Two Brews: Tips from the Pros
They are, personally, my two favorite beverages, and I know I’m not alone here. So, of course it makes sense to combine coffee and beer. It wasn’t too long ago that the addition of coffee meant you were drinking a stout or porter. But today, brewers are finding creative ways to successfully incorporate coffee into all styles of beer. Get tips on how to do it from three pros that know their way around the Joe.
Keigan Knee, Head Brewer and Co-Owner of Modist Brewing Co. in Minneapolis, Minnesota
The idea behind our coffee lager, First Call, is to present a new take on what we perceive a coffee beer to be. For First Call, we are going for big coffee aromas and flavor, while keeping the drinkability and refreshing qualities in a crispy lager. We want to make sure it looks like an ordinary pale yellow lager so the drinker gets that double take/mind blown moment when drinking it. This makes the coffee addition tricky, as you want the beans to contribute flavor and aroma, without turning the beer into a brownish shade.
We add ground coffee beans directly to the fermenter with our dry hopping (DH) cart and use the beer itself to do a cold pressing (instead of cold pressing in water). This hybrid cold press/dry beaning process maximizes flavor and aroma of the coffee while keeping color contribution very low in the finished beer. Also, we keep our dissolved oxygen levels extremely low since we can purge unwanted oxygen out of the coffee by using our DH cart. This process is also highly efficient while maintaining our quality and safety standards.
For this recipe, we add 2 lbs. per barrel (about 1 oz. per gallon/7.5 g per L); of course this is taking into account our custom roast profile and process. We do the coffee addition after the beer finishes lagering, passes diacetyl testing, and is crashed at 32 °F (0 °C) for 12–18 hours. We add the coffee at this stage to get a smoother flavor that has a less roasty acidic bite and fresh ground coffee aroma. Our centrifuge makes removing the coffee extremely easy while spinning out more coffee flavor from the grounds.
Prior to settling on this coffee addition method we tried multiple processes — hanging bags, whole beans, ground beans, and more traditional concentrated cold brew additions. All worked, yet turned out to be a quality issue, safety issue, or just a complete sh*tshow. Hot brewed coffee or adding coffee to the kettle or whirlpool did not give us the flavors we are striving for. Those flavors tend to be astringent and over processed with low aroma in the final beer.
Freshly roasted, high-quality beans are a must in making great tasting coffee beers. We collaborated with our local roaster to pick our beans and develop a custom roast profile that pairs well with the First Call base beer. Together we chose multiple beans from different origins and then roasted each to different levels and extracted them with fresh First Call in crowlers for mini representations for each coffee until we found the one. The roast has to be dialed since there are not any caramel/roasted malts to hide behind with a coffee lager. You can get a green coffee bean flavor (think green pepper and peanut butter) if your roast is too light or, at the other end of the spectrum, heavy roasted astringency if the roast is too dark.
Other than selecting the right coffee, there are a few other considerations during recipe development that are unique for coffee beers. We adjust the overall pH to compensate for the acidity of the coffee addition. Also we add oats and a touch of milk sugar to bring a soft creaminess to the mouthfeel of the beer, while still maintaining a crisp and refreshing finish. This all played very well together with the bold coffee flavor and aroma.
Jean-François, Founder and Head Brewer of Dieu du Ciel! in Montreal, Quebec
When I set out to design Péché Mortel in 2001, most of the coffee stouts or coffee porters available were kind of disappointing. Often it was a beer with only roasted grains used to give some coffee character, or a beer with just little bit of coffee added. As a coffee aficionado, I wanted to do a beer that wouldn’t leave you guessing. I went with an imperial stout, figuring that it would need to be a beer with enough structure to support the character of the coffee. I wanted to have the roasted character up front, supported by a good body and balanced with a solid bitterness. The idea is to have harmony between the toasted barley, the torrified malt, and the coffee.
There are two schools of thought about how to add coffee to beer — cold or hot. Cold extraction is great for aroma, but my feeling is that if your goal is to get coffee flavor into your beer, the hot side is better. We designed a special tank to run the hot wort through the coarsely ground coffee beans to get the flavor we are seeking. The hot wort is in contact with the coffee beans for a matter of minutes. For this method, at 1.3 oz./gallon (10 g/L), the coffee character will be very delicate, so I’d recommend using 2–3.3 oz./gallon (15– 25 g/L) for a more profound taste. For our barrel- aged version we do a second cold-side addition of coffee beans before bottling, and we’ve found that 24 to 48 hours is enough time.
We’re now planning some non-stout coffee beers that will utilize our hopgun on the cold-side. The idea is to run the beer through the coffee until we get the flavor we want. I’ve also used the mash tun to mix coarsely ground coffee with hot water before running it through the lauter tun. You need to have some sort of strainer before the heat exchanger to avoid blocking it, but with some fine-tuning this method works well.
The type of coffee you use will definitely leave its mark on your beer. We blend two different roasts to achieve the perfect balance. For our Péché Day one-offs we play around with coffees.
My other advice for homebrewers is don’t use too much highly torrified grain so that the coffee can shine through the beer. And if you want to go with the hot extraction, make sure not to burn your coffee; let the wort cool a little bit and don’t leave the coffee in contact too long. It’s better to under extract than over extract.
Gordon Whelpley, Head Brewer at Stony Creek Brewery in Branford, Connecticut
Stony Joe is a golden mocha stout. The idea behind it was to make a mindf*ck of a beer — one that makes you question whether your server messed up until you take a sip. We used coffee and cacao nibs to give a light beer loads of rich “dark” character.
We work closely with Redding Roasters (in Bethel, CT) to have fresh roasted and freshly ground (morning of) Arabica coffee, which is added after the beer has cleared a forced diacetyl test at 38 °F (3 °C) Then we add the ground beans at a rate of 1 lb. per barrel (approximately 1⁄2 oz. per gallon/3.7 g per L) into the fermentation vessel for no more than 24 hours. The reason we ended up going with coarse ground, fresh roasted (unrested) coffee was to add the coffee while it was still heavily degassing. This has the two-fold benefit of lowering dissolved oxygen pickup and accelerating the flavor extraction process. We’ve found that longer contact time with coffee lends itself to more green pepper character, which isn’t what we’re going for.
The coffee’s type, roast level, roaster, etc. is very important to the final beer. We went deep down the rabbit hole with our friends at Redding Roasters to select the right coffee for this beer. We ended up settling on a single-origin bean from Guatemala that was low-acid and complementary to the cacao nibs and malt profile. For this recipe, we also use lactose, which acts as the most important buffer against any harsh coffee tones in this beer. The beer is also about 25% flaked adjuncts; so its inherent “creaminess” strikes a nice balance.
In addition to the popular Stony Joe, we also do an imperial version of this beer, for which we barrel age green coffee beans for several months prior to roasting. We double our coffee and cacao additions to the imperial as well. This has added a whole new dimension of complexity to the final product.
