Heritage Coffee has been in business since 1974, so they’re really one of the OGs of gourmet coffee roasting in America—contemporaries of Starbucks and other Pacific Northwest coffee roasters who created the type of coffee we all now drink every day. They were enamored with the bold Italian coffees that they encountered in European travels. In many ways that coffee scene of the seventies had parallels to the craft-beer scene in the eighties and even today—small operators were trying to emulate and even surpass the flavors they craved from Europe and eventually created their own styles.
That’s how we started at Alaskan—our cofounder, Geoff Larson, was obsessed with European beers, and he began this brewery by emulating a Czech-style beer and eventually mastered smoked beers, ESBs, and a variety of European styles, all while bringing the Alaskan twist to the flavors.
So when I started looking at coffee beers, I got interested in the idea of pairing that great rich coffee aroma and flavor with a beer that wouldn’t mask or simply duplicate those qualities but would instead accentuate them. Most of the coffee beers I’ve tried have been coffee stouts and porters, which can be great but often work on the idea of melding the roast characters of the malt with the roast of the coffee.