Ask a brewer why (s)he adds coffee to his or her stout and the answer tends to go a lot like this: “We all love coffee, and we drink a lot of it around here. We also drink a lot of beer, so putting the two together just made sense.”
However, ask brewers how they add coffee to their stout, and the results vary as widely as the coffee varietals used.
Fresh Ground Coffee, Straight in the Beer
The first coffee beer ever created at Epic Brewing Company (Salt Lake City, Utah) was the now infamous Big Bad Baptist, an imperial stout with added cacao and coffee that’s aged in whiskey barrels. “Coffee selection that went into that beer was based solely on types of coffee that we liked,” says Ryan Buxton, Epic’s head cellarman. “We were working with a local roaster here in Salt Lake City—Caffe Ibis—and it happened to work pretty well.”