Best of Series: What is the Best Coffee Beer: Part 4?

It seems each year more and more breweries decide to try their hand at pairing arabica beans with beer. Nearly always brewing a porter or stout, brewers blend the natural coffee/chocolate flavors of darker malts with bold roasts, often from their favorite local shops. The combination continues to prove popular with craft beer fans. For Part 4 in our series, we look at coffee beers from Avery, Hill Farmstead, Eclipse, and Jackie O’s.

THE BEERS:

From barrel aged bombs to subtle milk stouts, we cover some of the best new coffee beers.

AVERY TWEAK

Steve: I drank this from the bottle pictured above. Following the great success of Goose Island’s Bourbon County Brand Coffee Stout and Founders KBS, Avery takes the barrel aging process to their coffee stout. The 17.81% ABV stout is aged 4 months in bourbon barrels after brewing with an organic espresso blend from Ozo Coffee Co. Potent bourbon, coffee and chocolate notes on the nose. Pours black, with an unexpected ruddy brown head. The taste is a perhaps the most potent coffee flavored stout around. Huge espresso blends with the vanilla and char from bourbon barrels, and waves of sweetness to balance this explosive espresso shot. The booze kicks in in the finish as the mild carbonation holds on to make this dangerously drinkable: Amazing beer.

Dave: … 5 oz pour in a large snifter at the new Avery tasting room in Boulder. Delivers on all the flavors promised and more – coffee, bourbon, oak, chocolate, molasses. Huge flavors blended well with no noticeable alcohol bite. Superlative.

New space Avery is terrific – a must stop when in CO.

9.5/10

JACKIE O’S DARK APPARITION VANILLA & COFFEE BEAN

A big Russian imperial stout brewed with brown sugar, Dark Apparition from Jackie O’s may be the most recognizable label from the Athens Ohio brewery. Tasted here is a newly bottled variant, brewed with vanilla and coffee. While the original has bold malts with some coffee notes, this beer smells distinctly of vanilla and coffee, with mild soy sauce and hops less pronounced. The carbonation is good for a 10.5% ABVer, helping making the thick body quafable. Finish is fading vanilla with the coffee showing itself in a bitter note. Overall, the taste is very close to the base beer, with modest vanilla notes, and a hint of coffee. If you like vanilla, and maybe don’t even like coffee, this beer is a fun twist on Dark App. If you are looking for a coffee forward beer that brings the java up front, this one might be a slight let down.

8.0/10

SIERRA NEVADA/NINKASI BEER CAMP DOUBLE LATTE

In the summer of 2014 Sierra Nevada released a 12-pack of collaboration bottles and cans, each a separate beer brewed in conjunction with “…coveted breweries, which were selected for their innovation and reputation for brewing world-class beers”. As you may recall, I visited Ninkasi and they certainly fit this description. So I was thrilled they were selected to team up on a coffee based milk stout. The Oregon brewer employed a cold pressed blend from the famous Stumptown Coffee Roasters to flavor Double Latte. And to great effect, this Beer Camp bottle pours a chocolate malt looking head that is frothy and long lasting, smelling of coffee, chocolate, and fruit. No soy sauce notes are present in the sweet coffee flavors that match the nose. The body is a glorious silky, creamy mouthfeel. There is just a hint of sweetness, along with mild acidity and a hop presence, all balancing each other. Dry finish with some lingering coffee and hops. One of my favorite beers from the 2014 Beer Camp collection.

9.0/10

HILL FARMSTEAD EARL

Note: Unfortunately, this beer will not be scored due to its age. Bottled in December of 2012, we didn’t sample it until February of 2014. Just like ground coffee in a can, the volatile oils from roasted beans fall off quickly in beer.

Aged or not, Earl opens with a crisp pop of the cap, pouring out a dense wet sand colored head with good retention. The aromas are sweet grains, and stone fruit. The flavors of this stout are roasted grain, oatmeal, semi-sweet chocolate, and fruit, with a hint of coffee building. The body is marvelous, with the oatmeal adding a creaminess to the thick stout. Finish on the palette is a transition to bitter coffee, that builds. A very nice beer, that is almost certainly even better with fresh coffee flavor.

CONCLUSION

For some, there is no such thing as bad pizza. Thick or thin crust, allowing for some standards such as fresh ingredients, the basic components are a time honored infatuation for millions of pizza lovers. It seems that with coffee beer too, we have come to a place where highly skilled brewers using high quality coffee, are hard pressed to brew a bad coffee beer. While some may prefer the vanilla in one recipe over the bourbon in another, none of these coffee based beers left us unhappy.

What Is The Best Coffee Beer?

Founders Double Oatmeal Chocolate Stout — FOUNDERS BREAKFAST STOUT

The Premise

Each winter brings back together old friends in North East Ohio for the Tri-City Beer Club’s Annual Christmas party. In its 15th year the TCBC is a small group of beer fans who gather to blind taste test beers in a category. Getting older, the group has turned in Nirvana for NPR, and Cherry Coke for coffee. To reflect the maturing tastes, for the first time we decided to take on a hugely popular craft beer style; coffee beers. So what is the best coffee beer? Round one of The Barley Whine’s research into this question puts some great beers up to the challenge.

Methodology

As always, we blind tasted brews of a similar style, rated between 1 and 10, with .5 as the only allowable decimal. The first beer was re-tasted at a random time to avoid position bias. Beers are ranked based on style, not their genetic closeness to Tim Tebow.

The Beers

Founders – Breakfast Stout: #1 . Smelling of coffee and sweet chocolate, pours a khaki strong head with good retention. The taste is cold pressed coffee complexly combined with semi-sweet chocolate. Finishes with a bitter chocolate, hoppy bite. The mouthfeel is thick but slick from the oatmeal, and well carbonated. A world class blending of flavors, brewed to perfection.
Southern Tier – Mokah #2. Huge roasted coffee and chocolate nose. Do the Tootsie Roll! Milk Dud candy dominates the flavors. Lots of great chocolate, followed by the coffee, with cloying sweetness. The body is thick, less smooth than the Founders brew probably due to less oatmeal. Almost no bitterness in the finish. The 11% ABV is buried. The non-coffee drinks all gave this top marks.
Tröegs – Java Head: #3 . A dark chestnut pour with bubbly tan head. Smell is surprising mix of malts, coffee, and hops. Some sweetness, coffee, and hops with biscuity malts. Lots of astringency from the oats and hops. Coffee is mostly in the finish. Body is creamy, smooth and thick.
Surly – Coffee Bender: #4. Burnt coffee nose. Sweet coffee taste, dark chocolate, espresso. Very tasty!
AleSmith – Speedway Stout: #5. Guess what? It’s black. Potent caramel/toffee nose. Taste is of a great imperial stout, with subtle java and chocolate, a bit of soy sauce.
Bell’s – Java Stout: #6 (tie). Day old coffee grounds and vegetable smell. Lots of nice roasted malts, milk chocolate and burnt coffee hit the palette. The mouthfeel is nice and think. True to a stout but better with coffee, this beer suffers against sweeter, less chocolaty beers.
Samuel Adams – Black and Brew: #6 (tie). Dark brown color. Caramel nose with subtle coffee. Taste has a creamy coffee element, with only very little malt or hops. Body is a bit thin, well carbonated. Drinkable, but just too one note and bland to stand out against others.
Midnight Sun – Arctic Rhino: #8. Coffee and caramel notes with some alkaline odors. Tasted of roasted malts, mild coffee and a bit astringent. The body is really thin, with decent carbonation. Not as strong a java flavor, and much less thick than the others.

Conclusion

With stouts and porters, roasted malts, coffee and chocolate are a natural combination to play out in dark beers. If you like coffee, the addition of it to a good stout can make for a more complex, satisfying, even phenomenal brew. Chocolate is a very popular addition to dark beers and for those that do not like coffee’s bitterness, chocolate and a bit of additional sweetness turns them around on the style. Some of the best stouts fall in the coffee beer category so even if you’re not a 6 cup a day Starbucks addict, give any one of these a try in place of your Guinness or Baileys and you will be joyously surprised.