Coffee Stout

The marriage of coffee and beer is a union that is celebrated, if not worshiped, within the craft-beer community. Here, two of the country’s most reputable coffee-beer brewers explain just how they make the magic happen.

ASK A BREWER WHY

(s)he adds coffee to his or her stout and the answer tends to go a lot like this: “We all love coffee, and we drink a lot of it around here. We also drink a lot of beer, so putting the two together just made sense.”

However, ask brewers how they add coffee to their stout, and the results vary as widely as the coffee varietals used.

Fresh Ground Coffee, Straight in the Beer

The first coffee beer ever created at Epic Brewing Company (Salt Lake City, Utah) was the now infamous Big Bad Baptist, an imperial stout with added cacao and coffee that’s aged in whiskey barrels. “Coffee selection that went into that beer was based solely on types of coffee that we liked,” says Ryan Buxton, Epic’s head cellarman. “We were working with a local roaster here in Salt Lake City—caffe Ibis—and it happened to work pretty well.”

Since its debut in 2011, Epic has released sixty-two batches of this “over-indulgent” coffee stout, as Buxton jokingly puts it. The beer has won multiple awards at the Denver International Beer Competition, and last year it won a silver medal at the Brussels Beer Challenge in the Coffee Beer category. “One of the things I feel that makes Big Bad Baptist so amazing is the bourbon character,” Buxton says. “We’re able to blend that beer and create big vanilla notes and caramel from the barrel.”

Next up for Epic Brewing in the coffee-beer category is an experimental, non-barrel-aged coffee imperial stout called Son of a Baptist. This time around, the coffee selection process is extensive, including sensory analysis of coffee varieties from across the country. The brewery has partnered with ten of its favorite coffee roasters in the United States to create a stout flavor profile designed to highlight small-batch coffee varietals. Accordingly, this 8 percent ABV imperial stout will vary widely from batch to batch. One of these batches, for example, uses a Rwanda Buremera coffee variety from The Red E Café and Roastery in Portland, Oregon. The coffee imparts notes of honey and apricot jam. Another batch uses a Costa Rican coffee

variety roasted at Cultivar Coffee in Dallas,