Coffee Stout With Roasted Pinon Pine Nuts and Cascade Hops: Beer Review and Brewing Notes

Coffee stouts are hard to do well. The oils in coffee stale quickly under CO2, which is why cold brewed coffee is often served nitrogenated. Brewing coffee every morning is time consuming. I say it is for suckers, that's why I make one keg once per month and have coffee on tap all the time. This beer is a small, dry version of a traditional hoppy American stout with lots of piney cascade hops blended with my cold brewed nitrogenated coffee with roasted New Mexican pinon pine nuts.

This beer is the first of three I made of a split batch of dry Irish stout (5 gallons/1 keg/50 beers each batch). The grain bill is simple: 20 lbs of Maris Otter, 3 lbs roasted barley, 2 lbs oats. That's it!

For the bittering hops, I eyeball a larger handful than normal of CTZ because stouts require more bitterness than many of the session beers I make. That is the only hop addition until I'm done boiling, wherein I add 2 heaping handfuls of cascade hops at flame-out and two more after fermentation shows signs of waning (called dry-hopping).

At 4.5% this is a sessionable beer. The hops add more percieved bitterness along with the pine/citrus typical of Cascade hops (IBU's) while the coffee brings a deep, rich thing to contrast. There is enough caffiene that I won't drink this stuff past 6PM or I'll have trouble sleeping, so it is suitable for day drinking or a good way to start a late night.

The roasty flavor of the pine nuts is distinctive and hard to place if you aren't already familiar with the flavor. The roasted malt takes a back seat to the big flavors of the nuts. I get the coffee from a market locally in CA called Trader Joe's. Making a keg of this stuff is as simple as grabbing 4 pounds, adding 6 gallons of reverse osmosis water, stirring every now and they for about 24 hours, and kegging it on nitrogen once all the grounds have settled to the bottom. I use a filter bag to reduce the amount of sediment that gets into the keg.

The verdict? I like this beer, but would rather see it in it's full sized 6.5% hoppy stout range without the coffee. The caffine makes it tough to enjoy as a session beer because it wakes you up more than it gets you buzzed.

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