Hey – we got some beer mail filled with homebrewed beer. We get homebrew from time to time, been doing this for a while since this is our homebrew exchange number 25! Let’s see what we have on the menu for this go around.

Dessert Porter Tasting Notes

Brian from Ohio sent us this beer and he didn’t give us too much information about the beer on purpose. He wanted us to evaluate from what we could taste and smell.

The name of the beer was MVP Baltic Porter. The MVP stands for Maple, Vanilla, and Peanut Butter.
8.8% ABV
Bottled on April 16, 2016
33.5 IBUs

Although the beer was brewed and bottled two years ago, the fragrance was strong when we opened it up. The aroma was filled with all kinds of sweet things. There was a big note of peanut butter banana sandwiches on the top of the beer with some notes of maple in there.

In the flavor, each of the named components were there. We could taste the maple, vanilla, and peanut butter in that order. Funny, the beer was not oily so we think Brian used peanut butter powder in his beer.

I found there was a little hotness from the alcohol in the beer but drinkable for 8%.

The mouthfeel was medium and delivered a sweet dessert punch. The only real issue we had with this beer was that it beer lacked any roastiness from the malts.

Tips for Next Time

We felt like this beer was a tremendous start to what could be an extraordinary beer. From what we could tell, he got all of his flavor components to present themselves. Now, Brian needs to figure out how to bring some malt flavors to the beer. It could be an addition of some brown malt or maybe a small amount of black patent malt. Some of the sweetness from the maple syrup could be replaced by some lower colored caramel malts.

Overall, a beer that left a strong impression and we hope he keeps working on it.

BREW ON!