Coffee and beer, they go together like peas and carrots. While there are many ways to infuse coffee into beer, and I guess beer into coffee, in our experience, a method we recently used with the caffeine boffins at @bearbonescoffee, has produced the most well integrated results.
Coffee grinds in the mash, espresso in the kettle, dry hopped beans, we have seen it all. More often than not the result is acrid, overly bitter and largely out of balance coffee flavours. So to nail those delicate coffee aromatics, and balance it in a lighter beer base, Tom and Burgo at Bear Bones used a filter roasted, Kenyan single-O, cold batched overnight, and double concentrated by infusing that eluent into another round of beans.
Filter roast is a lighter approach to roasting beans, keeping the temperature under 200oC and roasting beans for a shorter period of time, to the first crack. This means the furrow in the bean very slightly begins to open. Where an espresso or medium roast takes that roasting to the second crack, and more developed flavour. Here, the bean becomes more brittle and dissolves better through pressurised water, in an espresso machine. The lighter, filter roasted beans are less dissolvable, but retain more of the delicate coffee flavours and acidity. They require a longer steep, and with cold water, you can steep overnight to extract all the delicate flavours.
And so the taking the coffee juice from Bear Bones, we infused it into a malty lager. We wanted the base beer to be pretty clean, so the coffee could really do the talking. You get those lovely characteristic aromatics, with some solid berries, a bit of a wine like funk and some smooth caramel coffee flavours. Have one in the morning, and the evening, or you’ll get a touch Grizzly.
Brewery
