With autumn rounding the corner, October seems the perfect month to investigate the increasingly popular category of coffee beers. So, our friend Taco has slipped into some lederhosen to formally invite you to Tacoberfest — a very special Taco Tuesday, Oct. 1!
Our San Diego, Houston and Providence offices will cup the coffees used in some local coffee beers and then sample the brews themselves. With, of course: Tacos. We’re hoping some brewers might also join in the fun.
“We’ll be excited to see which yeasts or fermentations the brewers have chosen to pair with which coffee. Will more of them go for the traditional chocolatey notes or play with higher-acidity profiles and soury fermentations?” says Amanda Armbrust-Asselin, our Quality Control coordinator. “We can’t wait to taste the direction each collaboration has taken!”
So that folks can relax a bit and enjoy the festivities, San Diego is moving its starting time to 12pm PT, while Houston and Providence will start at 3pm in their respective time zones.
Please rsvp to team.providence@nkg.coffee, team.houston@nkg.coffee or team.sandiego@nkg.coffee with a headcount (team members welcome!), and we’ll see you October 1!
What’s the Deal with Coffee Beer?
Eager to start learning a bit more?
“The process of getting coffee into the beer varies from brewer to brewer,” says this Food & Wine article, citing Tim Matthews, head of brewing at Colorado’s Oskar Blues Brewery. “While some add dry coffee grounds during the fermenting process, others take a finished beer and a lesser quantity of cold-brew coffee and mix the two together.”
And, while coffee beer is a novelty for now, the flavor pairings make (delicious) sense.
“There is no more natural pairing in the world than beer and the coffee bean,” writes The Spruce Eats. “The deep roasted flavors of dark beers like stout, Schwarzbier (black lager), porter, doppelbock and others lend themselves perfectly to the beautiful, black, bitterness of coffee.”
That said, a few years ago, “when Seattle’s Georgetown Brewing earned gold with their Gusto Crema cream ale, the Brewer’s Association ended porter’s and stout’s 15-year reign as the de facto base style and bifurcated Coffee Beer with a second field specifically for coffee porters or stouts,” writes Craftbeer.com. “Sure, those are still the go-to base beers for brewers introducing a caffeinated punch, but it’s now lighter and brighter beers’ time to rise and shine as coffee’s beery best friend.”
As for the caffeine quotient, writes Edible Brooklyn, “All beers are going to differ, but every brewer we spoke to said that their coffee beers have fairly negligible caffeine quantities, generally comparable to one-tenth to, at most, one-quarter of a cup of coffee.”
We’re excited to sample the differences for ourselves and explore these themes with you! •
#IACTacoTuesdays #Tacoberfest
