walnut porter

I don't have a recipe for you but here are some pointers with regards to brewing with walnuts...

roast them in oven first for enhanced flavor
then steep 1 - 1.5 cups of them in vodka for 1 month
use this extract in the bottling bucket or keg for a 5 gallon batch
if you are worried about the oils diminishing your beers head retention, add some torrified wheat or another head builder

 

I still haven't used this method, but here's a pretty detailed description of how to use fat washing to make extracts of fatty/oily foods. You can add the extract to taste right before bottling or in the keg. The benefit over simply soaking the walnuts in vodka is that you actually remove (practically) all of the oil/fat, so you don't have any issues with head retention or fat going rancid or anything like that.

I'm planning to make a peanut extract for an upcoming, slightly ridiculous, chocolate banana peanut stout

 

I'm wondering if you need to worry about beer fat going rancid. The French term ''confit'' comes to mind where a food is cooked in its own fat and then stored with a layer of fat over it to help preserve it. I'd like to think that this is an argument that beer would preserve well either way, but I guess your head retention would still suck.

 

Yeah, I don't know whether there's an actual risk of it going rancid, I'm just repeating what it says at that site. Regardless, it seems like removing all the fat from the extract can do nothing but good.

 

These are tried and true award winning recipes. http://wiki.homebrewersassociation.org/AHA-National-Homebrew-Competition-Winners-Circle

 

I have a recipe for a pretty damn good Oatmeal Porter that I think ANY nut would pretty much send it into orbit.

I do it with some vanilla beans, and it's a favorite, even with my wife who's not a beer drinker. She'll drink a friggin porter, but won't deal with anything else. Odd...

 

Just tried a pecan brown ale that I have carbing up in the keg. I mashed about a pound of pecans that I roasted and kept in brown paper for a day to draw out some oils. Nuttiness is subtle, head retention is great.