Bacon and beer. Two food groups. Two con­cepts. Two things that go together. Together, tra­di­tion­ally, in the same way that milk goes with cereal. But together, in this post, in the same way that cocoa goes with rice bubbles…

I thought bacon jam was the pin­na­cle of culi­nary inno­va­tion, and then Brook­lyn Brew­ery is putting together a spe­cial brew…

“It’s a spe­cial malt that was smoked in the same room with some of the bacon made by the leg­endary Allan Ben­ton. “It’s almost ter­ri­fy­ing how much the malt smells like bacon,” Mr. Oliver said.

He plans to brew about 15 gal­lons of bar­ley­wine with that malt. In the mean­time, he’s been infus­ing a brown ale with the fla­vor of Benton’s bacon fat through a tech­nique known as “fat wash­ing.” Oh, and the bacon-fat-infused ale was also aged in bour­bon bar­rels, because bour­bon and bacon go together like, um, beer and bacon.

Even­tu­ally, the bar­ley­wine with the bacon-smoked malt and the bourbon-aged, bacon-fat-infused ale would be blended to cre­ate one mon­strously bizarre beer.

Sounds deli­cious. Unfor­tu­nately it prob­a­bly won’t ever be made avail­able for pur­chase…

“Unfor­tu­nately, the answer is nyet. Brook­lyn Brew­ery made 21 cases of Rein­schweins­ge­bot for spe­cial events, which isn’t enough for even lim­ited com­mer­cial dis­tri­b­u­tion. And don’t expect it to go wide any­time soon. Oliver tells us that “the tech­nique we used — which comes orig­i­nally out of the per­fume indus­try — involves trans­fer­ring an aroma from a fat to a liq­uid with­out actu­ally trans­fer­ring the fat itself. Then to com­pletely remove the fat and have none left in the liq­uid, it was very tricky.” How­ever, he says he’s open to find­ing a way to sim­plify the process so that ple­beians can one day enjoy bacon beer, too. Fin­gers crossed.”

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

Read Nathan's 3799 articles.