Coffee Beers and the People Who Hate Them
In July 2021, coffee expert and self-admitted person who is “not very good at talking about what I do for a living,” James Hoffmann made a video for his popular coffee YouTube channel. Hoffmann’s videos are a mix of how-tos, product reviews, and sometimes silly coffee experiments like the time he bought every single coffee item at IKEA or the time he donned a fake moustache to test a ‘70s era in-car coffee brewer.
But this video was a simple plea: stop putting coffee in everything.
Hoffmann reviews a few items that inexplicably promote coffee as a key ingredient: shampoo, hot sauce, wine...but he ends the video with a Guinness Nitro Stout. “The coffee is very present, and it’s actually quite well-balanced with the Guinness flavor—I’m not saying I like it. I’m just saying I’m impressed with the composition of flavor.”
Putting coffee in your shampoo might not be the next wild trend, but coffee beers are far from being a novelty item. From 2010 to 2016, the number of entrants into the Coffee Beer category at the Great American Beer Festival went from 52 beers to 168 beers, making “Coffee Beers” the sixth most popular category before it was split into “Coffee Beer” and “Coffee Stouts and Porters” in 2017. Many breweries have their own version of a coffee beer on their menu, and there’s even an annual festival dedicated solely to the genre.
Coffee beers are an incredibly popular subcategory of beers, but Hoffmann’s sentiment isn’t unique. I don’t particularly enjoy coffee beers either, and I wanted to find out if others in my circle—primarily coffee folks with a smattering of beer pros in there as well—felt the same way, so I conducted an informal Twitter poll, and found that most of my coffee friends agreed with me, while my beer friends were kinder and more loving of the marriage of coffee and beer.
I wanted to learn more about this divisive drink. Admittingly, my Twitter poll was less than scientific, but why were coffee people the first to raise an eyebrow when a coffee beer is on a menu—and are we wrong?
SAY NO TO COFFEE BEERS
Coffee beers have no traceable old world roots. Although we’ve been brewing beer and sipping coffee for centuries, the combination of the two is fairly recent, with some folks pointing to New Glarus Brewing in Wisconsin as one of the first to make a coffee beer. “We’re always trying to do things in a unique way and do something different than what others are doing,” says Dan Carey, co-owner and brewmaster at New Glarus. “Good coffee is a pleasure, and dark, roasted malts have such a distinct coffee character that it just seemed like a natural thing to try.”
In February of 1995, when New Glarus released their Coffee Stout, the idea to combine coffee and beer didn’t seem novel. Carey wasn’t sure if New Glarus was the first to release a coffee beer—Dogfish Head had Chicory, a beer made with Mexican coffee, on their menu when they opened in 1995 and Seattle’s Redhook Brewery released a coffee beer in the mid-’90s as well—but it was unfamiliar enough that soon after the release of Coffee Stout, Carey received a letter from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). “We applied to the ATF for license approval,” he says, “and they wrote back and they said, ‘Coffee is not an approved ingredient in beer, so you have to stop making this beer because you are not allowed to use coffee in beer.’”
Carey adjusted his brewing recipe, emphasizing the coffee flavor through the malt, and received a follow up from the ATF years later. “We got another letter saying, ‘You're using deceptive advertising because you're calling this a coffee beer, and there's no coffee in it. So you either need to stop making the beer or add coffee to the beer,’” he shares. “I wanted to say, ‘But I have a letter here and you told us to stop!’ But instead we said we’d start using coffee again and we’re back to the original recipe.”
COFFEE AS AN INGREDIENT
Coffee has huge potential when viewed as an ingredient or a contributing factor to the final flavor of a coffee beer. That might seem like a redundant observation, but like caviar, gold leaf, and other novelty ingredients, sometimes coffee is added to a beer as a way to catch the eye of a potential consumer rather than for its potential to be a contributing flavor component.
“I'm not surprised that you observed more pushback from coffee people,” says Stephen Morrissey, co-founder of Uppers & Downers, an annual celebration of coffee beers. I mentioned my informal observation to Morrisey, and he explained why he thought this might be the case: “There's a lot of marketing gimmickry that propels brand collabs, and a lot of coffee beers are driven by that logic. So it's not surprising that coffee people, who are so often looking to generate greater awareness of coffee's inherent virtues, don't love the idea of doing so via a poorly designed collaboration.”
Using coffee as a marketing tool isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Most people have had coffee at some point in their life. According to the National Coffee Association, 64% of Americans drink coffee daily, and the ubiquity of coffee in our daily lives is immeasurable—almost everyone at least knows what coffee is, and that recognition can help bridge a gap for folks new to the craft beer sector.
“Given how important the idea of ‘flavor experience’ is to any kind of beverage alcohol, it's helpful when producers can tap into easily understood ideas of flavor and expectation,” says Bryan Roth, news editor for beer trade publication Good Beer Hunting and director of the North American Guild of Beer Writers. “So while it may not be as clear if there's runway in terms of many new ways to use coffee, I think there's plenty of space in the market for breweries to find success, especially on a seasonal level.”
THE EVOLUTION OF COFFEE AND BEER
Both coffee and beer have been around for centuries, but their identities in the last thirty years have really flourished side-by-side. When Carey was tinkering with coffee beers in 1995, more and more coffee shops were embracing a similar craft approach to sourcing and roasting coffees—which is both exciting and potentially alienating to new consumers. But just because they’ve grown alongside one another doesn’t mean coffee beers as a style have evolved in the same manner.
“I think coffee beers don't necessarily speak fully to beer or coffee people (I know I fall in this category),” says Claire Bullen, a freelance beer writer and editor. “So many of the best-known coffee beers came out 10, 15, 20 years ago that they can also feel a little anachronistic and old-school in some contexts. And I think the way many consumers think about and approach coffee has changed so much in that timeframe, too—where before coffee might have been seen as more utilitarian and everyday, now we're really understanding its range and nuance and finesse, that this is something very, very complex.”
So maybe that’s it—it’s not that coffee beers themselves are inherently bad, but that it’s difficult to honor both ingredients and recognize their nuance and evolution over time. When I reached out to Hoffmann, he shared that his roastery, Square Mile Coffee, has successfully made coffee beers in the past, and hopes people continue to think outside the box when it comes to pairing coffee with beer. “I agree most are bad, and most lack imagination,” he says, “and so they end up being Porters or Stouts—heavy things made heavier by dark roasted coffee. Which is, to me, missing out on the potential of coffee as an ingredient.”
There’s so much potential in the combination of coffee and beer, and perhaps my current disdain is an indication that we’re still in the infancy of this category’s dazzling future. I find hope in the moments where both industries recognize one another as similar and different, experiencing the ups and downs of an industry in its infancy, but still willing to learn from each other.
When New Glarus started putting coffee in their beer, they partnered with a local roastery—Just Coffee Cooperative—and it’s this connection, made 26 years ago, that I think provides a blueprint for the future of coffee beer: partner with members of your community, build connections with the purveyors of your ingredients, and find ways to grow together, not just next to one another.
