Ditching The Regular Grind

Why coffee beers are about to get weird—and delicious.

- Kate Bernot

Like beer, coffee is a beverage that unites. Sigh at other red-eyed, early-morning travelers in line at airport security, state your need for caffeine, and they’ll commiserate. And like beer, it’s varied, with specialty roasters, cold brew techniques and even Keurigs encouraging Americans to think more about our coffee than ever before. So why should coffee beers be a roasty, stout-dominated monolith? Increasingly, they’re not.

To appreciate the new wave of coffee beers, one needn’t rattle off single-origin beans or even know whether they’re brewed, crushed or added to the beer whole. (That’s good news if you can’t tell Yirgacheffe from Siguatepeque and have never owned a Chemex.) Instead, enjoying the new guard requires a pivot toward thinking of coffee as a nuanced ingredient, one carefully chosen like a hop or a yeast strain. Brewers are thinking beyond coffee as merely roasted flavor and are instead using it as a tool to achieve dynamic flavors, aromas, even mouthfeel.

Most visibly, brewers are expanding the styles that coffee can be a part of, introducing coffee to Brett-fermented beers, imperial IPA's and cream ales. They’re building entire recipes around expressive, bright coffees, and the results are far from one-dimensional. It’s not hyperbole; these new coffee beers fully intend to blow your mind.

The best coffee beers, the ones that surprise and beguile, begin before a single bean or grain even hits the brewing tanks. They’re born in the recipe-building stage, right at the drawing board.