There are times when I think I may love coffee even more than beer, but I usually come to my senses. Thankfully, San Diego area brewers have made some truly stellar combinations of the two. AleSmith’s Speedway Stout was a game-changer back when I had it for the first time, and Victory At Sea from Ballast Point is another one that is always a pleasure. Coffee can be tricky to use in beer, and every brewer seems to have his or her own quirky preference for how to infuse it. Some go for extra-strength brewed coffee, some for cold-brewed, some for direct bean or grounds contact with the beer, and some with coffee extracts or flavorings.
Coffee can have a wealth of fruity and earthy flavors that compliment a beer. One of the tricks of making a great coffee beer is finding the correct bean to compliment the flavor profile of the base beer. Often, brewers will line up rows of different coffees and add them to samples of beer one at a time to find the right combination.
11 in ’11 member Lee Chase is no stranger to using non-traditional ingredients in beer, and the beers that he has brewed at Automatic Brewing Co. so far have all been very interesting. Before they were open on Sunday morning, Lee invited us to Blind Lady Ale House for a sample of the new beer he’s been working on for the winter season. This one is a Coffee Imperial Brown Ale with some American oak added—possibly the perfect beer to perk up our spirits after a long weekend. The coffee that Lee ended up going with is from Bird Rock Roasters: an Ethiopian variety called Jimma-Nigusie Lemma. In order to get the character that he wanted from the beans, Lee tried out a method of racking the finished beer into whole beans and letting them infuse for 50 hours.
As a finished beer, I was impressed by how vivid yet refined the coffee character was. The fruitiness and complexity of the coffee variety were apparent, but absent was the astringency and sharp roasty character that other varietals and infusion methods often lend to a beer. The American oak blended a nice woodiness into the flavor, but was much lighter than is my experience with most other oaked beers. Under all of that, this is a rich and malty, yet not overly sweet beer that I can see a lot of people loving. Automatic’s Coffee Imperial Brown Ale is going to be released at Blind Lady Ale House at their upcoming anniversary celebrations on January 30th. Fifty (50) one-liter growlers are available for pre-order at $22.99.