It's banana beer!

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.