Brews Brothers

Coffee and beer have more in common than you might think – and enthusiasts around the world are combining them to produce radical, delicious new drinks. Jamie Treby looks at the process and tries some of the best.

Coffee and beer, on the face of it, may not appear to share many things in common. One’s a stimulant; one’s a relaxant.

One’s mostly drunk in the morning; one’s mostly drunk at night. But as we all know, opposites attract, and the marriage of these two beverages has been giving pleasure to drinkers for the past couple of decades.

It’s impossible to know exactly when home brewers put the two together but it’s been happening since at least 1991, when beer writer Charlie Papazian published The Complete Joy Of Home Brewing. This best-seller not only suggested coffee as an ingredient but also discussed the intricacies of over extracting coffee, the temperature at which to brew the coffee and the effects it has on a beer’s flavour. In the recent fourth edition, Papazian mentions that coffee beers are now available from both craft and large breweries. The US Open Beer Championship now has a coffee beer category (number 73, to be exact), while the World Beer Awards honours chocolate and coffee flavoured ales. Meanwhile, homebrewed beers also made an appearance at this year’s CupNorth in Manchester.

And despite those superficial differences, beer and coffee pair remarkably well for a number of reasons. When making beer, malt is toasted to produce similar flavours to coffee, and it’s even rested in a much the same way, allowing for the aromatics and flavours to balance. Stouts and porters – while they may not use the detail of a roast curve, with its balance of Maillard and caramelisation processes – are the prime candidates for partnering with coffee flavour-wise, and yield the most commonly found results. However, you’ll find more and more variations are appearing – perhaps the beer brewer’s equivalent of discovering a lighter roast.