Friday, March 09, 2018
It's a Coffee Beer World
In the chicken-or-egg scenario, the answer is clear: Craft breweries began to grow exponentially before craft coffee roasters did. But now that the local business segments are on similar trajectories, there may not be a better partnership in the alcohol industry.
What's more, coffee beers have become one of the most studied and talked-about trends among the many booming styles in craft beerdom. From a panel discussion at January's Big Beers, Belgians & Barleywines Festival to Saturday's upcoming Cool Beans Beer & Coffee Festival at Ratio Beerworks in Denver, the offerings are being pored over as much as they are being poured — and beer drinkers are the beneficiaries.
Once a pairing that seemed only to be made straight up with stouts and porters, coffee is appearing now in everything from lighter ales to sours. And brewers are adding lactose, dextrose and spices to make your coffee beer feel like it too is served with sugar and cream, or with the appropriate ingredients to label it Mexican Coffee.
The idea of adding coffee to beer is not a new one, noted John Holl, editor of Craft Beer & Brewing magazine at the panel he led at Big Beers in Breckenridge. But the way it's being used now make shock the sensibilities of those brewers who first experimented it with it in the early days of what then was called the microbrewing movement.
One needs look only at Carton Brewing of New Jersey, where owner Augie Carton makes offerings of 12 percent and higher meant to simulate the common ways locals take their java — "regular coffee" with cream and two sugars and Italian-style with a dash of amaretto. The resulting beers — Regular Coffee Imperial Cream Ale and Caffe Caretto — use lactose, dextrose, anise and licorice to mimic those tastes, and they taste more like strong Belgian ales than a classic porter with roast in it.
More locally, Epic Brewing, long known for the coffee it blends perfectly into its Big Bad Baptist barrel-aged imperial stout with cocoa nibs, has diversified its offerings with its Son of a Baptist and its Coffee Cream Ale, not to mention offshoots like its ridiculous Triple Barrel Big Bad Baptist. And while the brewery's earned its reputation by going for the extreme, there may be no beer in Colorado in which the coffee owns the flavor quite so much as the deceptively smooth and drinkable Son of a Baptist imperial stout.
Oskar Blues also has brought alcoholic life to the party with is Java Barrel-Aged Ten Fidy, which uses the barreling and the coffee to mellow the beer in a slight but necessary way and give it a sweet, surprisingly easy body for a 12.9% ABV beer.
And then there are the wide range of beers that are adding coffee to their spicy Mexican stouts, creating an even more complex version of a beer that tastes already like a distinctly foreign drink. Crazy Mountain's Rum Barrel Aged Spanish Coffee Stout is a prime example of this.
Not everything blends seamlessly with coffee, to be sure. Jordan Schupbach, Epic director of brewing operations, noted during the Big Beers panel (pictured above) that he tried to brew a coffee beer with a lager yeast and it didn't turn out. Left Hand brewhouse manager added that he used a light-roasted coffee with a more light-bodied amber ale and "it just turned out to be not a good beer."
And brewers continue to push the taste barriers still, finding offerings that pair with coffee in newer and more intriguing ways.
Ratio's festival, running from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, will feature a coffee session IPA, a coffee chocolate rye scotch ale and a whiskey-barrel-aged Irish coffee American strong ale. The event, which aims to show off how many ways coffee can blend with beers to create new tastes, is as much education as it is imbibing.
Sure, the now-old-fashioned trick of blending dark coffee taste with a beer that also is as dark as night still works too. One need only try the Spaghetti Western Imperial Chocolate Coffee Stout, a collaboration between Prairie Artisan Ales and Italian beer maker Brewfist, to sense that.
But coffee beers are growing and diversifying, just as the coffee-roasting industry is. And that's a dark area worthy of having light shone onto it.
In the chicken-or-egg scenario, the answer is clear: Craft breweries began to grow exponentially before craft coffee roasters did. But now that the local business segments are on similar trajectories, there may not be a better partnership in the alcohol industry.
What's more, coffee beers have become one of the most studied and talked-about trends among the many booming styles in craft beerdom. From a panel discussion at January's Big Beers, Belgians & Barleywines Festival to Saturday's upcoming Cool Beans Beer & Coffee Festival at Ratio Beerworks in Denver, the offerings are being pored over as much as they are being poured — and beer drinkers are the beneficiaries.
Once a pairing that seemed only to be made straight up with stouts and porters, coffee is appearing now in everything from lighter ales to sours. And brewers are adding lactose, dextrose and spices to make your coffee beer feel like it too is served with sugar and cream, or with the appropriate ingredients to label it Mexican Coffee.
The idea of adding coffee to beer is not a new one, noted John Holl, editor of Craft Beer & Brewing magazine at the panel he led at Big Beers in Breckenridge. But the way it's being used now make shock the sensibilities of those brewers who first experimented it with it in the early days of what then was called the microbrewing movement.
More locally, Epic Brewing, long known for the coffee it blends perfectly into its Big Bad Baptist barrel-aged imperial stout with cocoa nibs, has diversified its offerings with its Son of a Baptist and its Coffee Cream Ale, not to mention offshoots like its ridiculous Triple Barrel Big Bad Baptist. And while the brewery's earned its reputation by going for the extreme, there may be no beer in Colorado in which the coffee owns the flavor quite so much as the deceptively smooth and drinkable Son of a Baptist imperial stout.
Oskar Blues also has brought alcoholic life to the party with is Java Barrel-Aged Ten Fidy, which uses the barreling and the coffee to mellow the beer in a slight but necessary way and give it a sweet, surprisingly easy body for a 12.9% ABV beer.
And then there are the wide range of beers that are adding coffee to their spicy Mexican stouts, creating an even more complex version of a beer that tastes already like a distinctly foreign drink. Crazy Mountain's Rum Barrel Aged Spanish Coffee Stout is a prime example of this.
Not everything blends seamlessly with coffee, to be sure. Jordan Schupbach, Epic director of brewing operations, noted during the Big Beers panel (pictured above) that he tried to brew a coffee beer with a lager yeast and it didn't turn out. Left Hand brewhouse manager added that he used a light-roasted coffee with a more light-bodied amber ale and "it just turned out to be not a good beer."
And brewers continue to push the taste barriers still, finding offerings that pair with coffee in newer and more intriguing ways.Ratio's festival, running from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, will feature a coffee session IPA, a coffee chocolate rye scotch ale and a whiskey-barrel-aged Irish coffee American strong ale. The event, which aims to show off how many ways coffee can blend with beers to create new tastes, is as much education as it is imbibing.
Sure, the now-old-fashioned trick of blending dark coffee taste with a beer that also is as dark as night still works too. One need only try the Spaghetti Western Imperial Chocolate Coffee Stout, a collaboration between Prairie Artisan Ales and Italian beer maker Brewfist, to sense that.
But coffee beers are growing and diversifying, just as the coffee-roasting industry is. And that's a dark area worthy of having light shone onto it.
Labels: Big Beers, Brewfist, Carton Brewing, Coffee beer, Crazy Mountain Brewing Company, Epic Brewing, John Holl, Left Hand Brewing, Oskar Blues, Prairie Artisan Ales, Ratio Beerworks
