Tears

Peanut Butter Nutter Porter (aka Dirty Rotten Porter)

A Tale of Whoa

And now for the tears portion of the saga.

I cried, and I'm not even human. Am part peanut though, mebbe.

Peanut Butter Porter. I'd had this one on my list for a while. I'd heard about this powdered peanut butter some brewers had used in their beers and wanted to try it out. Commercial peanut butter is loaded with oil, which will kill the head on a beer and leave an oil slick in its place -- not really the most aesthetically pleasing thing. If you want to use it, you can leach out the oil by spreading it on thick paper towels and leaving it for a few days or weeks. What? No good, man!


The powdered stuff was supposed to be every bit as peanut buttery, but without the oil, and also without preservatives and sodium. Also ready to use right from the jar!

Ready to use, right from the jar

Not only was there the primordial lure of peanut butter goodness, but also I thought it would be a good impetus to brew a style that I'm not all that into, a porter. Win-win! I worked up a pretty good looking recipe, got my yeast starter on the stir plate, a 3rd generation batch of this Burton yeast that I thought would work well -- a bit on the malty sweet side which should go well with the peanut butter, which is actually not sweet. Brew day was smooth sailing; mashed, boiled, chilled, and I pitched my yeast. Then I smelled the flask the yeast was in.


Sour. With a twang on the end. Uh-oh.


It smelled "Belgiany", which if you've ever tried Belgian beers can be good or bad, depending. This one was a clean, pungent, sour smell though. Obviously something wild had gotten into the flask before it went on the stir plate, but I thought, hell maybe it will end up being one of the "good" wild yeasts, and not one of the nasty ones.

This little bastard right here

I waited to see. It showed lively fermentation for the first 24 hours, and then slacked off to nothing. I pulled a sample to test it for attenuation (how much the yeast had fermented it) and to taste it. From my notes:

"Horrendous, charred rotten meat/burnt tire smell and taste with copious fine carbonation that dissipates immediately."

It was easily one of the vilest things I've ever tasted or smelled. It was unmistakably ruined. The second batch destined for the drain in less than 5 months. Devastation.


I moaned to my brew buddies about it, how bad it was, how the fermentation had stalled. Surprisingly, I got a loud chorus of folks exhorting me to let it go and see if it would straighten itself out. I agreed to do it just to see what would happen, but privately I had no hope for this beer.


About 10 days later I took another sample. I was surprised to see that it had attenuated fully, i.e. my wild and wooly yeast had done the job of the healthy Burton yeast (I supposed) they had supplanted. I tasted it, and got almost none of the black-plague-like aromas and flavors I was getting before. I say "almost" because it was still far from a proper porter; it was still sour and off-tasting. But it was a much cleaner, healthier kind of sour. I decided to bottle a few before I dumped it--seen here:

Dirty rotten porter

But dump it I did. And with no remorse.


My thought on it was: 1) it's not what I wanted, but 2) in spite of that, it may have become something good, or at least may yet, with a few months bottle conditioning, however 3) I won't be able to reproduce the fuckup that led to this something good, if in fact it turns out to be that way, BUT 4) I can always harvest the yeast from one of the bottles if it does turn out good after six months or a year of conditioning, and maybe have my very own in-house proprietary sour yeast culture...AND 5) there is no five yet. We'll just wait and see.


I bottled eight of these freaks, and I'll crack one open in a month or two to see how it's doing. I hope my brew brethren are right. I'd love nothing more than to join them at some point as they sit around the ancestral fire, telling stories of batches gone horribly wrong, only to return, phoenix-like from the fires of perdition to be the magnum opus of the dude's brewing career. But we'll see.


Needless to say, I'm saving the powdered peanut butter I ordered for a future, more "reliable" porter. You'll be the first to know about it. But much sooner than that you'll want to know about the new gear.


Keep you posted!