Coffee Beer: How Brewers Achieve That Java Bean Brew – CoffeeTalk

Alex Shoenthal, co-founder and head brewer of Lower Left Brewing Co., has selected a single-origin coffee for the 2024 version of Origin Story, a seasonal New England IPA he’s brewed for the past three years. The coffee is from China and is sun-dried, not roasted at all. Shoenthal is back in Lower Left’s tank room, brewing beer and road-testing the coffee he wants to add to a future batch. He uses Night Swim Coffee, a specialty roaster that serves as Lower Left’s coffee partner and whose roastery happens to be across the street.

The coffee’s color is unusually light, a cloudy caramel that matches the hue of the beans. The brewed coffee has a pretty good acidity, which helps pick up all the other flavors in the beer. However, two weeks after visiting, Shoenthal changed his mind and chose a new, bolder bean, Finca Rosita, from Caranavi, Bolivia. It is still a lighter coffee with notes of PB&J, graham cracker, vanilla, and lime.

Shoenthal plans to brew a batch of Origin Story in August and do the same for another coffee beer, Blix (6.4% ABV), an oatmeal stout infused with a Night Swim dark roast, around October. The colder months are typically when independent breweries offer coffee beers, invigorating blends of morning and evening brewed beverages. Charlotte-area brewers make a bunch of them, most tending to be porters or stouts like Blix: dark, malty heavyweights that pair well with early sunsets. But a few, like Origin Story (6.8% ABV), perform the higher-wire trick of welcoming coffee into other beer styles—and it still works.

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