How to brew with peanut butter, according to Bond Brothers

Sometimes it takes a village to brew a beer.

Bond Brothers Beer Company's Pastry Chef stout was made in collaboration with Barrel Culture Brewing and Blending for the latter's grand opening. The imperial stout is brewed with peanut butter, coconut and cacao nibs, but getting the ingredients to work took some help from two other breweries.

"There's some ingredients that it's hard to get good flavors out of them in beer," Bond Brothers' brewmaster Whit Baker told the 919 Beer Podcast. "Peanut butter is one of those. In general most (brewers) don't mess with it because of the oil content in peanuts.

"It kills your head retention, it provides a slickness that you don't necessarily want."

To solve the peanut butter problem, Baker enlisted the help of Josh Wing of Trophy Brewing, who dished out tips from his experience with The King, a peanut butter and banana Belgian Dubbel. But Baker said the original source of the peanut-butter-brewing tips came from the brewmaster at Terrapin Beer Co.

"We used 72 pounds (of peanut butter) in 300 gallons of beer," Baker said. "Josh told me those were the numbers that he was thinking about using next time but had not used yet. So, we went ahead and just went for it."

Head brewer Paul Wasmund said the 12 percent ABV beer used five-gallon buckets of peanut butter to get the finished product. The result is a thick, sweet beer that would do well drizzled over ice cream.

"Its coconut, peanut butter and chocolate," Wasmund said. "It's kind of a candy bar."