Craft brewers tend to be pretty fussy about what coffee they kick-start the day with, so it’s hardly surprising that a few of them have found ways to combine their two favourite beverages.

Brad Rogers was one of the first on these shores to introduce coffee beans into the brewing process with Crema, a coffee-infused pale ale which he created while head brewer at Matilda Bay. One wag suggested it was the perfect breakfast beer to wash down bacon and eggs.

In darker beers, heavily roasted malted barley can produce its own coffee-like flavours – they are similarly drum-roasted at relatively high temperatures - so it’s a fairly obvious step to add some actual coffee beans into a stout recipe. Long-running US craft brewer Redhook first released their Double Black Stout back in 1995 which uses Starbucks coffee; while Founders Breakfast Stout features oatmeal, chocolate and vanilla, as well as coffee beans.

In fact, so many American breweries are now producing coffee beers that there is a separate category for such brews at the annual Great American Beer Festival.

Not to be outdone, the Danish brewery Mikkeller makes perhaps the world’s rarest coffee beer – Beer Geek Breakfast Weasel – with kopi luwak, an Indonesian coffee made with beans swallowed by the cat-like civet. Later, some poor chap retrieves the beans from the animal’s faeces, cleans them and roasts them to make one decidedly expensive cup of coffee.

Faced with the challenge of creating a new winter seasonal release, Matilda Bay head brewer Scott Vincent hooked up with Toby’s Estate coffee guru Toby Smith. “I ran into him in Sydney and we ended up talking for ages about different techniques of roasting coffee and malt,” Vincent said.

“We’d already decided to make a big, robust dark beer which was something between a porter and an imperial stout. We released Crema in 2006 using coffee beans we’d roasted ourselves but this time we wanted to work with the best in the coffee business.”

Smith was invited to visit the Matilda Bay “Garage” brewery in Victoria where he and Vincent had a “cupping” session using various different coffee beans. Cupping involves pouring boiling water over ground coffee in a cup which results in a crust forming; the crust is broken with a spoon to release the individual aromas of each coffee.

“It’s the same as a beer tasting where everyone picks up different flavours and aromas,” Vincent said. “We decided on an Ethiopian blend called Yirgacheffe which is highly aromatic and has an unusual peppermint character.”

To introduce the coffee into the brewing process, the beans were coarsely ground and underwent a cold extraction, with the resulting liquid added directly to the fermenting beer, which had been christened Longshot.

“The brewers and I had to work hard to ensure the beer had a subtle balance of coffee and toffee flavours, and that the oils extracted from the coffee beans didn’t ruin the head. We wanted some nice mocha characters without too much astringency coming through in the finish.”

Matilda Bay Longshot will be available through Dan Murphy’s bottleshops from July 1; rrp $20/four-pack.

STOP PRESS

An error in the results catalogue from the recent Australian International Beer Awards omitted a bronze medal won by the Little Brewing Company for their Wicked Elf Pale Ale in the packaged section. It means the Port Macquarie craft brewer boasts a 100 per cent strike rate in local beer competitions with 20 entries collecting 20 medals.

TASTING NOTES

MATILDA BAY LONGSHOT (6%)

Dark brown/black with faint reddish highlights; creamy, beige foam. Aroma: espresso, caramel, dark chocolate and spice notes. Palate: chewy dark malt initially; luscious, sweet mid-palate with espresso/mocha notes emerging later; finishes dry and roasty with slight oily notes and good balance. Overall: serve at 10◦C to best appreciate the neatly-balanced coffee and dark malt characters.