Bourbon Barrel Porter

I promised details on the Bourbon Barrel Porter in an earlier post, so here you go…

I got this kit from the ever reliable Northern Brewer. I was looking for something different and this beer really fit the bill. They took an already interesting porter, and made it even more intriguing with the addition of bourbon, and bourbon soaked oak cubes.

The base porter recipe is something I hadn’t seen before. The fermentables consist of 2lbs of Wheat dry malt extract (DME) and 6.3lbs of Dark liquid malt extract (LME). Your basic homebrew usually only contains 6.6lbs of LME so you know you’re already making a more potent than average beer. Another interesting twist was that the recipe called for boiling only the Wheat DME for the full hour and then adding the Dark LME for the last 15min of the boil. Normally you’d boil the whole batch for the full hour. I’m not sure what the purpose of this was, but it all worked out just fine in the end.

Of course, the real fun of this kit came from the Bourbon Barrel part. Included in the kit were two ounces worth of toasted oak cubes. On brew day I threw these cubes into a 32oz growler and then added 16oz of Makers Mark Bourbon. I let them soak for a week while the beer fermented in the primary, and then combined the porter, oak cubes and bourbon into the secondary fermenter. I then let the beer age in the secondary for a month before bottling.

How’d it all turn out? The beer has a nice aroma with a hit of the bourbon sweetness, and a little edge of the oak. This translates right into the taste as well. The bourbon and oak flavors are definitely present, but in a nice subtle way. Between the wheat malt and the bourbon, the beer is very smooth but with a definite weight to it. It tastes best when it has warmed up a bit and if you drink it in small sips so that you can savor the flavors. All in all, it’s a really excellent beer.

Alcohol-wise, I’m not really sure what the percentage is in this beer. I know I should take initial and final gravity readings, but I haven’t done that in years. I put the fermentable numbers for the base porter into an online brew calculator and it came up with a theoretical final alcohol content of 6.3%. However, the bourbon adds a bit of a twist. 16oz in a 5gal batch doesn’t sound like much, but my quick calculations say that this translates into .4oz of bourbon per pint of beer… which is about half a shot. While I don’t know what the final figure is I can personally attest that after a pint of the beer,you’ll definitely have a nice buzz.