% if you want the smoke flavor to dominate, which you probably don't). Just use it as you would a typical base malt. Should be much easier than using actual bacon. In terms of yeast, I think the attractive thing about Wyeast 1968 is that it flocculates out really well, and it is appropriate for the style. But you probably can't go wrong with any number of English yeasts, including Nottingham if you want to stick to dry yeast. And something like US-05 would also work. Speaking personally, I would not emphasize the hops in a bacon-y porter. (Others may disagree.) I would go with a standard English hop like East Kent Goldings and use a light hand.
You are taking about a bacon'ish Porter but you are describing a Rauchbier. For research purposes drink a Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier as it has the flavor/aroma of a fresh fried pound of bacon. To duplicate this you use smoked malt as minderbender recommended. But you don't want cherrywood, rather the authentic beechwood smoked malt from Bamberg (Weyermann Smoked Malt). This is the gold standard of smoked (bacon) beer. Here's what goes into it. Don't let me discourage you, but this is a lager and will require techniques you haven't used yet. You need to ferment in the mid-50s and the smoke (bacon) doesn't appear until after many weeks of lagering (the colder the better). It's possible to use the smoked malt as a specialty grain in a conventional ale, but it will fall short of the real thing.
Bacon, bacon, bacon. Putting bacon into things can go too far. Bacon ice cream? Gross. Putting bacon into beer is like putting smoke flavoring in beer. Not a taste I'm going to acquire. You just need to know when to say when.
Great recommendations so far! I'll pass along info that a fellow homebrewer did to get a bacon flavor (not using smoked malt): - Cook up a pound of bacon until it's black - this way you'll get all the grease/fat/flavor - Reserve the fat and while still liquid, pour in an equal volume of bourbon (or vodka if you don't like bourbon flavor) - Freeze this mixture - Scoop out the solidified fat - Freeze again, and repeat scoop This should leave you with bacon infused liquor of your choice. You can pour this into your already-fermented beer. As I mentioned, I have not done this procedure. My friend's brew was fantastic though.
I have a very similar recipe for porter that has won a few medals. Instead of buying Brown Malt I make my own and it adds a lot of character to the finished beer. I take a pound of Maris Otter, or how ever much I am making, put it on a baking sheet and put it in the oven at 350. Open the oven every 5 minutes or so and give a good stir of the malt to stop burning. I do this for 25 to 30 minutes or until the whole house smells like grape nuts Works great. Good luck OP!
I like pale chocolate malt in a porter. My only advice on bacon is cautionary. You probably don't want to hear it.
Are you doing ag or extract, because I have a damn good recipe for a porter (sorry no bacon) but it is extract with stepped grains. It was actually a black butte clone and my first attempt was ok so I added .5lb of midnight wheat to the second attempt and that turned out really good. Second one tasted like founder's porter and only 4.8%.
I'm not a porter recipe expert so I'm going to pass on handing out advice about specific porter recipes. However, I am a an expert* on the taste of porters. Watery + smokey + porter = blech. Don't make a smokey porter unless it's got the body of Miss October and Miss January combined. *self-proclaimed
