Ingredient Focus: Bacon
Cured pork is not just for breakfast any more. Try adding a bit of comforting umami and smoke to your next brew with these tips.
BACON, THE BELOVED BREAKFAST staple, regularly turns up in beer these days, usually paired with some maple syrup and coffee. On its own, however, bacon can provide rich flavors that build over the course of a pint so long as you choose your meat wisely.
The idea for the Bacon Brown Ale that Alec Stefansky, brewmaster at Uncommon Brewers in Santa Cruz, California,
cap–mushroom makes actually came from ice cream. He’d make a candy ice cream with maple, bits of bacon, and crunched up stroopwafels. And it was the bacon paired with the sweet that started him down the ale path.
Brewing with bacon isn’t as simple as going out to the grocery store, picking up some strips, and dropping them into your recipe. “It’s a challenging thing because if you put the word bacon into the name, it’s great for a selling point, but you create expectations,” says Stefansky. “One of the big challenges we’ve had is that it doesn’t become a great big grease bomb or overwhelming. The bacon flavor in our Bacon Brown Ale is drinkable, with umami and smoke, but it builds as you drink; it doesn’t knock you out right away.”
Working with a butcher, Stefansky gets a whole pork leg, skin on and bone in, that has been rubbed, smoked, and cured “until it’s almost jerky,” and then he adds that the boil (about a pound per barrel at the brewery) where it rehydrates and adds that familiar smoky meaty flavor.
“If I can get some trotters I like to throw those in, too.”
Stefansky previously brewed with pork belly but stopped “because the fat ends up causing fermentation issues, and you wind up with chunks of fat when you’re trying to crash, cool, and package.” When you have a higher proportion of meat to fat, you get the flavor folks are looking for, and by adding it to the boil, you’re “functionally making a stock that just happens to be fermentable.”
Plus, there are the leftovers. After fishing the meat out of the kettle, the brewery usually has a taco party, inviting people to come over with their preferred toppings and piling tortillas with meat that just perfectly shreds from the bone.
While you’re most likely to encounter stouts when it comes to the bacon treatment, Stefansky says he prefers a brownale base because of the roast character that isn’t too overwhelming. He does add a touch of smoked malt to his base and prefers to use Hallertau Hersbrucker hops for their spiciness and fruitiness. Subtlety goes a long way, and the goal, he believes is to have a beer that builds on the flavors with each sip and one that you can have more than one of, if you so choose.