The concept: Whenever I think of the ideal dessert beverage,
I think of stout; that's the jumping off point for this beer. It's easy to pair a rich,
creamy stout with a chocolate cake or mousse to create a brilliant
complementary dining experience. I recognize the value of pairing beer with
food to enhance the quality of both, but the "easy" way doesn't
exactly excite me as much as painstakingly crafting creative beers.
With that in mind, I brainstormed a concept that I find
fresh and exciting: banana cream stout! The idea is to create a full-bodied,
richly textured beer, vaguely evocative of a milkshake, and then load it up
with an explosion of banana flavor, making an ideal pairing for either
chocolate-y or fruity desserts, or just as a standalone experience.
The execution: The tools at a brewmaster's disposal are
many and varied. Often there are many ways to arrive at the same solution. Such
is the case with banana.
Funnily enough, the principle chemical responsible for
creating the flavor of bananas is also produced as a by-product by certain yeast strains. These
banana esters are a prominent flavor component in many German style wheat
beers. In fact, I've heard dunkelweizen referred to as "banana bread
beer" which is not terribly far off from what we're doing here.
Using a German yeast strain that produces lots of banana esters
is only part of the equation here though. This is where I get to bust out my
tool belt. After all, it wouldn't really be a banana beer without bananas,
would it?
As far as I know, using actual bananas is not often
attempted (at least not outside of Africa) by either professional or home brewers, possibly because it's not
strictly necessary, and it can be quite messy, but I’m not going to let
something like that stop me. In order to get some further value out of the bananas
beyond the flavor component, I'll be extracting their sugar content as well (via the same technique used on pumpkin in many pumpkin beers).
When a banana ripens, a similar process to malting occurs:
amylase enzymes within the banana convert the fruit's starches into simple
sugars. This why the flavor of a banana is not entirely synonymous with the
banana ester compound - because the sweetness is inseparable from other
elements of the flavor profile. Mashing the bananas in with the malt will help
complete the conversion process, extracting the sugars from the bananas into
the wort.
I’m also baking the banana beforehand, hoping to
crystallize some of those sugars in order to add to the overall
complexity of the beer. I'm hoping this will be somewhat akin to the
banana version of caramel malt. I could be trademarking the term
"carabanana" any day now.
