Blending Red Wine With Porter Ale: A Crossover Beer Worth The Buzz?

(NPR) - If you're a beer lover and your significant other tends more toward wine, is there a drink that can satisfy both of you?

How about a beer-wine mashup, combining two of mankind's oldest beverages?

"To me, it's kind of the magic in the middle," says , sommelier and owner of the D.C. restaurant The Red Hen.

Zutant has partnered with his friend Jeff Hancock of craft brewery to blend a chocolatey porter ale with a touch of Bordeaux.

"It really has distinct red wine characteristics, as well as beer" ones, says Zutant as he sips the frothy, dark-brown mashup out of a wine glass. It has rustic notes that Zutant describes as "pruney" (as in prune), almost like dried cranberry.

"It's fun stuff, it's weird stuff, and I think it works," Zutant says.

The idea came to Zutant when he learned that winemakers usually toss out the tannin-rich sediment known as lees. A waste product of winemaking, lees are basically the stuff that falls to the bottom during the fermenting process: bits of grape skin, seed fragments and dead yeast cells.

It's of no use to the winemakers. But as the saying goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure.

Zutant got the lees from friends at two Virginia vineyards, and , then set about figuring out how best to blend the stuff with beer.

During my visit to DC Brau, where Zutant and Hancock make their wine-beer fusion, Hancock showed me how they pour the lees, which is viscous, almost like cough syrup, through a funnel into the top of an old wine barrel. The beer and the wine lees then age together inside the barrel.

The result? The tannins, which give red wine its complex flavor, are pulled into the beer.

And how do customers respond? When John Vorhees and Alicia Boyce sat down to dinner at The Red Hen a few weeks back, they were intrigued.

"You like wine and I like beer," said John Vorhees, talking to his wife. "So this could be it!" — something to satisfy both of them. And after tasting it, Vorhees proclaimed, "I'm sold."