Porter Tasting

Splittin' a bomber with the lady. Dating advice from the Lonely Boner: find a girl who loves beer as much as you do.

Cheers! Here's the tasting of the vanilla porter before it become vanilla-ified. Using the Appearance/Smell/Taste/Mouthfeel/Drinkability scale:

Look: black body with murky, dark red highlights when held to the light. Despite an aggressive pour, the only head that forms is a thin, beige layer of bubbles. It retains for a few minutes but not doesn't stick around very long and there's not much lacing either.

Smell: chocolate really stands out and is rather potent. Malty sweet with a hint of resinous hops.

Taste: follows the nose nicely. Chocolate really stands out in the taste with a hint of coffee, some malty sweetness, not much in the way of hops except a lingering hop bitterness from the Chinook hops in the aftertaste.

Feel: really where this one falls short. A bit too thin and a bit too flat.

Drink: spot on. If the carbonation was better this would be a very sessionable brew.

Overall, there are some things I like and some things I do not like about this one. First, the positives:

• The flavor is spot on and exactly what I was hoping for with my porter. Even if the vanilla doesn't quite work out, the regular porter is very impressive to me. I would reach for this one before I would reach for many commercial examples of the style.
• It looks quite good aside from the head.

Things I don't like:

• no head to speak of.
• too thin in body. Now, I know it isn't a RIS and isn't supposed to be that thick, but I still expect a bit of creaminess from my porters.
• A bit under carbonated

I think both of these are due to the problem of the stuck mash leading to a longer rest than I intended. The carbonation issue is something I'll worry about when I have a bottle from the rest of the batch because I didn't really bottle this with normal methods.

Blog Posts About This Beer

Vanilla Porter

Cheers!