Tuesday, October 14, 2008

So... the vanilla porter ended up being a very good porter, but with a slightly excessive amount of carbonation and not much vanilla flavor. Disappointing. (It still is good porter, though... and the carbonation, while being more than I expected and a little unruly when first opened, doesn't really affect the drinking enjoyment at all...)

I am speculating that during the bottle-conditioning, the yeast didn't quit after the priming sugar and continued eating the natural vanilla sugars. (or maybe it ate the vanilla first.) At any rate, the vanilla flavor was gone and the carbonation was more than expected.

Something to consider... Since I am using less than the standard dose of priming sugars, maybe I do not need to wait the standard full 2 weeks for conditioning...

Late Edit: I posted a question about this to the AHA (American Homebrewing Association) email board. The first response I received was that it was most likely not the vanilla bean but a wild yeast that was at some point introduced to the beer... possibly from the beans themselves...