Serving People Serving Coffee Since 2005
Issue link: http://baristamagazine.epubxp.com/i/659497
Peering down a short aisle lined with metal racks, I scan shelves stocked with hundreds of bottles of booze and chuckle at the fact that I've come to one of Oregon's longest-standing breweries to talk about coffee. Well, I should say coffee beer. The occasion for my visit to the Rogue Ales & Spirits company shop in Portland is the April bottle release of Rogue's Cold Brew IPA, its first-ever beer made with cold- brew coffee. This collaboration with Rogue's Portland neighbor, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, typifies a recent craft-beverage trend: breweries partnering with roasters to release an inventive variety of beers that feature cold-brew coffee blended into everything from imperial stouts to barley wines to golden ales. I'm here to learn what all the fuss is about. "We're bringing together two of our favorite things: coffee and beer," says Anna Abatzoglou, who, after several years working at the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, moved from specialty coffee to the beer world, joining Rouge in 2015. "We wanted to make a beer that's really easy to drink, the kind of beer you'd reach for on the first day of summer." Having personal experience with that tricky dilemma—cold brew or cold beer?—on many sunny days, I eagerly await a taste. I pour a few ounces in the bottom of a glass, one blown specially to match the beer, and take a quick sniff. The aroma of coffee hits first. I take a swig, and it's immediately clear that this beer aims to awaken your senses. The bold hop punch balances nicely with the sweet and nuanced flavors of Stumptown's Original Cold Brew concentrate. I pour a few more ounces in the bottom of the glass. I taste why the Cold Brew IPA has quickly become a favorite on draft at Rouge's pubs, but the coffee nerd in me starts buzzing with questions about method and process—the art and the science of making a great cold-brew beer. So I leave Rogue, a few bottles in tow, and set out to sip my way to the bottom of this trend by continu- ing my education with the roasters and brewers at the center of it. Methodology Any geeky drinker knows that the concept of adding coffee to beer certainly isn't a new one. Brewers have sourced beans from roasters for years, essentially cold-brewing coarse grounds in their fermentor. Providing brewers with cold-brew coffee themselves, however, rather than leaving everything to the brewery, gives roasters more influence on the flavor profile of the finished product, a greater stake in the process and, in many ways, changes the dynamics of collaboration between the somewhat foreign worlds of coffee and beer. To understand why, it helps to define, in general terms, each of the various ways in which you can produce beer with cold-brew coffee. Thankfully, that's easier than it sounds, given that those mentioned above are essentially the two primary methods master brewers have in their arsenal. The first technique keeps the roaster's involvement to a minimum: They hand off beans to a brewer, and that's typically the extent of the collaboration. However, describing this process as cold-brew requires a squishy definition, since the brewer essentially replaces water with almost-finished beer. The brewers—who often have limited knowledge of coffee—take the beans and essentially cold brew the coarse grounds in the fermentor after the completion of the primary fermentation process. Beyond this, there's little in terms of standard procedure, which leaves a lot to chance. This makes many quality-obsessed specialty-coffee pros squirm. Sure, brewers may recruit the coffee expertise of the roaster to select the right beans to complement the flavor profile of the beer in ques- BEER NEW ADVENTURES IN COLD BREW: Article By JON SHADEL 90 barista magazine