Peanut butter, chocolate. Peanut butter, chocolate. Nice treat, but hoped for more nuance than a Reese’s cup. 3/5 stars.
Peanut butter is an incredible substance. I’ve tried other nut and seed spreads, but nothing has ever come close to the creamy and sweet-savory delight of peanuts. I can appreciate the sweetened and hydrogenated versions, but my favorite type of peanut butter is made from nothing other than ground peanuts. It’s a bit thicker than a JIF or Skippy, with more of a gritty texture than the versions with palm oil added. The flavor isn’t as sweet, but the savory qualities are far superior.
The type of peanut butter used in beer, typically, is completely different from what you or I might spread on toast. One problem with dumping peanut butter (or even peanuts) straight into the kettle is the fat. Fat, for one thing, isn’t water soluble. During the process of making the beer, especially if the beer if filtered, nearly all fat molecules will fall out of solution and be removed from the beer. That is a problem for peanut butter, since a portion of the recognizable flavor comes from the peanut oil. Remove that, and you end up with something… less. More on that in a moment.
The other problems stem from what happens to the beer if you don’t remove the fats. Fats will interfere with head retention. That may not seem like a big deal at first, because plenty of places serve beer in dirty glasses or through dirty tap lines. Plenty of people seem just fine accepting a beer of their favorite macro adjunct light lager without any foam topping the mug, right? Of course, there’s the fact that beer is less visually appealing without that pillowy head. And, we eat (drink) with our eyes first. Also, the head is where most of the aerosolized aroma molecules are contained. So, if you want to smell something while you drink, maybe a bit of head would be good. That’s in addition to the fact that a large portion of taste is actually retronasal olfaction (smell coming through your mouth instead of nose, basically). So, having a head on your beer is definitely good, then. Plus, the fats tend to oxidize and make the beer go off pretty quickly. Gross.
Back to the fatless peanut butter. There is a way to do this, and in fact you can probably buy it in your nearest grocery store. It’s peanut butter powder. It’s a fairly good approximation of peanut butter when mixed into a liquid, but a little less messy for brewing. In my experience, however, it doesn’t quite taste the same. There’s something missing, and beers using powdered and defatted peanut butter powder end up tasting more like peanut butter candy than the real thing. It has an artificial quality to it that can easily make the entire beer taste fake. Some brewers are able to get around this by resting the beer on peanuts, or adding enough complexity in the malt bill, or barrel aging. It helps distract from the lack of authentic peanut butter flavor, but doesn’t fix it. Perhaps… perhaps it would be better if peanut butter stayed out of beer.
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A Beer a Day 