9 Numbers

So yesterday i headed over to Primavera Coffee Roasters for a highly unusual event.

I’m designing a Coffee Oatmeal Stout and i want to use Primavera-roasted coffee in it, as it is both local and generally awesome coffee. I emailed Brett (owner/proprietor of Primavera) about it and made an appointment to do a tasting featuring a few of his coffees and several varieties of hops provided by me. For his normal coffee tastings he puts the coffee grounds in a cup, pours hot water in and lets it sit for four minutes. Then he scrapes the excess grounds out and finally dips a spoon in and slurps a taste of the resulting concoction. We followed that procedure, but added a hop pellet in with the coffee grounds.

We tried six different hop varieties in each of three different coffees for a total of 18 different flavor profiles. The hops were Saaz, Willamette, Kent Goldings, Simcoe, Cascade, and Northern Brewer. The coffees were Ethiopia Harrar, Brazil Daterra Reserve, and Peru Norte — all selections made by Brett and his crew based on their estimations of what would work well in an oatmeal stout. The results were astonishing. Out of 18 different cups, each one had a remarkably different flavor. Some combinations worked very well; some were awful.

Northern Brewer was horrible throughout. It clearly just doesn’t pair with coffee, period. Good to know. The most quintessential Pacific NW American hops in the group — Cascade and Simcoe — were ok, but they dominated too much. As Brett put it, the selections with Cascade in them didn’t really taste like coffee, they tasted like beer. I wanted a combination with flavors that complimented each other; i didn’t want the coffee to be completely overwhelmed by the hops.

The remaining three hops each had one coffee they worked particularly well in. Kent Goldings paired best with the Ethiopian Harrar. Saaz paired best with Brazil Daterra Reserve, and Willamette paired best with Peru Norte. Oddly, the combination of Saaz and Peru Norte tasted like latex paint (no thanks!). Props to Brett for identifying that flavor.

So now all that remains is to take the top three pairings, brew them up one more time, and mix them each in with a commercial oatmeal stout (Samuel Smith’s) to see which one works best in beer. To be done later this week.

Beer is fun.