Let’s recap, shall we?
You've got your bacon vodka, bacon cupcakes, bacon bourbon, bacon lube (don’t ask), bacon salt (handy for seasoning the rare product that isn’t already bacon-flavored), Grub Street declaring that bacon’s jumped the shark, Grub Street later getting meta about bacon jumping the shark (as in, declaring bacon over is so over), last month's wake-up-and-smell-the-trend piece in Details that ran with the coverline “IS BACON GOD?” in which it's posited that “Suddenly, it seems, a serving of bacon delivers a deeper meaning." (And we're not even getting into stuff like the bacon explosions or the BA-K-47.)
And now, inevitably, ridiculously and somewhat tragically, comes news that the generally gimmick-averse hopheads over at Brooklyn Brewery are experimenting with bacon beer. Specifically, beer infused with bacon fat.
Brewmaster Garrett Oliver started by smoking some mash in the same room as a batch of Benton’s bacon, he told Diner’s Journal, at which point all hell broke loose:
...he’s been infusing a brown ale with the flavor of Benton’s bacon fat through a technique known as “fat washing.” [...] Oh, and the bacon-fat-infused ale was also aged in bourbon barrels, because bourbon and bacon go together like, um, beer and bacon.
Eventually, the barleywine with the bacon-smoked malt and the bourbon-aged, bacon-fat-infused ale would be blended to create one monstrously bizarre beer.
“One of two things will happen,” Mr. Oliver predicted. “Either this will be the most amazingly disgusting thing you’ve ever tasted in your life. Or I shall rule the earth.”
What's left of it, that is.
