Brooklyn Brewery

Updated, 2:25 p.m. | There seems to be no end of experimentation and obsession with all things bacon, and people, both breathing ones and the animated variety, seem to like it.

There’s chocolate-covered bacon, the Bacon Explosion (heart attack in a bundle), bacon ice cream, bacon jam and bacon vodka.

People, wistfully, have been fantasizing about a bacon beer.

Brewers are obliging. Garrett Oliver of the Brooklyn Brewery has created limited quantities of bacon beer. And in Chicago, David Burke’s Primehouse at the James Hotel is serving bacon beer brewed by the executive chef, Rick Gresh, as part of a beer pairing menu. In Washington State, the Front Street Ale House on San Juan Island began offering a bacon beer on tap in spring of 2008.

Mr. Oliver said his beer, called Reinschweinsgebot, is a mix of two different creations that “get baconed by different methods.”

One of the creations is inspired by a technique used to make the bacon-infused bourbon at PDT, a bar in the East Village. Mr. Oliver mixed brown ale, which had been aged for nine months in bourbon barrels, with bacon fat. But then he froze the fat into a solid and filtered it out.

“In the end,” he said, “you don’t have any fat.”

The second is beer is made out of a malt that was smoked in the same room with some of the bacon made by Allan Benton, a maker of smoked meats in Tennessee. Then the two complement each other.

“The first is a bacon-fat-flavored aroma and the second beer is bacon-smoked aroma,” Mr. Oliver explained.

So what is the assessment of bacon-flavored creation?

“We think the beer is really tasty,” Mr. Oliver said. “It would be excellent with pork belly. It would be more interesting with monkfish.”

But he only made 20 cases, one of which will be served to diners at a dinner at Per Se in Midtown on Friday night.

As for the other 19 cases? “We never intended it as something we intended to sell,” Mr. Oliver said.

It seems like the opportunity for the public to try might be the Per Se dinner. The price? $350 plus gratuity. (Ouch!)

For that amount of money, you could buy a round-trip plane ticket to Seattle, then travel to San Juan Island. There, intermittently, is a bacon-flavored pale ale on tap at the Front Street Ale House, where it sells anywhere from $1.25 for four ounces to for $8.25 for a liter.

“We did it as a novelty not knowing what would happen with it,” said Warren Combs, brewmaster at the San Juan Brewing Company, who created the beer.

The beer is made by suspending oven-dried bacon in a pale ale that has already been brewed.

“Every time I take it off tap,” Mr. Combs said, “people talk about it and so I put it back on.” He plans on making a darker version soon.

To advertise the beer, a yellow pig sign is in the window with the words “bacon beer.”

The pig may be the most photographed celebrity on the island. Mr. Combs said, “During peak season over 100 people a day take a picture of the bacon beer pig.”