In the most recent  issue of BYO (May-June 2009), we published a collection of stories grouped together under the title "Breakfast Served Anytime." The idea was to highlight common breakfast food ingredients — such as oats, corn grits, coffee and maple syrup — that could be employed in brewing. And of course, we profiled a couple "wacky" ingredients as well, breakfast cereals and bacon. (Yes, bacon. We got the idea from a brewpub brewer in Washington who did this.)  

I have most of a 10-gallon (38-L) keg of porter left, so I decided to "dry pork" a small amount of it and make my own bacon beer. In the BYO article, we recommend baking the bacon — as the brewpub brewer did — to let the fat drip off. However, I'm allergic to following instructions, so here's what I did: 

I fried a few pieces of bacon over medium heat in a frying pan to different levels of crispness, then tasted them. I decided that I preferred the flavor of slices that were just barely crisp. I then fried 12 pieces this way, turning them often to avoid burning and removing them from the grease when they were just starting to firm up. (They were still slightly limp when I placed them on the paper towels, but they were crisp once they cooled. I cut the full bacon slice in half, because I was using a fairly small frying pan.) Here's what the bacon looked like after cooking and setting on paper towels for awhile to soak up the grease:

After changing the paper towels a couple times, I took a kitchen shears and cut off any parts of the bacon that were obviously fatty and not crisped. I didn't try to eliminate all the fat, just the areas that were the most lightly cooked. Then I put all the bacon strips into a sanitized 1-L soda bottle, as shown here: 

Next, I filled the bottle with porter, as shown here: 

I am going to let this sit for a few days, refrigerated and under CO2 pressure via the use of one of my Carbonator Caps, then use this as a concentrate to blend back to a larger volume of porter. 

It's possible that a layer of congealed pork fat will form on top of this bacon extract. If so, it will be easy to remove. The bacon did kill the porter's foam as I poured it into the bottle, but I'm hoping the final blended beer will have a head. 

If I like the bacon flavor imparted to the beer, I have an idea — smoked bacon porter. Bacon is typically smoked with hickory and German rauchmalz (smoked malt) yields a bacon-like smoky character to rauchbiers (smoked beers). So, I'm thinking of brewing a porter with enough rauchmalz (or home hickory-smoked malt) to accentuate the bacon flavor. I have few "regular" beers planned before I do this, however.