Vanilla Bean Porter Keeps the Vanilla to a Hint at the Finish

Farmington Brewing has a vanilla porter on tap that barely mentions the vanilla. The brewery puts it at a hint, and puts it at the end, which is a narrower target than it sounds.

Style: American Porter
Release Date: 2026-09-17
ABV: 5.8%
Farmington Brewing Company (Farmington, MI)

Vanilla is an easy ingredient to overuse. Farmington Brewing Company has used very little of it.

The Farmington, Michigan brewery has Vanilla Bean Porter pouring now at 5.8 percent ABV, part of a run of beers it added to the taproom list this week. The brewery's description of it is one sentence long: a dark, medium-bodied porter with a hint of vanilla at the end.

Both halves of that sentence are doing work. The vanilla is framed as a hint rather than the point of the beer, and it is placed at the finish rather than the opening. That is a more specific target than a vanilla porter usually sets for itself.

The brewery's tap list puts the beer at 40 IBU, which is a firm figure for an American porter. It suggests the middle of the beer is carried by roast and hop bitterness rather than by sweetness, leaving the vanilla somewhere to land on the way out instead of competing for the whole pour.

Medium body is the other note worth keeping. Porters in this range can be built thin enough to drink quickly or thick enough to sip, and Farmington has aimed between the two at a strength that still reads as a full pint rather than a nightcap.

Vanilla Bean Porter is on tap at the brewery's Grand River Avenue taproom in downtown Farmington.

Editor’s Take

The whole beer is in one word, and the word is hint. Vanilla has spent the last decade as craft beer's loudest available lever, the thing you pull when a dark beer needs to become an event. Pastry stouts, dessert porters, adjuncts stacked until the glass tastes like a bakery case. There is nothing wrong with any of that, and plenty of it is very good, but it does mean the category has quietly agreed that more vanilla is the only direction vanilla goes.

So a brewery describing its own vanilla porter as having a hint of vanilla at the end is making a small, deliberate act of self-restraint, and then declining to make a fuss about it. That is my favorite kind of brewing decision. It also happens to be the harder one to execute, because vanilla is not a subtle ingredient and getting it to sit at the back of a beer rather than the front takes more care than simply adding more.

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.