Most beers that advertise vanilla do not say where the vanilla came from. Fonta Flora Brewery names two places.

Periodic Motion [Vanilla] is a 12 percent barleywine-style ale aged in bourbon barrels and conditioned on Madagascar and Papua New Guinea vanilla beans. Naming both origins is the tell that this is a blend rather than a purchase.

Madagascar grows the large majority of the world's vanilla, and its beans set the reference point - full, sweet and creamy, the flavor most people are picturing when they use the word. Papua New Guinea is a far smaller origin, and its beans are generally described in different terms, fruitier and more floral. Putting the two together is the same instinct that produces a blended whisky or a house coffee: use one for the body everyone recognizes and the other for the top notes that make it specific.

What makes the choice interesting in this particular beer is that the barrel got there first. Oak contains vanillin naturally, and bourbon is required by law to be aged in new charred oak, which means a freshly emptied bourbon barrel is about the most generous vanilla delivery system in brewing. Adding beans to a bourbon barrel-aged barleywine is not introducing a flavor that was missing. It is leaning on one the wood had already started, then pushing it somewhere the wood could not reach on its own.

Periodic Motion is a recurring beer for the brewery, and Fonta Flora marks its variations in square brackets - a double barrel-aged version has come through the same series. The bracket works like a version number on a base recipe the brewery keeps returning to.

It arrives in a dark bottle under a white capsule, with a cream label carrying a drawing of a rabbit skull beside a vanilla orchid in bloom. Poured, it is opaque black-brown under a thin tan head.

A barleywine at this strength, sweetened by both barrel and bean, would sit well against something salty and firm - aged cheddar, or dark chocolate with sea salt - where the salt can cut the residual sugar rather than compete with it.

Periodic Motion [Vanilla] is available starting September 11 through Fonta Flora's wholesale accounts, with availability questions directed to local account representatives.

Editor’s Take

Here is a coincidence nobody planned and everybody should enjoy. Madagascar vanilla is sold on the world market as Bourbon vanilla, after the island where it was first cultivated at scale, back when that island was called Bourbon rather than Reunion. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Kentucky. So this beer contains bourbon vanilla, aged in bourbon barrels, and the two bourbons in that sentence are entirely unrelated to each other - one an Indian Ocean island, one a whiskey, both trailing back to the same French royal house by different routes.

Worth remembering too that vanilla is the second most expensive spice on earth after saffron, and the reason is labor: the orchid's natural pollinator does not exist outside Mexico, so every bean in commercial production anywhere else was pollinated by hand, flower by flower, in a window of a few hours. Fonta Flora put that orchid on the label next to a rabbit skull, which is a properly Appalachian way to illustrate a luxury good.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.

Periodic Motion [Vanilla] Blends Madagascar and New Guinea Beans

Most beers that advertise vanilla never say where it came from. This 12 percent bourbon barrel-aged barleywine names two origins, Madagascar and Papua New Guinea, which is a blending decision rather than a sourcing note.

Source & Editorial